Real estate team leaders Shay Noonan, Rebecca Bates, and Randy Lusk share proven strategies for owning client relationships, increasing conversions, and recruiting top agents with branded mobile apps
The 2026 real estate market continues to challenge agents nationwide. With mortgage rates hovering around 6.3%, inventory slowly rebuilding, and buyers and sellers navigating unprecedented complexity, one question keeps coming up: How are the top teams not just surviving, but thriving?
In our recent "Built to Win" webinar, we sat down with three of Real Brokerage's highest-performing team leaders to uncover their secret weapon: branded HomeStack apps that put them—not the portals—at the center of every client relationship.
Before we dive into solutions, let's address the elephant in the room. Zillow, Realtor.com, and Redfin don't work for you—they work against you. Every time a client searches on these platforms, you're one click away from losing them to another agent.
Randy Lusk, Team Lead of Porchlight Property Group and a top 3% Maryland agent with over $100M in sales, put it bluntly:
"It makes a small part of a realtor's soul die every time I see somebody share a Redfin or a Zillow link to one of their listings. It just hurts my soul because I'm like, 'Why? Why are you giving them your platform?' Please don't click on those links."
Randy went on to explain his approach to breaking clients free from portal dependency:
"It's like, how do you get your customers off of Zillow? 'Cause that's all they know, right? I've worked out a template in Follow Up Boss that breaks it down in 4 bullet points: privacy, security, and the fact that you get me on the other end. They're gonna be well taken care of by the person they want to hear from—not from some random real estate agent."
The reality: If your clients are searching on someone else's platform, you don't own the relationship. You're renting it.
The most successful real estate teams in 2026 have stopped renting their client relationships and started owning them through branded mobile apps powered by HomeStack.
Rebecca Bates, leader of the Aaron Bates Real Estate Team on Long Island and a veteran agent trainer, breaks down the fundamental shift:
"They're getting that link directly from something that we own instead of a website that sells their data to somebody else. Yeah. That's awesome. And you know, it's all roads leading back to that agent instead of some other agent that's on Zillow or Redfin or something like that. So I love that."
A branded HomeStack app gives your clients:
But here's where it gets powerful: You can see everything they do.
Randy Lusk calls it exactly what it is: an unfair advantage.
"When the agent knows which clients are using their app and what they're searching for, I've put it out there to my move-up and investor clients, and they're like, 'Wait, what is this? This is yours?' Now I get to see really where they're most interested. When you get to see what they're looking at and where they're spending their time—it's massive. It's an unfair advantage."
Here's what that looks like in practice:
Randy also teased what's coming next:
"Part of our goal with the agent insights is AI kind of putting the right people in front of you at the right time with talking points, best times to call them. We want to not just throw data at you but create very actionable data, and you know that's what AI is good at. So you can expect that coming to your apps here coming up shortly."
Translation: The gap between agents with branded apps and agents still relying on portals is about to get even wider.
Email open rates are abysmal. Texts get ignored. But push notifications? Push notifications get seen.
Shay Noonan, founder and Team Lead of The One Team Scottsdale with over $100M in sales and 12+ years of experience, explained how her team uses HomeStack's push notification feature to maximize ROI on their marketing efforts:
"We found ourselves making social media videos, YouTube videos, and emailing them out but having this disconnect between us as agents and our clients. A big thing for us with HomeStack is push notifications. Every time we spend $1,000 on a listing video, we send a push notification to make sure our clients and database are seeing that. Push notifications were huge to bridge that disconnect."
The takeaway: If you're spending money on content marketing and relying solely on email to distribute it, you're wasting your budget. Push notifications ensure your content actually reaches your audience.
Great agents want to work on great teams. And great teams give their agents great tools.
Rebecca Bates has made her HomeStack app a central part of her recruiting pitch—but not in the way you might think. She's not just talking about client-facing features. She's talking about making her agents' lives easier.
"If my agents are always working from their phone, what can I put on their phone to help them? How can I put resources on their phone?"
Rebecca integrated her team's entire toolkit and shared drive directly into the app:
"What I actually ended up doing was taking our team toolkit and taking our share drive and actually putting it within our app. So my agents, they can go into the agent resources section of that app and they can actually go straight to our team toolkit, which has links to everything, and where they can go straight to our share drive, which is also where everything that we use lives."
This solved a major pain point:
"It solved the problem of agents trying to find Google Drive or the toolkit from their phone so they're not always in front of their computer. Because most agents are working from their car all the time. Half the meetings I take, they're literally driving. I feel like I need a segment called 'Agents in Their Cars.'"
Rebecca summed it up perfectly:
"I mean, we need—if these things are gonna be utilized and you're gonna take the time to make them, you want them to just be easily accessible to your agents while they're eating lunch, in their car, you know, doing deals."
The recruiting pitch writes itself: Join a team where everything you need is on your phone, where client relationships belong to YOU, and where technology makes your job easier—not harder.
One of the biggest mistakes teams make when implementing new technology is trying to showcase every single feature at once.
Shay Noonan learned this lesson with her previous CRM:
"We were using Lofty CRM, and our agents were like deer in headlights. It had too many options, too many things. The search IDX was desktop-only in a web browser—our agents weren't using it. That's what made us turn to HomeStack. We had to make it better by making it more simple."
The lesson: Complexity kills adoption. Simplicity drives results.
Your branded app should do a few things exceptionally well:
That's it. Master the fundamentals, and the conversions will follow.
There's a fear in real estate that AI and automation will replace the human element. But the best teams understand that technology doesn't replace relationships—it enhances them.
As the webinar discussion revealed, the goal isn't to automate away the agent. It's to give agents superpowers: knowing exactly when to reach out, what to say, and how to add value at every stage of the journey.
AI tells you WHEN. You provide the WHY.
Randy, Rebecca, and Shay all emphasized the same point: clients want to work with real people they trust. Technology just makes it easier to BE that trusted advisor at scale.
Every day you don't have your own branded app is another day you're:
The best time to launch your branded HomeStack app was yesterday. The second best time is today.
Randy Lusk left us with this powerful reminder about why owning your platform matters:
"It makes a small part of a realtor's soul die every time I see somebody share a Redfin or a Zillow link to one of their listings. Why are you giving them your platform? It's privacy, security, and the fact that you get me on the other end of that. Knowing that they're gonna be well taken care of by the person that they want to hear from—not from some random real estate agent."
Don't give away your platform. Build your own.
👉 Schedule a HomeStack Demo
👉 Download the "Built to Win" Implementation Kit
👉 Watch the Full Webinar on YouTube
Shay Noonan | Team Lead, One Team Scottsdale
12+ years in Scottsdale | $100M+ in sales. Shay built One Team Scottsdale to transform real estate through transparency and client empowerment.
Rebecca Bates | Leader, Aaron Bates Real Estate Team
Long Island team leader specializing in agent training and development, with a focus on systems that scale.
Randy Lusk | Team Lead, Porchlight Property Group Maryland REALTOR® | $100M+ in sales | 1,000+ transactions | Top 3% of Maryland agents | CNE, ABR, and MRP certified.
