Behind the Closing Table: Matt Brady Talks Relocation Branding and Social Media With Alysia Stern

Behind the Closing Table: Matt Brady Talks Relocation Branding and Social Media With Alysia Stern

The Agent Who Brought a Children's Book, a Marketing Company, and a New York Accent to Myrtle Beach

Matt Brady sat down with Alysia Stern, a real estate agent licensed in New York, South Carolina, and Florida, for a Behind the Closing Table conversation that covers one of the most unusual backstories in the real estate world. Alysia came to real estate after decades in healthcare management, a children's book publishing career, a marketing and publicity company, a podcast she launched in 2012, and years of helping celebrities, politicians, and restaurant owners build their brands.

She is also the product of four generations of military family. Her grandparents served in World War II after immigrating from Ireland and Italy. The military service continued down the line to her son who is a United States Marine. Her husband Chris is a retired New York City firefighter. After his retirement from the FDNY they loaded up and moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where they built their Heroes Agents brand serving veterans, first responders, and military families in a new market where they knew virtually nobody.

She sold six houses in her first six months in New York. She has been a top producer relocating people from across the country to Myrtle Beach for the past four years. And she does all of it with a Brooklyn accent that is not going anywhere regardless of how many years she spends south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Why Her Husband Made Her Wait Before Getting Into Real Estate

The most revealing part of Alysia's story is why she did not get into real estate when she first wanted to. She had the desire, the marketing skills, and the entrepreneurial drive years before she got her license. Her husband Chris, who had been in real estate for twenty-four years, told her to wait.

He was working twenty-four hour shifts as a FDNY firefighter. During major weather events like Hurricane Sandy he was gone for a week at a time. If she started showing houses in the evenings and on weekends with the twins at home there was nobody to cover. He told her when the twins were old enough to be independent he would let her start.

She got frustrated. It felt like he was holding her back from her dream. Looking back she understands completely. Real estate is a twenty-four hour career. You get eight o'clock phone calls from buyers crying about their family situation and you lie awake at night thinking about their problems. You become a therapist and a financial advisor and a project manager simultaneously. If she had started before she was ready she would not have been able to give it what it required. Her husband gave her the foundation to succeed by making her wait for the right moment.

The Career That Made Her Marketing Ready Before Real Estate Existed

Alysia has been a writer since the age of nine and has been published internationally since 1999. When the twins were born she started journaling their daily stories and by around 2005 she had written Don't Eat the Crayons, a children's book built around her twins actually eating crayons and a far-fetched story about the colorful chaos that followed. It was published five years later and she used that milestone to pitch media aggressively.

As newspapers, local TV, and school book tours started picking up her story people began asking how she was marketing herself so effectively. By 2011 she had become a publicist and social media manager for other people alongside her own brand work. By 2012 she launched The Rendezvous with Alysia podcast. By the time she went to work with politicians, celebrities, and restaurant owners she had an S-Corp and a full marketing company.

When she finally got her real estate license in 2017 or 2018 she already knew exactly how to build a brand, get media attention, create content, and build the no-like-trust factor that makes people choose you specifically rather than the generic agent who happens to show up first.

Building a Brand in a Market Where You Know Nobody

When the Sterns moved to Myrtle Beach Alysia had no database, no relationships, and no local credibility. Her approach was direct and relentless. She started by hiring a buyer's agent she found on Zillow to help them purchase their short-term rental condo. The experience was smooth enough that she asked that agent if she could work with her while she got her South Carolina license. She lasted three months at that first brokerage before switching to where she is now.

In those first months she had one strategy. Scream from the mountaintops. Tell everyone she had ever worked with in New York that she was now a realtor in South Carolina and if anyone was thinking about moving to Myrtle Beach she was the person to call. She posted constantly and did not stop. Her first several sales were all people from New York who had been following her social media and reached out when they were ready to make the move.

She is now four years into the Myrtle Beach market with a reputation as a relocation specialist who has lived the experience herself. She did not just read about moving from New York to South Carolina. She packed up fifty years of family connections, left her daughter behind in New York, and built something entirely new from scratch. That lived experience is her most compelling credential with the clients she serves.

What People Moving to Myrtle Beach Usually Do Not Expect

Alysia is direct with every client considering a move to Myrtle Beach about the things vacation experiences do not reveal. The Grand Strand is a genuine beach community with traffic, tourism seasons, wild animals in the more rural areas, and a surrounding landscape that includes some of the poverty that has been part of South Carolina for decades.

Gorgeous new construction communities are going up throughout the region. But getting to some of those communities requires driving through streets that do not match the community itself. Rundown farms, abandoned lots, and properties that have accumulated years of debris can sit directly adjacent to beautiful subdivisions priced between three hundred fifty and four hundred fifty thousand dollars. She tells every buyer to drive around. Not just the house. The entire surrounding area at different times of day.

She described a showing in Conway where she had her dog with her and encountered a pack of wild dogs running across a two-acre lot. The point is not that Myrtle Beach is unsafe. The point is that it is a real place with real characteristics that a vacation rental stay does not capture. Buyers who do the research and understand what they are choosing rather than romanticizing a beach vacation are the ones who make smart decisions and stay satisfied with them.

She also raises the property tax conversation specifically for investors. Investment properties in South Carolina carry a meaningfully higher property tax rate than primary residences. For buyers who plan to use a Myrtle Beach property as a rental rather than their primary home that difference is a significant number that needs to be factored into the financial analysis before the purchase.

The Heroes Agents Brand and Why She Serves Who She Serves

The Heroes Agents brand was built around a genuine identity rather than a marketing concept. Alysia comes from a family that has served in every generation since World War II. Her son is a Marine. Her husband spent his career in the FDNY. Her daughter is an EMT. After military service virtually everyone in her family became a first responder in New York. NYPD, MTA, EMS.

When she and Chris built their brand they were not picking a niche because it was underserved. They were serving their own people because that is who they are. Veterans and first responders working with an agent and a family that understands their world from the inside produces a different kind of trust than the generic agent relationship. The no-like-trust factor that Alysia talks about is real and with the Heroes Agents brand it is grounded in lived experience rather than positioning.

She also runs a charitable mission called Cans and Crayons built around the belief that no child should ever be hungry or without the means to create. The media attention that charity generated in New York fed directly back into her real estate brand in ways she did not initially plan but now fully understands.

Social Media Advice That Goes Against What Most Agents Do

Alysia teaches a social media class for real estate agents and her perspective on what works is consistently different from what most agents are doing.

Stop doing trends. The Kool-Aid dance. The freeze. The TikTok format of the moment. She is unambiguous about this. Trends generate views from people who are not going to hire you. When three hundred agents do the same trend the one who did it best is still not the agent the viewer is going to call because they learned nothing about whether to trust that person with the largest purchase of their life. Trends make you look like everyone else. Looking like everyone else is the opposite of what a brand is supposed to do.

Post every day. This is a fact in her view. Consistency matters more than production quality. A phone from ten years ago that produces shaky video is still producing content. Content that is consistent and genuine will outperform polished content that appears once a week and disappears. The audience that matters is not going to judge your equipment. They are going to judge whether you are worth trusting.

Find the right platform for your actual audience. Her buyers are retirees relocating from New York. They are on Facebook. Agents working with first-time buyers in their twenties are on TikTok and Snapchat. Posting brilliant content on the wrong platform produces zero results regardless of quality. Know who you are trying to reach and be where they actually are.

Find your niche and build your brand around it. She described agents in New York who built their entire brand around animal rescue and now every person in the animal rescue community thinks of them first when buying or selling a home. The niche does not have to be military or first responder. It just has to be real and it has to genuinely connect to the audience the agent wants to serve.

Views do not pay the mortgage. Sales do. Ten thousand views with no transactions is a worse outcome than five views that produce three closings. Metrics are not the goal. Relationships that produce clients are the goal.

Building a Brand You Own Rather Than One You Borrow

Alysia has been approached by large national brokerages and she consistently declines. Her reason is direct. Under a team at a major brokerage she would be at the bottom of a brand hierarchy that lists the brokerage first, then the team, then the team leader, and then her name somewhere below all of that. She cannot build her brand from that position. She can only build their brand.

This is not a universal prescription. She acknowledges that some agents genuinely want to build within a larger organization and that can work well for them. But for agents who want to build something they own, something that travels with them regardless of which brokerage they work with, independent brand building is the only path. The no-like-trust factor belongs to the person. It should be built around the person. When clients are choosing between agents they are choosing a human being they want to trust with their most significant financial transaction. That human being needs to be identifiable and visible rather than subsumed into an organizational identity.

What the First Ten Clients Would Look Like If She Started Over Tomorrow

Open houses and door knocking. No database. No phone contacts. Just showing up where potential clients already are and introducing herself with genuine value rather than a sales pitch.

Her first listing ever came from calling for-sale-by-owners in her community. She knew the community, she knew the market, and she could offer something specific. In Myrtle Beach and surrounding areas where HOA communities restrict solicitation she found non-HOA neighborhoods where door knocking was possible and offered real help. She and Chris shoveled snow. They mowed lawns. They offered to help elderly neighbors with errands. They introduced themselves as neighbors first and agents second.

When she arrived in South Carolina she had no local connections but she had years of marketing experience and she used all of it. She turned her open houses into events with food, drinks, her own branded materials, and a genuine sense of welcome that made the community want to show up. The people who walked through the door were not just potential buyers for that listing. They were potential clients, potential sellers, and potential referral sources for years.

How to Reach Alysia Stern

Social media links and YouTube channels are in the description of this episode. Alysia is licensed in New York, South Carolina, and Florida and specializes in relocation from the northeast to the Myrtle Beach area. She also hosts Realtors and RVs, a podcast built around the RV lifestyle community that overlaps significantly with her relocating retiree client base.

Matt Brady is the Carolina Mortgage Coach. For mortgage guidance on your next home purchase in the Carolinas reach out to Matt Brady directly.

Sources

MyrtleBeachAreaRealtors.com
NAR.realtor
MortgageNewsDaily.com
ConsumerFinancialProtectionBureau.gov
Investopedia.com