How One Agent Sold $126 Million in a Single Neighborhood
- Jerad Larkin
- 3 hours ago
- 10 min read
How does a real estate agent build a business inside one neighborhood?
By becoming the most knowledgeable person in a defined area and staying in relationship with the people who already live there. Stacie Chadwick did $1.9 million her first year and over $126 million last year, working almost entirely inside the Colorado community she has lived in for 22 years.
I brought Stacie Chadwick on stage at the Unfiltered Event because her numbers do not look like anyone else's. She got licensed at 49, after 17 years out of the workforce. Her first year she closed $1.9 million. Last year she closed over $126 million, and she is over $100 million again this year.
Here is what makes it interesting for you. She did not do it by out-spending anyone, out-posting anyone, or working a wider territory. She did it by narrowing down to one neighborhood and refusing to leave it.
That is the whole conversation below. Watch it, then read the written breakdown underneath for the parts worth stealing.
What this conversation covers
Why she stopped taking deals outside her own community, and what that did to her confidence
The one question that won her a builder listing every other agent was already circling
How 150 five-star reviews that all name the same place got her surfaced by AI
Why she refuses to use the word farming, and the word she uses instead
The daily habit she says is the single thing to start tomorrow
She did not start with a neighborhood. She started with a confidence problem.
Stacie's first deal was for a family member, in a market she did not know. She drove her cousin around a part of the metro she had never worked, running comps she was not sure about, feeling like she was faking it.
Her words on stage: she felt like an imposter.
That deal is the reason for everything that came after. She made a rule for herself that she would not take another deal unless she could sit in front of a client and honestly say she was the best person for the job.
That rule sounds like a limitation. It is actually a strategy. Once you decide you will only work where you are genuinely the most qualified person in the room, you are forced to pick a lane and go deep. Most agents do the opposite. They chase every lead in every zip code, and they end up passable everywhere and dominant nowhere.
For a Denver agent, the practical version of this is simple:
Pick the area you already know best. Where you live, where you spend your weekends, where your kids go to activities.
Learn it cold. Every builder, every floor plan, every HOA quirk, every price band, every reason a home there sells fast or sits.
Stop taking deals that pull you away from it until it is producing.
Step three is the hard one. It is also the one that separates the agents who own a neighborhood from the agents who work in one.
Why she will not call it farming
I asked her about farming and she pushed back on the word immediately. She does not like it. Her word is relationship building.
That is not semantics. It changes what you actually do.
Farming, the way most agents run it, is a mailer schedule. You buy a list, you send postcards, you wait. It is cold by design.
What Stacie did was the opposite. Before she ever had a license, she was on the committee that built the community pool. She sat on the membership board at the club. She volunteered for everything she could get her hands on, because she was a stay-at-home mom who wanted to use her brain.
By the time she got licensed, she was not introducing herself to anyone. Everyone already knew her, and they knew her as somebody who showed up and did the work.
Her line on stage was blunt: if you are in this business chasing money instead of serving people, you will burn out and you will be frustrated. She is not being sentimental about it. Service is the mechanism.
Two things to take from this:
Being known is not the same as being marketed to. A postcard makes you visible. Showing up on a committee makes you trusted.
The relationship comes before the license. If you are new, the fastest thing you can do is get involved in something in your area that has nothing to do with real estate.
The question that won her a listing nobody else asked for
This one is small and I keep thinking about it.
In 2020, Stacie noticed a builder's truck parked outside a new construction home in her neighborhood, day after day. One day she stopped and started a conversation. She learned he was driving up from Colorado Springs.
So she asked him a question: why are you coming all the way here from the Springs when you could hire someone who lives five minutes away and knows this neighborhood cold?
He hired her. Then she asked him a second question, which is the part most agents skip: had anyone else suggested that?
Nobody had.
Agents had been circling that listing for weeks. Not one of them made the actual ask. That is the whole gap. The strategy is pretty simple: know your area better than anyone, then say it out loud to the person who needs to hear it.
Specificity is what made AI start naming her
Here is the part that surprised the room.
Stacie built her business around one place because it made her confident. She did not build it that way to rank in AI search. But that is what happened.
When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI results who the top luxury agent in a specific area is, the model has to assemble an answer from what it can find. If everything it can find about you is scattered across five metro areas and forty price points, there is nothing for it to latch onto. If everything it can find about you names the same place over and over, you become the obvious answer.
She called it an unintended consequence. I would call it the single most important marketing shift happening right now, and almost nobody is set up for it.
Her three pillars for being findable:
A strong personal website. She uses Luxury Presence and was clear on stage that she has no financial relationship with them, she just thinks they do good work.
Her brokerage's site. She is with LIV Sotheby's International Realty, and she treats that profile as a real asset, not a placeholder.
Google reviews, everywhere. This is the one most agents underuse.
Reviews are the fuel, and most agents leave them sitting there
Stacie has around 150 five-star Google reviews. Here is what she does with them that matters: she does not let them sit in one place.
She puts them on her own website. She puts them on her brokerage profile. And because nearly every one of those reviews names her specific community by name, the AI systems reading the open web keep seeing the same association over and over.
That is how a review stops being social proof and starts being search infrastructure.
The other thing she said that stuck with me: your clients and referrals are reviewing you before they interview you. Same as picking a restaurant. They are reading before they ever call.
If your review count is thin, a few things worth knowing:
You can reach backwards. A client you did great work for five years ago will still help you out if you ask.
Reviews do not have to come only from clients. Your lender can leave one. Your title rep can leave one. Anyone you have actually worked with can speak to how you work.
You have to make it easy. Send the direct link, and make sure your Google Business Profile is claimed and current. Do not make someone hunt for the form.
This is one of those small things that can make a big difference, and it costs nothing but the ask.
Only 9% of agents stay in front of a client a year after closing
That figure came up in the conversation, and whether the exact number holds or not, the pattern is real. There is an enormous pool of past clients out there who liked their agent fine and have not heard from them since the day they got their keys.
Stacie's answer to this is not a drip campaign.
Once a year she throws a party called Vino in the Village. Wine tasting, whiskey tasting, local restaurants bringing food. She invites her top 100 clients. About a quarter of them are in a transaction with her now. The other seventy-five percent are past clients she simply has not let go of.
One night, a hundred touches.
Between events she is writing notes, sending emails, and picking up the phone. She told a story about a past client whose husband was going through cancer treatment, and how she found out from a neighbor and called her that same day for a half-hour conversation that had nothing to do with real estate.
Her framing: she does not chase transactions, she stays interested in people. In an industry that has automated most of its follow-up, the agent who actually calls is doing something rare.
How she structures a day that supports $100M+
She is up at 5:00am. From five to seven she works out and time blocks the day. From about 6:30 to 8:00 she is building the day for her team. She has three people working for her full time, including a marketing director and a showing agent who also stages. She runs the operation in Monday.com.
Then from 10:00am to roughly 6:00pm she is doing the work only she can do.
She was direct about the scary part. Hiring her first assistant was the hardest decision she ever made, because you are committing money you are not sure you will have. Her verdict was equally direct: best thing she ever did.
The reason is not that it saved her time. It is that it moved her out of the work that drains and into the work that grows.
What she is actually using AI for
She is not using AI to replace her judgment, and she was clear about that.
Two real examples she gave:
A listing she took over where the prior agent had blown two mold tests and the seller had bad information. She ran the reports through Claude and had the discrepancies mapped out in seconds, then brought in a specialist to verify every piece of it.
MLS descriptions. Her team calls the AI output the first draft, and that is all it is. She takes the beds, baths, and square footage that AI formats cleanly, and then she writes the story of the listing herself, aimed at the specific buyer she knows is going to walk in the door.
If you are letting a chatbot write your listing remarks and publishing them as-is, you are leaving the entire job undone. AI gets you 85 to 95 percent of the way there. You are the expert, and you make the final call.
The one thing to start tomorrow
I asked her for a single nugget the room could act on, and she did not hesitate.
Call three people a day.
Not a script. Not a real estate conversation. Open your phone, scroll to a name, and call to ask how they are doing. How are the kids. Did you ever retire to Florida. Catch me up.
Her point, and it is a good one: your phone is already the best CRM you own. Scroll to the bottom of your contacts and look at the number. Some of those people you should not call. Most of them you should, and every one of them either owns or rents.
Three a day is roughly 750 conversations a year. You cannot manufacture what comes out of that.
About Stacie Chadwick
Stacie Chadwick is a real estate agent with LIV Sotheby's International Realty and has lived in the Village at Castle Pines for 22 years. She closed over $126 million last year and is over $100 million again this year, working almost entirely inside her own community.
Before real estate she had a commercial real estate career in Chicago, then spent 17 years raising three kids. She got licensed in 2019 and closed $1.9 million her first year.
This conversation was recorded live at the Unfiltered Event on August 20, 2026, at Venture X Downtown Denver in the Dairy Block.
FAQ
How do I start farming a neighborhood as a new agent?
Pick the area you already know best, usually where you live, and commit to learning it better than anyone else working it. Get involved in something local that is not real estate. The goal is for people to know you as a neighbor first, which is a much shorter path to trust than a mailer.
Is neighborhood farming still worth it in 2026?
Yes, and arguably more than before, because specificity is now what makes you findable in AI search. An agent whose entire online footprint points at one area is far easier for an AI system to recommend than an agent spread across a whole metro.
How many Google reviews does a real estate agent need?
There is no magic number, but volume and consistency both matter, and so does what the reviews say. Reviews that name your specific market area do double duty as social proof and as a location signal for AI search. Ask past clients, lenders, and your title team, and always send the direct link.
How do I get recommended by ChatGPT as a real estate agent?
Concentrate your online presence around a defined area and a defined specialty, then make sure that association appears consistently across your website, your brokerage profile, your Google Business Profile, and your reviews. AI systems assemble answers from patterns, and a scattered footprint gives them nothing to work with.
When should a real estate agent hire an assistant?
Most agents wait too long. The signal is not a revenue threshold, it is when the low-value work is crowding out the work that actually grows your business. Stacie described it as the scariest decision she ever made and the best one, because it moved her attention back to the work only she could do.
Want more of this?
I run the Unfiltered Event and teach classes across Colorado on marketing, AI, and business growth for real estate agents. As an Account Executive with Chicago Title of Colorado, I work with agents across the Denver metro every day on exactly this kind of thing, and I make sure the closing goes smooth when it is time to close.
Subscribe to my weekly emails for real estate tools, marketing tactics, and invites to upcoming classes and events across Colorado:
Jerad Larkin
The Mile High Title Guy
Account Executive, Chicago Title of Colorado
303.630.9430 | Info@MileHighTitleGuy.com
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