When High-Touch Service Meets High Stakes
In long-term stay accommodations, the guest experience can look simple from the outside. A reservation is made. A lease goes out. A unit is ready. A stay runs smoothly.
But operators know the truth: exceptional service is built behind the scenes—where communication, readiness, accountability, and financial accuracy all have to stay aligned. When the back office slips, guests feel it. Executive guests feel it first.
For Sterling Relocation, protecting that experience at scale meant strengthening the operational backbone behind it.
Meet Denay Sanders, President and Founder of Sterling Relocation
Denay didn’t start in corporate housing, she started in property management and real estate development. While doing lease-ups, a nearby corporate client needed furnished apartments. Denay partnered with a corporate housing provider to set up units, learned the industry from the inside, and later joined that provider in sales.
She quickly found the same gap she’d felt as an operator: “the attention to detail… and the product just wasn’t meeting their needs. So, I ventured out and started Sterling.”
She founded Sterling Relocation and has led it for 24 years.
A Business Built Around Executive Expectations
Denay built Sterling around a clear standard of service. As she puts it, “we’re very different from a lot of corporate housing companies… our prime focus is executives.”
That focus shapes the entire business. Sterling supports relocation, assignments, training, and corporate project stays where expectations are high and mistakes are expensive. Even as the company has grown nationally, Denay has worked to preserve the responsiveness and personal attention that define the brand.
“My clients have my cell phone number,” she says. “We have 24-hour on-call, which is a person who works in the office, not an answering service.”
That kind of service does not scale through good intentions alone. It scales through operational discipline and systems that help teams stay fast, informed, and consistent under pressure.
Details Are the Product
Denay’s operator mindset shows up in the places many companies overlook. She cares not only about the apartment itself, but about the lived guest experience inside it, from housewares and technology to the subtle signs that a stay has been thoughtfully prepared.
“Our housewares are really a grade above everyone else’s, and we’re constantly changing them,” she says. She is equally direct about the standards she refuses to accept: “I’m not a fan of when I walk a third party, and I see an alarm clock from 1980.”
That same mindset shaped how Sterling approached technology. Denay wanted systems that could help the company keep pace with rising expectations while protecting the service standard that set Sterling apart. In her words, “we really take pride in… being on the forefront of technology and being able to kind of move with the way that the world is moving.”
The Modernization Trigger
As Sterling grew, one issue became harder to ignore: communication could not stay manual.
During Houston weather events, guest notifications had to be sent one by one, with the team “having to copy and paste and blind copy,” which Denay described as “an amazing time waster.”
Mobile responsiveness mattered too. With real on-call expectations, the team needed to work from anywhere without losing speed or context. Denay put it simply: “it was really important to be able to view it mobile.”
This was more than an efficiency problem. It was a service problem.
Sterling needed a stronger operational backbone, one built for the realities of long-term stay accommodations and capable of supporting a high-touch experience as the business scaled. CodeOne by Software Answers gave Sterling that modernization path.
Why Software Answers and CodeOne Mattered
Sterling went live on CodeOne in April 2025.
Denay’s long-standing relationship with Software Answers gave her a clear understanding of what she valued most: deep corporate housing domain fit, operational control, and clean data you can trust. When Sterling reached a point where integration flexibility mattered most, she chose CodeOne for its API-first approach and modern workflows.
Denay describes one of CodeOne’s biggest strengths plainly: “the strength of CodeOne is in the ability to have the API.” For Sterling, the value isn’t the API itself, it’s the flexibility and connectivity it enables. By integrating CodeOne with other systems, the team could automate manual processes, access real-time information, and keep critical data synchronized across their operation.
That meant less time exporting spreadsheets, re-entering information, or chasing updates between systems, and more time responding to clients and guests. The ability to build workflows around Sterling’s specific business processes helped the team move faster while reducing operational complexity.
CodeOne as the Operational Backbone
One of the clearest examples of CodeOne’s value is how Sterling used it to connect stay data into HubSpot. The point of that integration was not simply convenience. It was visibility and speed when trust was on the line.
“I can go into HubSpot, and I can pull that stay and then I can see everyone who’s ever communicated or touched that guest,” Denay says.
That visibility becomes especially important when something goes wrong. If a complaint escalates, leadership needs facts fast, not scattered fragments buried across inboxes and handoffs. Denay explains it this way: “I can see, where did this breakdown happen? What date did it happen? Without having to search Outlook.”
The impact is immediate. “You literally, in minutes, figure out exactly what happened.”
That outcome starts with CodeOne. HubSpot plays an important role in the communication layer, but CodeOne is what gives Sterling the trusted stay data and operational backbone needed to make that connected workflow useful.
Scaling Communication Without Losing the Human Touch
Sterling has also used its connected setup to support broader communication workflows, from segmented outreach to operational notices and guest reminders.
For Denay, this is about making communication more useful, not more automated for its own sake. “I just think people are so bombarded with email,” she says. “I appreciate so much when I’m giving a heads up with a notification.”
That logic carries directly into the guest experience. Sterling uses timely prompts for check-in reminders and missing vehicle information before those issues become guest frustrations. As Denay puts it: “Your check-in’s in 24 hours. You haven’t provided your vehicle information… there’s a possibility that you’re going to be towed.”
What makes this meaningful is that the communication can be tied to real operational milestones. CodeOne holds the operational truth around the stay, and Software Answers gives Sterling the platform foundation to turn that truth into timely, consistent guest-facing action.
For a company built on personal service, that matters. Sterling is not trying to automate away the human touch. It is using CodeOne to make that human touch more scalable, more responsive, and more consistent.
Building a Better Branded Guest Experience
Denay’s next priority is a Sterling-branded experience that feels more modern and more proactive from first touch through arrival.
One moment matters especially to her: letting guests know early when a unit is clean and ready. “It’s time for you to check in and your unit’s ready,” she says. “We would want to let them know they can check in early.”
She knows how much those details matter. “It’s clean and it’s ready to go… oh my gosh, that’s great… don’t have to hang out in the car for two hours.”
Again, the story points back to the same foundation. Sterling’s vision for a stronger branded guest experience is not built on guesswork. It is built on CodeOne as the operational backbone providing the long-term stay platform that helps Sterling extend trusted operational data into the moments guests actually feel.
The Lesson in Denay’s Story
Sterling’s story is a strong example of what operational excellence really looks like in long-term stay accommodations; building systems strong enough to protect the service standard as the business grows.
In Sterling’s case, that has meant preserving a high-touch service model while modernizing the workflows behind it. It has meant replacing manual communication with more connected, scalable processes. And it has meant using CodeOne as the backbone for greater visibility, faster response, and more consistent service delivery.
Denay did not build Sterling by chasing novelty. She built it by setting a high bar and then strengthening the systems required to uphold it.
CodeOne now plays a central role in that work, helping Sterling scale executive-level service with more clarity, more control, and a stronger operational foundation.