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Christina Thomas, founder of GOAT+DIME and a top 1% agent in San Diego, replaced Zillow and Redfin with a fully custom branded real estate app built by HomeStack, then used it to build a client-facing relocation resource center, an agent-only operations hub, and a repeatable strategy other real estate agents can copy. Her story shows what a custom real estate app can do for relocation clients and agents competing in saturated markets that a template app never will.
Some agents treat their branded app like a nice-to-have. Christina Thomas treats hers like the foundation of her entire business.
Christina is the founder of GOAT+DIME, a San Diego-based brokerage she launched in 2024 after 21 years in the industry. She is ranked in the top 1% of agents in San Diego and nationally, she holds her Broker's license, and she once negotiated the $72M off-market sale of the Ritz Carlton in Lake Tahoe on her own. In other words, she has seen every version of this business and she knows exactly what works.
So when she talks about why her custom-branded app built by HomeStack and named GOAT+DIME after her own brokerage, changed everything for her, agents should be taking notes.
For 20 years, Christina sent buyers and sellers straight into Zillow and Redfin, the same apps every other agent in her market was also sending clients to. She said it plainly: her clients could get lost, or get bounced to another agent's listing, at any moment inside those platforms.
“I felt like I could never capture my clients into one space,” she said. And once she saw what HomeStack could do, it hit her all at once. Zillow had been collecting the leads, the attention, and the loyalty that should have been hers the entire time.
She moved fast after that first meeting. No long deliberation, no waiting for the perfect moment. She saw the gap and she closed it, partnering with HomeStack to build out a fully custom app under her own brand.
That app became GOAT+DIME, named directly after the two standards her brokerage was built on: greatest of all time service, and showing up at a level ten every single time. It wasn't a generic template with her logo slapped on it. HomeStack built it around the exact way Christina works and the exact way her clients think.
This is the part that really sets Christina apart. She didn't stop at property search. Using the flexibility of her custom HomeStack build, she built out a full resource center inside her GOAT+DIME app for every county she serves, San Diego, Orange, LA, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Palm Springs.
Inside each county, she has curated places to stay, restaurants, fitness studios, school links, entertainment, everything a buyer moving into a new area would want to know but has no idea where to find. And she doesn't just list them. Under every single category she adds her own personal take, what she actually likes about that hotel, that restaurant, that gym.
It reads less like a directory and more like advice from a friend who already lives there.
She calls it a buyer resource, and it is aimed squarely at the clients who are relocating and don't know the area at all. Those are often the clients who need the most hand-holding, and Christina figured out how to give it to them at scale, inside one app, without a single extra phone call.
Christina didn't stop with buyers and sellers. Inside that same GOAT+DIME app, she also built out what she calls the GOAT Suite, agent-only app features just for her team.
If someone is out in the field and a lockbox fails, or they forgot to put a sign up, everything they need is right there with links attached.
No digging through email. No searching old text threads. Everything her team needs lives inside the app, at their fingertips, in the moment they need it.
That is the kind of operational thinking that turns a brokerage into a business that can actually scale.
Christina shared a moment that captures exactly why this works. A buyer relocating from North Carolina had been living on Zillow, sending Christina listings she found there. Christina told her to download GOAT+DIME instead so she could favorite everything and pull it up easily once she landed in San Diego for showings.
Within an hour, at night, after a couple of margaritas, that buyer had favorited 400 homes throughout San Diego. She messaged Christina apologizing and gushing that the app was the best thing she had ever seen.
Christina laughed and told her they would need to narrow it down to ten before the trip. But here is the real win. That buyer, a high-profile attorney who had lived on Zillow for years, never left GOAT+DIME again. She later left a glowing Google review specifically about the experience.
That is what it looks like when a client falls in love with your brand instead of a third-party portal. It's proof of what a real estate app built for relocation clients can do that Zillow never will.
Christina put it simply. Real estate is a numbers game, and most agents look the same on paper. She recently mingled with Compass agents who all had the same tools, the same resources, the same pitch.
Her edge is her GOAT+DIME brand and app, built alongside Side Real Estate.
It lets her show, not just tell, what full service actually looks like. As she put it, a lot of agents throw around the phrase “full service” without ever backing it up. Her concierge-style app is proof.
Christina's approach isn't complicated, it's just thorough. Here is what any agent can take away from it:
In a market where every agent has access to the same MLS data and the same basic tools, the agents who win are the ones who give clients somewhere to actually stay. Christina Thomas figured that out first, and her results speak for themselves.
She isn't the only broker betting on owning her tech stack instead of renting attention from third-party portals. Similar strategies are working for other top HomeStack customers who are building a lasting agent brand instead of just another listings feed.
See how a concierge-style real estate app built around your brand, your counties, and your clients could change the way you do business. Book a demo to find out what GOAT+DIME-level service could look like for your team.
A concierge-style app goes beyond listings. Christina Thomas's GOAT+DIME app includes curated county guides with restaurants, hotels, fitness studios, schools, and entertainment, each with her own personal recommendation attached, so it reads more like advice from a local friend than a directory.
Relocation clients need more than home listings before they arrive. Christina Thomas built a resource center covering every county she serves, so buyers moving from out of state can research neighborhoods, schools, and local favorites inside the same app they use to save homes.
Yes. Christina Thomas built an agent-only section inside her GOAT+DIME app, sometimes called the GOAT Suite, so her team can pull up lockbox codes, sign instructions, and other field resources without digging through email or old text threads.
A true custom build is built around a specific agent's actual business: their counties, their brand name, their workflow, and their voice. Christina Thomas's GOAT+DIME app is a custom build for exactly that reason; HomeStack built it around how she works, not a shared template with her logo swapped in.
