Copy This Real Estate Team’s VIP Club Strategy For Low-Cost Referrals

I didn’t set out to build a VIP Club strategy that turns one client into five. I was just trying to fix a hole I saw in my business, and if I’m being honest, in the industry.

We had the systems.

We had the automation.

We had the raving reviews, the happy clients hugging us at the closing table. We were doing a lot of things right.

But the referrals weren’t coming in the way they should’ve been. Not at the volume I expected based on the experience we were providing.

I knew it costs more to acquire a new client than to keep an existing one, which is why we invested in billboards, $25,000 to $35,000 a year, to stay top of mind with people who already knew, liked and trusted us. The goal wasn’t even to generate new business. The goal was to remind our past clients to come back and to refer us.

If we picked up new leads? Great. But that wasn’t the core play.

And here’s the part that frustrated me the most: It didn’t work. At all.

Because we weren’t actually serving any real need for those people after closing. It wasn’t that they didn’t like us. It was that we’d become irrelevant to their life. And you can’t billboard your way back into relevance.

So I went looking for a blueprint. Something that could actually take care of clients before, during and forever. A real system. Not a CRM checklist or post-close drip campaign. Something that would anchor us in their lives long after the sale.

I couldn’t find one. So we built it.

Enter: The Lifetime Home Support Model

This is the foundation of our business now. It’s a strategy for every step of the real estate journey, from a first-time homebuyer coming out of a lease all the way to a senior transitioning into long-term care.

But the center of gravity for all of it, the program that drives loyalty, retention and referrals at scale, is our VIP Club.

We created it as a human-to-human solution for staying connected: Something that feels good for the client, creates stickiness for the agent and adds real value that lasts well beyond the transaction.

And all it takes to get in? Buy or sell with us once. That’s it.

What is the VIP Club?

Think of it like a homeowner’s lending library but way more fun.

It includes our moving trucks (we sell ad space on the trucks to our vendors so we cash flow on them), party equipment, like snow cone and cotton candy machines, bounce houses, margarita machines and karaoke. It includes tools most people don’t want to buy, rent or store — ladders, commercial carpet cleaners, specialty equipment, you name it.

We started out with about 20 core pieces of equipment. You can get all of them for under $4,000.

Every single piece is branded. Every single checkout is tracked. And clients use this stuff for everything: birthday parties, baby showers, grad parties, block parties, garage cleanouts. Luxury clients use it. First-time homebuyers use it. Nonprofits use it.

They’re not just checking out a popcorn machine. They’re checking in with our brand. Their friends and neighbors see it, ask about it, and suddenly that one transaction turns into conversations, and those conversations turn into referrals.

It’s not just a perk, it’s a system

We built custom software to streamline the whole process. Every time a client checks something out, their agent gets notified. The system triggers automation that gives the agent a moment to re-engage in a way that actually matters.

Not to “follow up.” Not to ask for business. To check in. To reconnect. To show up with intention.

That’s the key. This doesn’t feel like marketing. It feels like being helpful. It triggers the Law of Reciprocity on a high level. 

And it works. Think about the natural life cycle of a client: They go to your website before they hire you to vet you out. They go to your website during the transaction to look for homes or compare their listing to other homes, but after the closing, they don’t come back to your website. We created a branded site that is all about serving them; we are not asking for anything.

The numbers

We used to spend, on average $30,000 per year on billboard campaigns that didn’t give us a single easily trackable ROI. We replaced that with a $4,000 equipment set and a strategy that brought us over a 38,000 percent return.

In May alone, we average over 800 checkouts, and for two years in a row, May also brought us 50+ referrals from our sphere.
All from branded gear and a system that makes it easy to connect.

We estimate that one employee averages one hour per day on our VIP Club, and that is being generous; our software does the rest.

This is how we became the No. 1 team in South Dakota since 2017 and rank No. 33 in the nation, where we serve a small market and are one of the least populated states in the country. Our 20-some agents dominate 10 percent of the market share. And it didn’t happen by accident.

A few months ago, one of our longtime clients checked out basically every piece of party equipment we have. Her husband had just been cleared of cancer, and they were throwing a huge celebration.

I saw her in the parking lot when she came to return the equipment. We hugged. Cried. Laughed. It was one of those moments that just stopped me.

We weren’t there as her real estate agent anymore. We were there as someone who got to be part of her family’s joy.

That’s not marketing. That’s connection. And you can’t fake that with a newsletter.