Some of RISMedia’s 2025 Real Estate Newsmakers left their mark helping other real estate professionals get ahead, among them Sabine Steinbrecher, CEO of Hiveologie, an e-learning company targeted at real estate agents and brokers.
During 2024, over 20,000 agents attended Hiveologie workshops. A 25-year real estate veteran, Steinbrecher credits the practical, learned-from-experience advice the company’s educational content offers.
The professionals her company coaches aren’t the only hive that Steinbrecher is passionate about, either. She is active in the field of bee conservation, maintaining a sister company Sweetwood Mountain that sells, among other products, honey—and donates 100% of its profits to bee conservation efforts.
RISMedia spoke with Steinbrecher about her real estate education career, her conservation efforts and the ways in which personal passions can be the differentiation an agent or business needs.
Devin Meenan: How does it feel to be named an RISMedia Real Estate Newsmaker?
Sabine Steinbrecher: Truthfully, I think it’s one of the greater honors in our industry because I’ve known the gang at RISMedia going on 20 years now, and I have a lot of respect for the work that’s done there. I know that this process is something to be particularly proud of. After many years of trying to add value back into this marketplace, it’s really lovely—and I’m grateful for it, for sure.
DM: Having been recognized in the Trailblazers category, can you talk about your feelings on what that title means to you as well?
SS: My whole career has been all about trying to be an innovator to the point of us often doing things a little too early, the old sort of bleeding edge story. But I’ve been innovating in this space for many years, over two decades now. The Trailblazer element is probably one of the most important things for us because I believe that there’s a lot that we can do around impacting agents and organizations in this space using education. Innovation around education is an area that we can be particularly proud of if people think of us that way.
DM: Speaking of education, can you walk through some of the workshops you offered to your Hiveologie team last year and what specific subjects you focused on?
SS: We have a mission to focus on the topic of acceleration, especially when we’re in markets like this that are a little more challenging and dealing with an audience of many agents who haven’t gone through a down market before. In fact, the National Association of Realtors® points to something like 65% of all agents having never been through a down market, so what we try to focus on are the skills to help them accelerate their growth. Growth can mean customer service, it can mean revenue, it can mean deals and it can mean leads. The topics that we like to focus on support all of those things—and the way that we do it is unique, too. And this year, even more so, we’ve got all kinds of cool new things that we’ve launched since we ran with this program last time.
Our model is blended, which means we’re not just putting up workshops or ad hoc courses. We’re often doing it in a blended format, which is more of a system, and that allows us to do things like add coaching. We’ve incorporated a lot of coaching components into a lot of our programs, offering a Monday morning rally to provide agents and brokers a micro growth topic. This can be anything to do with a growth lever to build their business.
DM: Anecdotally, could you share any of the feedback you’ve received from agents as far as what they find advantageous about the workshop model?
SS: While we get a lot of really great testimonials from our folks, the thing that comes up most often is that they love that we’re giving them highly practical and tactical moves. These are things they can apply to their business immediately, which is a big deal considering the fact that much of the training in the marketplace is heavily theory based. We come to the table for them with content that’s practical and tactical, but also coming from seasoned experts. We’ll work with a top producer to build one of our programs, or we’ll build with a subject matter expert who’s been doing it for 20 years in order to get them the best combination of all of those things. That’s what people seem to react to the most.
DM: In what ways does the bee conservation you’re involved in intersect with your real estate work, if at all?
SS: In the most obvious way, it intersects because we donate 3% of all of our core sales directly to bee conservation. We started a sister company a year or two ago called Sweetwood Mountain—and 100% of its profits are also moving into (bee conservation projects). That particular product site includes things like closing gifts as well as traditional gifts and things that people (agents in particular) can use, but it’s also for traditional honey and gift giving, too. We’re trying very hard to use education for our audience to find ways to focus on bee conservation efforts in some form. We’ve done that in a couple of different ways, but that’s how it intersects.
Honestly, the fact that we went with bees and hives and the company name Hiveologie happened at different times, which is kind of interesting. They weren’t originally meant to be together, but when we came up with the Hiveologie brand, it was because we’re building this community of agents and this hive and more supportive ecosystem in learning that’s a little bit different than what others are doing in the marketplace.
DM: I’m curious, which came first for you: bee conservation or real estate?
SS: It’s funny that you say that. I’ve been doing the real estate stuff forever, so that was long before we morphed into the Hiveologie brand, which came a couple of years before setting up the mission. The e-learning came first and the social mission came after.
DM: Has working in conservation taught you anything about running your business? Have you learned any lessons that other real estate professionals maybe haven’t?
SS: I’ve done this whole study on how you can benefit from including a social mission in your business. I’ve spoken on it a couple of times, and I’ve tried to look at how it’s impacted our business and how it impacts my team. I will say that at the most basic level, people who are also social mission oriented are attracted to us. We get a lot of people who not only love the fact that they get all these benefits I was telling you about, but who also say that our work supporting bees is a big deal for them. We’ve received this same type of feedback from the agents that work with us as well.
It really does attract certain people to us in terms of who our partners and clients are. It even impacts my staff. They love that we do this, too, and we try to include it in everything we do. It really makes a pretty significant difference, and that’s even just at the most basic level. There’s probably 20 other things, but it’s certainly been a big deal for us. And it makes me feel as though if every business did this 1%, 2%, 3% (or whatever they’re comfortable with), it would make an enormous impact.
DM: What advice would you give to other real estate professionals who want to take a cause they’re passionate about and mix it with their business the way you have?
SS: We actually teach that when we do our programming—either at a level of a social mission, or at least in terms of what their unique passions are. One of the main reasons for that is so an agent can be as authentic as possible when they’re interacting with others. It also creates this wonderful opportunity to talk to people, to develop a community, to get out in their own community and make a difference.
The way that we teach them is to “be authentic.” When you’re talking to your audience, this is a wonderful way to do it—and if your passion happens to also merge with a social mission, even better. People often come to us and say I don’t know what to post about. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to talk about. If you’ve got this passion, there’s no shortage of things to talk about. A great example could be something that has nothing to do with an obvious social mission, but maybe it’s golf or yoga, and you’re just making people healthier. You’re helping promote that by being the yoga agent or the golf agent. There’s a ton of neat stuff that you can do with it.
RISMedia’s 2025 Real Estate Newsmakers showcase is sponsored by:
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Stay tuned to RISMedia.com for ongoing coverage and close-up interviews with our 2025 Real Estate Newsmakers.
