Offerin' Real Estate Insights

Stacey McVey Turned a Bad Experience into a 30-Year Real Estate Career

• OfferIn.io • Episode 12

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Agents today are expected to do everything: generate leads, juggle offers, build relationships, stay ahead on tech, and somehow still have a personal life.

In this episode of the OfferIn podcast, Darrin Grella interviews Stacey McVey, 30+ year eXp agent, business coach, and founder of the Rebel Agent Posse, on how today’s agents can use real estate tech tools, coaching, and mindset to build sustainable success in a changing market.

Stacey shares her journey from being a frustrated first-time buyer to creating one of the most respected real estate coaching programs in the country. She dives deep into what makes top agents thrive, including the must-have agent productivity tools, and how intentional use of tech creates leverage not distraction.

🎯 Topics Covered:

  • What bad deals taught Stacey about service and risk management in real estate
  • How real estate tech tools boosted her consistency and productivity
  • Building a real estate team through trust, mentorship, and coaching
  • Lead generation for agents that actually works
  • How Offerin helped her simplify offers and reduce stress

If you're exploring real estate mentorship, aiming to scale your business, or balancing family life as a part-time real estate agent, this episode delivers clarity, strategy, and actionable solutions.



👉 Discover how Offerin helps agents win more deals, save time, and look like heroes to their clients. Visit Offerin.io to learn more or schedule a demo today.

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Darrin Grella: If you think coaching is just for newbies, the story of our guest today will flip that idea on its head. She built a significant, agent driven community for coaching of high performers every day of the week.

So today on the OfferIn podcast, I'm super thrilled to welcome eXp agent Stacey McVey, 30 plus year agent, team lead business coach, consultant and founder of the Rebel Agent Posse. She lives at the intersection of doing and teaching. She's still, you know, still in her blood. She's still doing real estate, but also teaches it and brings real, no fluff strategies about how to scale, how to use technology wisely and absolutely, how to crush it on a day in and day out basis as a real estate professional.

Stacey, welcome to the show.

Stacey McVey: That was one heck of an intro. Let's see what we got.

Darrin Grella: Yeah. Okay, great. This is, hopefully one heck of a conversation.

Stacey McVey: I hope so. I hope so.

Darrin Grella: It'll be good. So, when did you realize that the life of real estate was your thing? You've been doing this 30 years. You'll take me back? Right. So what was the thing that you're like, "Oh, this is what I'm doing, and I'm going to commit my life to it"?

Stacey McVey: I had grown up around it, so it was the thing I didn't want to do. Okay. That's what my parents did. They were investors. My uncle was a broker. My grandmother worked in the 50s. Okay. At Miller Realty and Insurance, you know, and so I growing up around it, you think that, you know, this isn't how I want to spend my time.

I can't imagine doing this. And we got married. We had our kids, we outgrew our apartment. And I had a less than stellar experience with a real estate agent buying our first house. And it was a nightmare. It was a nightmare from start to finish. I can't really blame our agent. It was the listing agent at the time and unbeknownst to us, the sellers were going through a bankruptcy, and so they were taking things out of the house that they should have left.

They had to make a repair on the house, and they decided that instead of painting the trim white, they painted it cotton candy pink. And here we are, you know, sweating. How are we ever going to afford groceries and a mortgage payment? And we're moving into this house having this really bumpy, miserable experience. That was it for me. I'm like, if if this lady can do this, I really think I could knock it out of the park. And there was a need for it. And so that was when I looked at my husband and said, I think, I think I need to do this, and I think it would afford us the flexibility for me to be home with the kids quite a bit and still build a career.

Darrin Grella: Amazing. Yeah. That's interesting that a poor experience drove you to it. I'm also curious like growing up in it as maybe a second generation, real estate professional. Right. But like what was the thing that pushed you away? Why did you not want to do it?

Stacey McVey: The hours back then, everything was done in person. Yeah. You know, when fax machines became a thing, it was like the most liberal moment for a real estate agent who had kids and was trying to juggle stuff. But it was, you know, it just seemed to be chaotic. It seemed to be all, you know, encompassing. And I didn't want that.

I wanted to be at home with my kids. That was the number one goal that we had as parents was to stay home. And I was like, there's too much going on with real estate. I'll never be able to do that. So from the beginning, by necessity, it was about finding balance and I would argue, counter balance to make this career fit the life that I had envisioned with my family.

Darrin Grella: So we know that real estate is all about sacrifice, right? You give your life to your clients, right? So how do you balance like yours that were balanced counterbalance? How do you balance family and this crazy career?

Stacey McVey: Yeah. And then answer changes with every wave of technology that comes out that can help us. Yeah.

Darrin Grella: You mentioned the fax machine. That was the big one that.

Stacey McVey: I.

Darrin Grella: Was.

Stacey McVey: Or having the whole internet. I remember sitting at a sales meeting and, you know, internet was being talked about. And would the listings ever appear online? And I'm really dating myself here, but they were saying, you know, what's going to happen when our listings are online? And my manager stood there serious as a heart attack and said, that'll never happen.

There will never. No one will ever be able to view homes online. And so with every iteration of technology, we've gotten more and more freedom. If an agent knows how to use it to their to their advantage, or it can also be the biggest distraction ever, depending on whether or not you take the time to develop your own strategy and then find out how technology fits into that.

But to balance everything you have to begin with the end in mind. What is the life I want to live and then build your practice around the life you want to live, not try to have a life around the career you want to have. You tailor the career to match the life you envision for yourself.

Darrin Grella: That's great. Yeah, it's really good thinking about, you know, fast forwarding till today, you've been able to build this coaching business. When was the time? Same thing, same question. When was the time you said, "Hey, I'm an awesome agent, I'm producing, and I'm now I'm going to move into the coaching aspect"?

Stacey McVey: Yeah. My kids showed me Facebook. It was the moment I can remember exactly the room in my house and the chair I was sitting in when it happened. Yeah. And I saw what Facebook could be. This is when most people weren't on it yet. We hadn't hunted down all our former classmates yet on Facebook. You know, we were just getting on saying, "What is this all about"?

At the same time, having Myspace. It was silly at the time. Facebook really gave me the opportunity to dive into something completely new. That was behaving almost like a, database or in a CRM that was updating itself. So if I'm an agent and I'm a little scattered around and I just need to kind of keep tabs on my people, this was a way to do it.

I could celebrate moments with my clients. I could find out what was going on in the community. And I could do that from home. Right? Like, it was a lot easier. Seeing that opportunity led me to get really good at it and start teaching it. And I realized that at that point, your manager at your office can't be your end all, be all.

There's not enough hours in the day. And I really started spending more of my time teaching agents how to go from knowing nothing about something, to making it work for their business without getting caught up in all the distractions. And that was really kind of the pivot point that led me forward to think, you know what? I know these things. The agents need to know that they're not hearing from their local broker or they're not able to access that information. And I need to deliver it at a local level. And that's where it really began.

Darrin Grella: Wow. That's awesome. You know what I love about your story so far is that you see opportunities. You see them. So for example, you mentioned the fax machine. Yeah. Okay. That made you more efficient. You mentioned Facebook. Oh, that's making me more efficient. You mentioned coaching. Oh, it's making others more efficient. Like you seem to have this drive in there.

I'd love to dive into that. So we'll have a conversation about technology here as well. So, you know, tell me a little bit about Rebel Agent Posse.

Stacey McVey: Yeah.

Darrin Grella: First off, why why the name? Well, like so it's different, right?

Stacey McVey: Rebel agent.

Darrin Grella: Rebel.

Stacey McVey: Excuse me. No, no. You're good, you're.

Darrin Grella: Good, I'm good. Real estate. Yeah. Rebel. Yeah.

Stacey McVey: Right, right. The problem with our business, it was very cookie cutter. The solutions were very cookie cutter. And the more I traveled throughout the country and was coaching agents, I realized that doing it the way everyone had been telling them to do it wasn't necessarily working in their market. And there's a wave or a trend, if you will, in real estate toward a certain something at any given time.

You know, right now it's AI everybody everybody's talking. AI no one is talking about anything but AI. And the challenge becomes you have to rebel against whatever the tide is at the moment that's pulling you away from the core of your business breach. So, yeah. So rebel for me. You know, anyone that's known me for any length of time will tell you. I do tend to be very rebellious in my approach to things. I want to pick it apart. I want to question it. I want to understand whether or not it's right for me. Just because it's right for you. That doesn't mean it's right for me. That's kind of where that comes from. And, you know, a posse is a group of people that are like minded.

We have a really supportive tribe of people that are experimenting in their businesses. They're not afraid to swim upstream on some things and make some changes so that they can have the life again, that they envision inviting this business in as a way to fund it, not letting the tail wag the dog.

Darrin Grella: There you go. Yeah, I love it. Rebels. You know, going against things that are going to take you away from that expertise, the posse, the community. So you have, hundreds of people in your community. You've had thousands of agents come through your trainings. Is there any trend that you see in the agents themselves? Like, if you were to say, wow, okay. I've all these thousands of people I've seen and coached here are the the three characteristics. Here's the attributes that I see in these agents that make them successful. Yeah. Have you seen any trends over there?

Stacey McVey: 100%. The the most important thing is that they're coachable.

Darrin Grella: Okay.

Stacey McVey: And by coachable it means not only that they're open to hearing ideas and being told what will work, but they have a willingness to go deep without looking back up, without that temptation to quit before they've actually put in the full effort to realize the result. So, you know, time on task over time. You know, we hear that it's kind of a cliche at this point, but time on task over time is what really helps people succeed in real estate.

So the second attribute to that, I think, really would be the ability to stay in that that groove of repetitious boredom and not be distracted. Yeah. That consistency. Like you're not jumping out of bed in the morning going, "I can't wait". You have to understand that our highest dollar productive activities are the ones that are particular personality style we call boring, you know?

And so their ability to stay in that really makes a difference. And resilience would be the third thing I would tell you. They got to be resilient. You you have to be able to bounce back. This job changes sometimes by the minute. And so you can have a crushing morning and have a triumphant afternoon, and you have to be able to take balls in stride and show up again tomorrow.

Darrin Grella: That's great. So we have a mindset on how we're building OfferIn and a couple of those mindsets you spoke of, you know, learn from your failures, right. So that's the resilience piece. Embracing the boredom of consistency is one of our core core mindsets. So yeah. Yeah. That aligns aligns very well. But that's good helpful.

Thank you. I'm super curious about coaching. Okay. So if I was an agent, why would I want to coach? And also, when you speak to that, like, is it a new agent that comes to you or is it the agent that has 20 years? If I'm an agent, why would I want to coach?

Stacey McVey: Typically, someone will seek coaching when they've identified something that they want to incorporate into their business, and they want to get there as fast as they can with the least amount of friction possible. Okay. And I think coaching should be topical. I think you should, come up with your business strategy and that might be a strategy coach.

And then depending on what you're looking to implement in your business, there are people that are really, really good at that and can help you go and implement much faster. And even though I am a fail forward with velocity kind of girl, sometimes that's a necessary coaching can cut down on that. And people's, threshold of pain around failure is pretty low.

Like we're taught that that's a bad thing. So I love that OfferIn embrace this failure, too. But a coach can help you reduce some of that friction, get where you want to go and get there in a way, that you can onboard. Everybody learns differently. Some people can go on YouTube and teach themselves all kinds of things.

Some people can read the manual. I'm not read the manual kind of girl and got to like, take it out of the box and just try it and then figure it out later, you know, kind of thing. But for a lot of people, having that person that will go stride for stride with them is the difference between them being able to implement and not implement. And that's why they seek coaching.

Darrin Grella: That's great. I think, you mentioned a little bit about the like the people, the way they learn an aspect of that community, right? That that you have people to lean on. There seems to be this lack of resilience there really is in our community. And, and of course, as we age, we look at the, you know, the current generation, we're like, oh, they're so weak compared to how we used to do it.

Yeah. But, it truly like, you know, it's okay to fail. And I think, when we're in a community of people, like in a coaching situation, you have some accountability, you have some people to lean on and, and collaborate with me like, oh, it's tough out there. Yeah, yeah, it's tough. But you know, keep going. So there's some motivation piece to that.

Like how you like I guess coaching in general. Is it expensive? How does how does this work? What's the do people hire coaches for? Hey, I'm going to do this for a course and they just do a small course? Or is it like, hey, I want I want to, you know, break the bank here and give you, you know, all my money so that you can, you know, coach me and teach me? And so what's the price ranges of people using coaching services?

Stacey McVey: Yeah, it's really all over the board. It really depends. Are you coaching with someone because you know, you want to get better at your client relationship nurturing? And so you're going to hire someone to bring you through, you know, lighting up a CRM and all of your work flows? And how does that actually look? Are you someone building a team?

So depending on what you're looking for, that could be something as simple as an online course. Okay. But also that can be a little bit passive where, you know, I did the thing and I'm following the instructions and I still got hung up. Okay. That's where a coach comes in. I like to hybrid coach, which is we have some, you know, tutorials you can lean back on in those moments, like if you're working on Saturday night and that's the time you had available, there's tutorials available for you.

But we also have live coaching so that when you are stuck, you can say, "I'm just stuck on this little thing". I can't figure it out. Yesterday I had someone sending out an email newsletter. She said, "I gotta talk to you. This thing just doesn't look the way I want it to look". It's all garbled up. Well, here.

Her email viewing pane on her desktop was just shrunk really small, so it made the text all wonky and she's like, "Oh," that was holding her up from doing something. Yeah. So sometimes having that resource where you can come in and just go, "Here's my thing, how do I fix it so I can move forward again," will be the difference between someone being able to implement and not at all. So there's all kinds of solutions depending on what you're looking for.

Darrin Grella: Got it. Okay. Would you recommend everybody has a coach?

Stacey McVey: It depends on how fast you want to go. Okay.

Darrin Grella: So you need the skill at scale quicker because there's so many ages like you hear the statistics, right. Or, you know, so many of the agents, 75% of agents sell five or less homes a year. It's like, how do you how do we get this whole population of folks to either don't be in real estate because it's really hard.

And if you're not going to put in the effort, make the sacrifice. Just don't do it right? That's okay. Wait. The other portion of is like, how do you get them from five houses or two houses to 10 to 20? Like, and scale faster? You know, I think coaching is an opportunity, but is it something in people or is it something? Why, why why is that? Why are there a significant portion of our industry not producing?

Stacey McVey: I think a significant part of the industry lacks the basic skills to get business. When we take our classes, we're taught all about, you know, how many square feet are in an acre and all of this stuff. That's really important. It is. We need to know about the product that we sell. I would argue we don't sell anything, but the very, you know, heart of the business is relationship, creation and nurture.

And we're not taught that. And so they're very passive in their approach to the business. If somebody brings it up and drags them into the conversation and they'll talk about the fact that they're a real estate agent, and a lot of them don't have the goal when they get in to replace an income, they're not full time. They're just trying to save up enough to make a couple extra payments on their mortgage or put a kid through college.

So by its design, yeah, we've attracted a lot of people to the business through no fault of their own, have been told they can have a great part time income. And unlike Northeast Ohio, where we hover, you know, around a little bit of a lower price point, if you sell ten houses in Denver, Colorado, or in Southern California, you're doing a okay.

All right. So unit count can be a little bit deceiving depending on where you are. Very good okay. So you can make an extra 75 to 100,000 doing half a dozen houses, you know, depending on your market. Not in our market, but in some markets. So I think that, you know, it's kind of historically been that way. It's been a part time thing.

And so when things get really hard and those numbers start to contract, like they have recently over 40% contraction and the number of available transactions for real estate agents, you're going to see those part time people struggle more than the people that are full time who have been creating their own economy. Yep.

Darrin Grella: That's very good. How do you get your coaching clients?

Stacey McVey: Usually word of mouth, believe it or not. Okay. I teach a fair amount. I do offer free content for people, although I think that is also a blessing and a curse for agents because on the inside, that consuming free coaching content all day long and they don't understand what they're actually viewing is a sales pitch.

So there's something left out of that recipe, you know, to get you to take the next step to buy the thing, buy the course, you know, hire the coach. So you're not getting a cohesive strategy when you're, you know, kind of piecemeal. This free stuff together, I offer it to it's how people get a sense of who I am and what it would be like to work with me. So it's important. But you, you tend to meet people through other people who have had experience with your coaching.

That's that's primarily how I get my clients. Sometimes every once in a while, somebody will be like, "I saw you, you know, on social media, or I saw you, teach a class at the board or something like that," and I'll get a client that way. But often it's by referral.

Darrin Grella: Yep. Which is great. Which means you're bringing value. And then with value comes, comes that. So same thing with, like, you know, a listing, right? You do a great job. That client refers you to the next client, right?

Stacey McVey: It's the cheapest not cheapest. It is the cheapest. The least expensive lead that we procure is a referral. It has the highest conversion ratio. And it's the warmest call you make. And real estate agents run away from that as fast as they can. If you would lean into that, whether you're building a coaching business or a real estate business, you would realize that you can drive more profit to your bottom line with those warm and referral type leads.

Darrin Grella: Yeah, we we struggle with this a little bit. It OfferIn, because we actually want to give it away for free. Okay. This is a business. Right. So the tough part is like, well, you need people to scale and all this kind of stuff. So it's like, yeah, but we also want people to see the value in it.

So to your point of art of like, hey, there's a bunch of free information and then you kind of dilute the value that you're getting. So we've learned that like we were giving away free trials, people use it. But people weren't taking it seriously because it is a little bit of a new thing in a workflow. So if you give it away for free, people are like, oh yeah, I tried it.

And you know, like you hit a couple bumps. It's just different than what I normally do. So I'm done. We've learned, though, our churn rate was higher with a free trial versus actually charging for it. So again, at the end of the day, we'd love to do it for free because we really believe that this is impacting the way agents, do real estate and its impact in their personal lives.

It's stripping administrative work from from their workload. Right. So they can be more efficient. Yay, yay. And that experience was very similar to, to your first experience as well. But, I guess in a, concise manner, like, like high level. What was your first experience using OfferIn, like?

Stacey McVey: It was funny. I was surprised at how quickly I got it set up. Yeah. I deal in technology all the time, so it felt very intuitive to me. I had heard about it from a friend, and they're like, "You have to look at this". You know, "You're the girl that's always teaching." You know how to use tech.

"You have to look at this". And I did, and it was just at a time where it it served the purpose perfectly for me. I was really busy. I was taking on a lot of, family things, helping out family members at the time. And I lit up these listings that were getting multiple offers and it was killing.

I was like, "How am I going to do both of these things at the same time?" You know, and do them at a high level? And that's when I learned about it, I implemented it, I think it took me less than ten minutes. The first shot out of the gate. Were there more things to learn? Sure there were.

Could it do more than I thought it could? It could. So, it it is a huge timesaver. But for me, it's also good for risk management. And I think agents need to really understand that as much time as they spend on some of these other things, they need to backtrack on their risk management. A friend of mine almost just missed just missed an offer on a property that was the highest, best offer on the property.

But the the offer was lost in spam and the agent didn't call to follow up.

Darrin Grella: Are they use an OfferIn, by the way, they're not. Oh, maybe we should talk.

Stacey McVey: We're having it. We're having a conversation with Nancy. So the the the thing of it is, is, you know, how would that seller feel had they known they could have, you know, maximized their position by thousands of dollars, right? These things happen every day and agents aren't thinking about it, and they certainly aren't going to talk about it, even if they are thinking about it.

Darrin Grella: Never admit it.

Stacey McVey: No. So for me, in as much as this is an efficiency play, this is a risk management play. If you're a broker listening to this, if you're a team leader listening to this, and you're responsible for other people who may or may not exactly know what they're doing all the time. Yeah, this is the play. This is what OfferIn can do.

I couldn't say enough good things about it. I called you, did I?

Darrin Grella: I was super impressed by.

Stacey McVey: What is going on. Yes. It's amazing. So, I would encourage people when they're looking at implementing technology, it's not just what it can do for you efficiency wise, but it's also what it can do for you risk management wise.

Darrin Grella: Yeah. Great. Thank you. That was not planned, by the way. Like a little, OfferIn commercial, so that was awesome.

Stacey McVey: I'm just. I'm just telling.

Darrin Grella: You, I'm glad it was impactful. Truly. I'm glad it's helping.

Stacey McVey: It is. And there's nothing else in my tech stack that can replicate what it does. So a lot of the technology that agents have access to, there's a lot of redundancy in there. This is unlike anything else that we use, and it fills a critical role that allows us to live that balanced life that we talked about earlier.

So that's what technology is supposed to do for you, supposed to create leverage. And this really did great.

Darrin Grella: So if someone's listening today and wants to begin coaching, you know, the being part of being coached was their first move. How do they get a hold of you?

Stacey McVey: Probably find me on Instagram, believe it or not. And you'll get a feel for whether you like my style and, what you think of the content. We advertise our free Ask Me Anything session every Wednesday at 1 p.m. eastern. They're welcome to jump on that and get kind of a taste of it. It really is a game show.

Yeah. It's like Stacey's on the hot seat for an hour. It is what it is. So they're welcome to do that. You can find me on Instagram at Realtor McVey okay.

Darrin Grella: Awesome. Thank you so much. You know love for anyone listening. If they want to join, your coaching community and really check out what she has, I'd encourage you to do that. You know, I'd also love, love to have you stick around. If this was interesting content. We're going to dive in. We're we have to do part two here.

And dive into, technology and really say, like, okay, we mentioned AI. That's the newest, latest words on the street. I'd love to get your perspective on that. So we're going to break for now. Make sure you subscribe. And like, you know, the content so that, you know, the next time we put out some, some great stuff on AI and technology and real estate that you can, be be abreast of that.

So thanks for joining us. Until next time.