How Amy Riggsbee Built a Career on Trust and a Little Bit of Calculus
Amy Riggsbee leads one of the most complex networks in American real estate: 16 title companies across 26 states, all under the HomeServices of America banner. As President of National Settlement Services, she manages a scale most executives can only imagine. But ask her what makes her proud, and she won’t point to her title, her systems, or her foresight. She’ll point to her people. For Riggsbee, the story has never been about her alone; it’s about the teams who make scale possible, day after day, by turning change into progress.
Her path to that role began like many of her generation’s: with a typewriter. She typed out forms line by line, knowing the smallest slip meant starting over. Then technology began to shift. First DOS, then Windows. While others groaned at the disruption, Riggsbee saw possibility. She hacked outdated systems, creating custom fields that mimicked the automation she believed was coming. It was part foresight, part ingenuity, and entirely practical; she wasn’t waiting for better tools, she was building workarounds in real time. That early instinct (to refuse inefficiency and search for smarter ways) became the hallmark of her leadership.
Years later, when she was tasked with uniting operations across multiple states, she drew on that same impulse. But she also recognized a deeper truth: change is never just about systems. It’s about people. Where others use the phrase “change management,” Riggsbee reframed it as “compromise management.” To her, change imposed from above rarely sticks. Compromise, on the other hand, creates buy-in. “You can’t just drop a new system on people and expect them to embrace it,” she explains. “You’re asking them to give up a comfortable way of working, and that takes compromise.”
So she starts with listening. She sits with her teams to hear what slows them down, like redundant keystrokes, endless file searches, and the rework no one admits but everyone hates. Then, and only then, does she show them how new processes and technology will remove those roadblocks. The moment when someone realizes they’ve saved hours of work isn’t just a win for the company; it’s a win for the person who trusted her enough to take the leap. Riggsbee makes sure those wins are celebrated. “Adoption is one thing,” she says. “Belief is something else.”
Belief has been her north star. She even has a formula for it: relationships × time = trust. Trust, she insists, is the invisible infrastructure of HomeServices’ title and escrow operations. It’s what makes 16 different companies feel like one unified enterprise. Without it, processes fall apart. With it, teams embrace uncomfortable changes and turn them into lasting improvements.
Her metaphors for leadership are drawn from life. In the 1990s, she earned her pilot’s license, a hobby her husband still hates. But for Riggsbee, flying was more than adrenaline. It trained her to rise above the turbulence, to see the messy exchange of data between lenders, agents, and title companies not as disjointed chaos but as one connected flight path. That high-altitude view allows her to design systems that feel cohesive, even when the details are anything but.
In college, when calculus threatened to derail her, a professor named Dr. Ritchie refused to give up on her. He sat with her for hours, helping her break down the problems until she saw they weren’t just about numbers. They were about service: asking the right questions to guide someone toward the answer. That lesson became central to her management style. Today, she asks her teams to try their best, with the promise that she’ll be there beside them until they figure it out.
The results speak for themselves. Under Riggsbee’s leadership, HomeServices has achieved consistency and cohesion across 26 states. But the systems and scale aren’t what she points to first. She points to the people who embraced compromise, celebrated their wins, and built trust together. Those teams, she insists, are her greatest pride.
Amy Riggsbee’s career proves that the most powerful solutions in real estate aren’t designed in a vacuum. They’re built on trust, sustained by compromise, and lived out by teams who carry the change forward. At HomeServices of America, she has become the architect of that model, guiding one of the country’s largest settlement services networks not with force, but with trust multiplied over time.