It was the fall of 1988. I had just turned 30. I was sitting in a beige cubicle crunching numbers for someone else’s bottom line, and I had this gnawing feeling that public accounting was slowly killing something inside me.
So I did what any reasonable person would do. I quit.
I walked into a real estate office in Huntington Beach, sat down at what they called the “up desk,” and waited for the phone to ring. I had no clients, no pipeline, and no clue how long I’d last. But I had one thing going for me: I was the “Yes” guy.
Open house on a Sunday? Yes. Floor time on a Tuesday night? Yes. Help a young couple find a 600-square-foot condo they could barely afford? Absolutely yes.
Three Generations of “Take Care of People”
My father was a small business owner. So was my grandfather. And his father before him. None of them ever used the word “branding.” None of them ran Facebook ads. But they all said the same thing, almost word for word: “Take care of your customers and they will take care of you.”
That line didn’t sound revolutionary at the time. It sounded like something you’d stitch on a throw pillow. But standing at that up desk in ’88, fielding calls from strangers who were about to make the biggest purchase of their lives, I realized something that changed my entire trajectory.
This wasn’t about sales. It was about listening.
The couple looking at that small condo didn’t need a pitch. They needed someone who would shut up long enough to hear what actually mattered to them—the school district, the commute, the dog they were planning to adopt. When I stopped trying to sell and started trying to help, everything shifted.
Referrals came. Repeat clients came. Families who bought that first condo called back five years later for the house with the yard. The throw-pillow wisdom turned out to be the whole playbook.
Enter: The Farm Boy and the Airline Executive
By year four, I had a problem. A good problem, but a problem. The phone was ringing more than one person could answer. The referrals were outpacing my ability to give each client the attention they deserved. And I knew—from watching my father—that the moment you let service slip is the moment you start losing the thing that built you.
That’s when I met Philip Talbert.
Philip grew up on a family farm in Illinois. If you’ve never worked a farm, here’s the short version: you wake up before the sun, you do hard things nobody sees, and you don’t complain about it. That was Philip’s operating system.
But he wasn’t just a work ethic in a polo shirt. Philip had spent years in communications, copywriting, and airline management—recruiting and training teams at a level most people in real estate never touch. He understood something that I was still learning: service isn’t a feeling. It’s a system.
When Philip came on board in 1996, he brought the structure. The follow-through. The “we don’t just say we’ll call you back—we actually call you back” discipline that turned a one-man hustle into a real operation. He took the family-business warmth I’d inherited and gave it a backbone.
Suddenly, we weren’t just taking care of people. We were taking care of people consistently, at scale, without dropping a single ball.
The Left Fielder from Huntington Beach
Fast forward to year 21. Philip and I had built something we were proud of. But the market was changing. Technology was reshaping how buyers searched, how sellers marketed, and how deals moved from handshake to close. We needed someone who understood that shift in their bones.
Lane Stone walked into our world, and I knew within five minutes he had something.
Lane is a Huntington Beach kid—born and raised. He played baseball at Santa Barbara City College—a lefty outfielder—and if you’ve ever watched a good outfielder track a fly ball, you know what I’m talking about: reading the crack of the bat, taking the right angle, and running full speed to a spot everyone else thought was unreachable. That’s Lane in a transaction.
He had a degree in business and finance from Chapman. He’d cut his teeth at Washington Mutual and then Chase during one of the most chaotic periods in banking history. He’d seen the mortgage industry from the inside—the good, the bad, and the 2008.
What Lane brought wasn’t just youth and tech fluency, though he brought plenty of both. He brought a speed of thinking that matched the speed of the modern market. He could look at a listing, a comparable, a negotiation, and see three moves ahead while the other side was still loading their spreadsheet.
The two-man team became the Sackin-Stone Team. And the business evolved from a duo into a full-service operation—marketing, technology, transaction coordination—all built around the same core idea from 1988: take care of people.
The Great-Grandchildren Are Calling
Here’s the part that still gets me.
A few years ago, I got a call from a young woman looking to buy her first home in Orange County. We started talking, and she mentioned her great-grandmother’s name. I stopped mid-sentence.
I sold that woman her condo. In 1988.
We are now serving third and fourth generation families. Let that sink in. The granddaughter of the couple from that first open house. The nephew of the guy who called the up desk on a random Tuesday. Families who have trusted us with the single biggest financial decision of their lives—not once, but across decades, across generations.
That doesn’t happen because of marketing. It doesn’t happen because of algorithms. It happens because 400+ families took the time to leave five-star reviews, and because every one of those reviews represents a real conversation, a real closing table, a real set of keys handed over with a handshake.
Philip, Lane, and I don’t operate like the teams you see on bus benches—where one “superstar” agent slaps their face on a billboard and you end up working with an assistant you’ve never met. Every client works directly with us. One-on-one. That’s the deal. That’s always been the deal.
37 Years of Orange County Sunsets
I’ve watched Orange County change in ways I couldn’t have imagined from that up desk in ’88. Neighborhoods have transformed. Skylines have grown. The market has crashed, recovered, soared, corrected, and soared again.
Through all of it, the one constant has been the people. The families who keep coming back. The referrals that show up because someone’s cousin mentioned our name at a barbecue. The trust that compounds like interest over 37 years.
To every client, every family, every person who picked up the phone and gave us the chance to help—thank you. That’s not a tagline. That’s the whole point.
And if you’re reading this and thinking about your next move—whether it’s your first home, your forever home, or just a conversation about what the market looks like right now—I’d love to grab a coffee and talk. No pitch. No pressure. Just a conversation.
That’s how this whole thing started, after all.
— Scott Sackin, The Sackin-Stone Team