The Chris List™

Two livestreams this week that I would love for you to join me on.

1st one is starting right now and is an A-Z training on Beacon (my AI seller report startup). If you use Beacon or are interested in seeing how to use it, hop on right now.

The 2nd one (Thursday at 1pm est) is a marketing mastermind with three super smart agents who are dominating their market using YouTube, social, and email.

Even if you can not attend these live RSVP anyways so that I can send you the replays.

Here's what is in this week's Chris List:
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📝 [C]ontent: What an 1888 novelist teaches about listing descriptions
🛠 [H]ow-To: Never miss a new Instagram feature again
🔬 [R]esearch: The staging ROI numbers everyone quotes are fake
🎨 [I]nspiration: The grossest ad in NYC this week was pure genius
📈 [S]wipes: The buyer email to send before Labor Day hits

📝 [C]ONTENT

This interactive essay will make you see life differently 🥹

There's a new interactive essay called Ordinary Abundance that walks you through a normal apartment and stops at every object you never think about.

The opener wrecked me.

Back in 1888, a writer named Edward Bellamy imagined a future where you could hear any song, any time, in your own home, perfect quality, on demand.

He said if humanity ever pulled that off, we'd have hit "the limit of human felicity." The absolute ceiling of human happiness.

That's Spotify. You have it in your pocket right now. And you probably used it today without a flicker of awe.

The whole piece is like this. Every "boring" thing in a modern home was once a miracle somebody wept over:

Electric light: a crowd in 1880 Indiana stood "with bated breath" the first night their town lit up, like they were seeing something supernatural.

Clean water on tap: when running water reached New York in 1842, people danced in the streets. Their wells used to share dirt with the graveyards.

A pineapple: so rare in 1700s Britain that hostesses would rent one for the party instead of eating it.

Same house. Same objects. Total blindness to how insane they are.

Why this matters for agents:

Your buyers have "hedonic adaptation," a fancy way of saying the brain stops seeing what it sees every day. And that is exactly what kills a listing.

The seller stopped noticing the morning light in that kitchen years ago. The buyer walks through and sees "kitchen." Nobody feels anything.

Your job is to make them see it again.

Stop writing listings like a spec sheet. "3 bed, 2 bath" is invisible. Instead, do what this essay does: make the ordinary feel like a wonder.

"The first cup of coffee you'll drink in that back-corner window seat."
"The 100-year-old oak the last three families grew up under."
"The dead-end street where kids still ride bikes until the streetlights come on."

You're not selling square footage. You're selling the stuff people walk past every day and forget to be amazed by.

Be the one who makes them look twice.

🛠 [H]OW-TO

Stop chasing every Instagram update. Bookmark one page instead. 📌

Instagram shipped so many features this year it's genuinely hard to keep track.

Beyond their brand-new logo, their product team is on fire.

Replace Audio. Photo comments. Grid reordering. A whole TV app. An SEO update that changes everything. And that's just since July.

Here's the problem: most agents "keep up" by watching random reels from social media gurus who spin one tiny feature into a 12-minute video.

You lose an hour and still miss the update that actually matters.

The fix is boring and it works: use a running changelog.

​NapoleonCat has a page that tracks every Instagram update, newest first, and keeps refreshing.

One tab. Everything Meta rolled out, in plain English, with the exact taps to use them.

The ones worth a look right now:

📈 Instagram SEO

Public posts from professional accounts now show up in Google search. Your listing content can rank on Google, not just in the feed. Treat every caption like a mini landing page: real keywords, your city, descriptive alt text.

🎵 Replace Audio

Swap the song on an old post without deleting it, and it keeps all its likes and views. Refresh a listing reel with trending audio instead of starting over.

🔀 Reorder your grid

Drag your best-performing posts to the top so a seller checking you out sees your strongest work first.

⭐ Add straight to Highlights

Build Highlights without posting to your Story first. Make clean, permanent sections: Sold, Reviews, Neighborhood Guides, FAQ.

📷 Photo comments

People can now drop actual images in your comments. Run visual prompts: "Comment a photo of your dream kitchen," or ask past clients to post their closing-day pics right under your post. Instant social proof, zero DMs.

🎬 Edits Teleprompter

Read your script on screen while you film. This is the fix for every agent who freezes on camera. Write your market update, hit record, sound natural. No more 14 takes.

🎯 Your Algorithm

Tap the two-hearts icon in Reels to tell Instagram what to show you more of. Load it with real estate marketing tags and your feed becomes a free swipe file of ideas to steal.

📸 Instants

Spontaneous, disappearing photos to your close friends. Not a campaign tool, but a low-effort way to keep your sphere feeling like insiders: prep before a showing, a peek at closing day.

📍 Friends Map

Share your location with a chosen list. Honestly? Mostly personal. The one agent angle: even if you don't share your own spot, you can use the map to see location-tagged content from local creators, which is decent for spotting what's happening in your farm area.

You don't need to know all 40 updates. These are the 2026 ones that actually matter, so far.

🔬 [R]ESEARCH

The staging stats floating around your feed are made up. Here's the real data. 🛋️

You've seen the posts. "Staged homes sell for 20% more!" "312% ROI!" "3,551% return!"

I dug into where a lot of those numbers come from, and a bunch trace back to staging companies quoting their own unaudited "studies," with no methodology and figures that contradict each other in the same article.

So let's use the one source that actually surveyed working agents: NAR's Profile of Home Staging, built on 1,266 responses with a margin of error of +/- 2.75%.

Here's what's actually true.

Staging's #1 proven job isn't price. It's visualization. 83% of buyers' agents said staging made it easier for a buyer to picture the property as their future home.

That's the real mechanism. You're not adding dollars, you're removing the imagination tax.

The price bump is real but modest. Nearly 3 in 10 agents (29%) reported staging led to a 1% to 10% increase in the dollar value offered.

Not 20%. Not triple digits. A single-digit lift that still pays for itself.

Speed is the underrated win. Almost half of sellers' agents (49%) said staging reduced time on market. In a slow market, days saved are dollars saved.

Where to spend it: for buyers, the living room was rated the most important room to stage (37%), then the primary bedroom (34%) and the kitchen (23%).

Don't blow the budget staging the guest room nobody cares about.

And the sleeper stat that explains half your showings: 48% of agents said buyers expected homes to look like they're staged on TV shows, and 58% said buyers were disappointed by how homes looked compared to those shows.

HGTV quietly reset your buyers' baseline, and reality keeps losing.

Why this matters for you:

Stop quoting the cartoon ROI numbers. Sellers are smart, and one Google search away from realizing "3,551% return" is nonsense.

Quoting junk stats makes you sound like everyone else spraying hype.

Instead, sell the honest version, which is more persuasive anyway: staging helps buyers see themselves living there, gets you offers faster, and nudges price up a few points.

That's a real pitch backed by your own professional association, not a staging vendor's sales page.

And one more thing worth noting: the share of agents staging every listing has dropped from 38% in 2017 to 21% in 2025.

Staging went from default to strategic.

Your edge isn't staging everything. It's knowing which listings actually need it, and setting seller expectations before the TV-perfect fantasy sets in.

🎨 [I]NSPIRATION

A 10-foot hairball rolled through Manhattan on purpose. It's genius. 🧶

On August 12th, a giant hairball rolled down the streets of New York like a hairy tumbleweed and came to rest in the Meatpacking District.

Not a prop from a horror movie. An ad.

The stunt, nicknamed "The Tumblehair," was a joint project between agency Uncommon Creative Studio and hair brand K18, promoting their new hair longevity serum.

It stood 10 feet tall and, per the brand, was built to represent the number of hairs New Yorkers shed: 161 billion strands.

It went viral instantly. The comments wrote themselves. "They pulled this out of my wife's drain." "This is insane, we love it."

Here's why it works:

They took a stat nobody can feel and turned it into a thing nobody can unsee.

"New Yorkers shed billions of hairs a year" is a fact. You read it, you forget it. But a 10-foot ball of hair rolling past your coffee shop? That's lodged in your brain forever.

They made an abstract number physical. Gross on purpose. Impossible to scroll past.

The Realtor steal:

Your market is full of stats that are true and completely invisible because they're just numbers on a page. "The median home in our zip gained $60K in equity over three years." Nobody feels that. It's noise.

Your job is to make the number physical.

Make it visual. Don't post "$60K in equity." Post a photo of a new truck, a kitchen reno, a year of private school tuition, whatever $60K actually buys, with the caption "this is what your neighbors' homes earned them since 2023."

Make it local and weird. "Homes on Maple Street have sold, on average, in 11 days this year. That's faster than it takes most people to return a library book." Odd comparisons stick. Round numbers don't.

Make it a thing people share. A giant prop at your open house. A stack of Monopoly money on your listing table showing the neighborhood's total appreciation. One physical object beats a hundred stat graphics.

You don't need a hairball. You need one number, made impossible to ignore.

Boring stats scroll by. A thing you can see stops the thumb.

📝 [S]WIPES

There are 496,000 more sellers than buyers right now 😯

New Redfin data just dropped, and it's a gift if you have buyers on the fence.

The number of homebuyers actively in the market fell to a record low of about 967,000 in July, while there were roughly 1,463,000 sellers.

That's nearly half a million more sellers than buyers.

Nearly 80% of major U.S. metros are now buyer's markets.

Miami leads with 154% more sellers than buyers. Nashville and a cluster of Texas cities aren't far behind.

There are only 6 seller's markets left in the whole country, led by the NYC suburbs.

And here's the timing hook straight from Redfin's economist: the stretch between now and Labor Day is a potential sweet spot.

Buyers have leverage, motivated sellers are willing to deal, and the early-fall rush hasn't hit yet.

Translation: your buyers who've been "waiting for a better time" are sitting in it right now and don't know it.

So wake them up. Steal this:

Subject: You have more leverage than you've had in years

Body:

Hey [First Name],

Quick heads up, because the window on this won't stay open long.

Nationwide, there are now almost 500,000 more sellers than buyers on the market.

Sellers are competing for a shrinking pool of buyers, which means the people still actively looking (like you) have real negotiating power right now.

Here's why I'm emailing you today specifically: the stretch between now and Labor Day tends to be the sweet spot.

Motivated sellers want to move before fall, buyer competition is thin, and that's exactly when you can get concessions, price flexibility, and terms that disappear the second the market heats back up.

I'm not saying buy something you don't love. I'm saying if you were ever going to make a move, the leverage is currently on your side, and it usually isn't.

Want me to pull 3-4 listings in [Area] where the seller looks motivated?

I can have them in your inbox by the end of the day.

Just reply "yes" and I'll get to work.

[Your name]
[Phone]

Two quick tweaks to make it hit harder:

Swap the national stat for your local one if your metro is on the buyer's-market list (Miami, Nashville, Texas agents, this is your moment).

"154% more sellers than buyers in Miami" lands harder than any national number.

If you're in one of the 6 seller's markets, flip the whole email and send it to sellers instead: "Everywhere else is drowning in inventory. Here, buyers are still competing. List now while you're the exception."

Same data. Two totally different plays. Run the one that fits your zip.