At Home Real Estate Services accepts Small Business Award

A residential property management company that started nearly 20 years ago in a two-bedroom house walked away from an annual Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce event on May 6 with an award in hand.

The chamber announced At Home Real Estate Services of Southwest Missouri LLC as the recipient of the 2026 W. Curtis Strube Small Business Award.

Founded in 2007 by Michelle Gipson and Trent Jackson, the residential property management and leasing firm was a first-time finalist for the annual honor.

Gipson accepted the award at the ceremony on her company’s behalf. She was joined on stage by Jackson and Jamie Wilcox, At Home’s chief operating officer.

“Anybody that knows me knows this is the most uncomfortable place for me in the whole world,” Gipson said after taking the stage. “But we are so, so honored to win this.”

A lifelong Springfield resident, Gipson said At Home started small, isn’t splashy and has grown by word of mouth.

“We started our company because we felt like there wasn’t anybody else that could offer what we offered,” she said. “Single-family owners that just had one house, there just really wasn’t a good place for them to go.”

Gipson recently told Springfield Business Journal that real estate “has changed a lot” since the company’s 2007 start. At Home’s 28 employees manage approximately 2,800 units – most of which are single-family homes and duplexes – across the Springfield metro area, according to officials.

“We have kind of crazy swings. COVID changed things a lot, too,” she said of the real estate market. “Being able to adapt to that is one of our strengths. We’re always looking for ways to do it better, more streamlined, and to adapt with what we’re facing.”

At Home started in a small, two-bedroom house on South Campbell Avenue and nearly doubled its footprint following a move to office space in 2009, according to company officials. Nearly a decade later, the business purchased its current office at 1628 S. Campbell Ave. – more than quadrupling the size it occupied upon its founding.

“At Home Real Estate Services represents the kind of steady leadership, thoughtful growth and community commitment this award was created to recognize,” said Craig Wright, Small Business Council chair, in a news release. “Michelle, Trent and their team have built a company that not only serves its clients well but also contributes to the strength and vitality of the Springfield region.”

Presented annually by the chamber’s Small Business Council, the award honors chamber-member businesses that demonstrate growth, resilience, innovation, strong company culture and meaningful community impact. The award is named in recognition of the late Curtis Strube, who founded the chamber’s Small Business Council and is a former director at Drury University’s Breech School of Business Administration.

Gipson said just getting recognized as a finalist for the award was significant to her.

“It’s emotional, I feel like, because this is my baby. I’ve nurtured it,” she said, reflecting on late nights working and wearing a variety of hats with the company over the years. “I’ve put all of my blood, sweat and tears into this.”

According to chamber officials, roughly 300 people attended the annual ceremony at the Oasis Hotel & Convention Center. The luncheon also included a keynote speech from Casey Woods, new head football coach at Missouri State University.

Other finalists for the award were, in alphabetical order:

• Insurors of the Ozarks, a 1982-founded insurance firm for which a third-generation owner, Bryant Young, took over the business on April 1.

• PCnet LLC, founded in 1987, an information technology company led by President and CEO Marty Roach.

• People Centric Consulting Group LLC, a business management consulting firm founded in 2012 by CEO Don Harkey.

• Sensitively Sweet LLC and The Safe Spoon, a bakery started in 2022 by Katrina Hagan. Sensitively Sweet is joined by The Safe Spoon, a cafe she and her husband, Alec, opened earlier this year.

Growth catalysts
For At Home, Gipson said one its most significant expansions was the 2019 acquisition of Debco Management Inc. The deal added roughly 800 units to At Home’s portfolio, nearly doubling what it was managing at the time, she said.

“We’ve never sought to just get big real fast. We’ve always wanted to grow at a manageable pace where we weren’t biting off more than we could chew,” Gipson said. “But we had done a lot of prep work beforehand to bring in extra people to get our systems really streamlined so that when people came on board, it didn’t feel like, ‘Oh, there’s all this extra work.’ It just was a very, very smooth transition.”

Another catalyst for At Home’s growth has been leaning into technology. The company adopted AppFolio as their software system early on and is continually evaluating and testing user experiences for other tech platforms, according to past SBJ reporting.

“We’ve always focused on treating everybody’s property like it was our own,” Gipson said. “How would we want it done if we owned it? Because we do own some of these properties too and not treating it any differently than we would our own.”

Noting she’s had not-so-great jobs in the past, Gipson said there was a desire early on to make sure At Home would be a welcoming and supportive place for its employees. 

“I wanted this to be a place where people wanted to come to work,” she said. “And this is not an easy job, so that was very important to me.”

The finalists are selected based on written applications reviewed by an independent panel of judges comprising previous recipients, local business representatives and volunteers of the chamber’s Small Business Council. This year’s judges were Logan Aguirre, of 2025 Small Business Award winner Four One Seven; Chip Broemmer, Advanced Car Care Center LLC.; Chrystal Irons, Missouri Small Business Development Center at Missouri State University; Mary Andrews Martin, Drury University; and Wright, Small Business Council chair.