🤫 Everyone has an AI secret. What's yours?


The Chris List™

If you have not seen our 2026 Real Estate Marketing Report, it is truly a must-read.

Because you are already on The Chris List, I wanted to make sure you could access it without filling out a form or "becoming a lead."

Here is direct access to the 64-page PDF

The two pages with the most direct answer to "how do I get more listings and better leads" are 35 and 39.

Now, here's what is in this week's Chris List:

📝 [C]ontent: Strangers wrote down their AI secrets
🛠 [H]ow-To: Check your AEO visibility score for free
🔬 [R]esearch: Scientists scored half a million listing photos
🎨 [I]nspiration: Meet the world's worst photographer
💡 [S]wipes: Impact of school district on a home's value

📝 [C]ONTENT

She asked strangers for their AI secrets 🤫

Olivia Tai, 26, walked San Francisco, San Jose, and New York with a bright red sign.

"Everyone has an AI secret."

Anonymous notecards and a box.

Then the notes went on to What We Tell AI (warning: reading the notes is addictive af).

Confessions poured in.

AI-written wedding vows.

Lying to a manager about using AI.

Cloning an ex-boyfriend's voice for one last conversation.

Tai calls it an art project.

The booth is meant to attract people who already use the tools because she got tired of the AI talk turning into a debate if it will end the world convo.

So she made the stakes personal. One clear note beats a thousand abstract hot takes.

Why this matters for agents:

Your buyers and sellers already asked an AI about you. About what the house is worth. About whether they need an agent.

They will not volunteer that.

Action item: In the first five minutes of your next conversation, ask: "Before we started, did you already ask ChatGPT about this?"

If they freeze, they already asked.

Your job = answer it better than the bot.

🛠 [H]OW-TO

Check your AI visibility score for free 🔎

Search Engine Land just shipped a free AI Visibility Checker.

Type a company name, a website, a product category, and a competitor and it runs about 150 queries across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity and hands you a 0 to 100 health score.

First check is free. No login. No email. No card. You can get one free check per browser per day.

Buyers already asked ChatGPT who to hire. If the machine cannot find you, it names Zillow, the team down the street, or nobody.

Three things worth checking:

Brand check

Company = your brand name. Website = your website. Category = "real estate agent." Competitor = the agent that wins listings in your area.

Listing-farm check

Website = the city or neighborhood page you publish for the farm. Category = "real estate agent in [city]." The biggest gap is usually Use Case or Solution Discovery.

That means the machine will not hand a buyer your name for that ZIP.

Review identity

Ignore the vanity score. Look at citation rate. Mentions with no link are empty calories. If the bot names you and cites Zillow or Realtor.com, that is the identity to fix.

Publish one boring, citable page: license number, brokerage, years in market, real reviews, FAQ for "who is a [city] listing agent."

Then run it again next week to see if you made any gains.

🔬 [R]ESEARCH

An AI scored half a million listing photos 🔬

Two economists built a CLIP Q-score (a nerdy way to say it analyzes how variables affect constants).

They ran it on roughly 500,000 listing photos.

Controlling for size, rooms, floor, ceiling height, building age, and distance to downtown: a 0.1 higher photo score lined up with about 3.5% higher asking price on a sale and 5.8% higher on a rental.

Photo score ranked third or fourth most predictive, behind only square footage and distance to the city center.

That said, they found better-looking homes take longer to sell because they are priced higher.

Better photos only move listings faster once you hold price constant.

Why this matters for agents:

When a seller fights the price you suggest, pull two live listings near them that got full asking price and show them those photos as a way to better "sell" the importance of the photographer you use.

They will see that the pictures were great, but the price was more so the catalyst for a 100% list-to-sale ratio.

🎨 [I]NSPIRATION

Icelandair hired the world's worst photographer 📸

Blanche Mortemard beat out 127,624 other self-declared bad photographers.

The prize = $50,000 and 10 days in Iceland.

The catch?

The photos had to be RAW files, meaning you could not edit, filter, or alter them to be bad.

They had to be genuinely bad.

She drove 1,500 miles. Shot 5,484 photos.

61 had a finger in the frame. 462 were shaky or blurry. 282 were of unidentifiable objects.

Icelandair still put two on billboards worldwide.

Why this matters for agents

Virtual staging that floats a sofa through a wall is the opposite of this. So is the wide-angle that turns a 9-foot beige bedroom into a ballroom.

Photos matter, but overdone photos erode trust.

Steal this idea

Take real listing photos and make them bad on purpose.

Finger in the frame. Wrong white balance. Crooked horizon.

Use your own listings. Not a render.

This week, pick one active listing and publish one intentionally imperfect pic to post on Instagram.

Lean into the overdoneness; I bet by doing so you will get more engagement than normal.

📝 [S]WIPES

Top school zones cost 35% more (Philly is 94% more) 🎓

The typical US home inside a highly rated school zone (GreatSchools 8 to 10) sells for $580,000, versus $430,000.

That's a 35% premium.

The gap swings hard by market. Philadelphia is about 94%. Fort Worth is 82%.

In Little Rock, the good zone is actually about 5% cheaper.

Look up your local number and then send the swipe below to someone who does not care about what school district they are in:

Subject: Quick one before you fall in love with a house

Nationally, the typical home in a top-rated school zone runs about 35% more than the typical home.

Here in [METRO] it is about [X]%.

I can send you three homes just outside that zone, plus what the difference buys you in square footage, amenities, and backyard.

Want them?

Action item:

Fill [METRO] and [X]% from the Redfin table and send it before/after they tour homes with 8-10 ratings.

Thanks for reading the entire list 😁

Don't forget that because you are on The Chris List, you get the 2026 Real Estate Marketing Report without filling out a form.

Here is direct access to the 64-page PDF

Chris Smith

p.s. If you enjoy The Chris List, forward it to the agent who helped your career the most

The Chris List™

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The Chris List

Chris Smith is the bestselling author of The Conversion Code. He co-founded the SaaS marketing platform Curaytor, an Inc. 500 fastest-growing business. As a C-level executive at dotloop, Chris helped lead them to their acquisition by Zillow for $108 million. The Conversion Code has become required reading for marketing courses at colleges like Johns Hopkins University, and Chris Smith is a sought-after lecturer and speaker whose credits include NYU, as well as sold out events with Gary Vaynerchuck and Hubspot, among others. His work has been featured in Adweek, Forbes, Fortune, and many other publications.

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