The Chris List™

Trust is the only currency left in this business.

Every "impartial" source is quietly sponsored. Every feed is crowded. Every seller has been burned or knows someone who was.

The agents who win from here aren't the loudest. They're the most believable.

Which is exactly why Jimmy and I built what we're showing you this Thursday.

We're going live with the biggest update we've ever rolled out at Beacon, the #1 AI seller report tool for listing agents.

We're walking through three new features:

Playbooks (our most requested feature of all time)
​Seller Pulse (so you always know how your seller is actually feeling)
​Social Media Auto-Detection (so the work you're already doing shows up automatically)

​Click here to save a seat

Now, let's get into The Chris List...

📝 [C]ontent: Inman's editorial wall just cracked

🛠 [H]ow-To: Double your IG Story views for less than a coffee

🔬 [R]esearch: Everyone ditching screens just handed you an edge

🎨 [I]nspiration: The World Cup is in your backyard. Go cash in.

📈 [S]tats: What the world's first trillionaire could actually buy

Inman's new "impartial" advisory council is its own advertisers 🤝

I worked at Inman News. And the one thing that was sacred, the bright line nobody crossed, was the wall between editorial and advertisers.

The newsroom didn't care who sponsored the conference. That separation was the entire reason anyone trusted the coverage.

This week, that wall got smashed.

Inman announced a brand-new 16-member Advisory Council to help steer what CEO Tom Bohn is calling "Inman 2.0," his plan to turn a news publisher into the "Bloomberg of residential real estate."

The council will help guide editorial, events, membership, and community strategy.

Read that again. The people being covered are now helping shape the coverage.

Look at who's on it: execs from Zillow, Compass, eXp, Lone Wolf, RealScout, Fello, Luxury Presence, and more.

A murderers' row of the biggest brokerages and tech vendors in the industry.

Many of whom have been, or currently are, major sponsors of Inman's events.

One council member's quote is almost too perfect: people are looking for "a trusted, impartial voice" in a chaotic environment.

Impartial. From a council of the industry's biggest checkbooks.

Here's what I can't get past: there isn't a single working Realtor on the list.

A council built to figure out what the industry "needs most" from its media platform, and not one of the actual agents that platform claims to serve has a seat.

Why this matters for you:

The whole industry is consolidating around platforms funded by the vendors they cover. When the referee starts taking money from the players, you have to read everything differently.

That's the opportunity. Because in a world where every "trusted source" is quietly sponsored, the one truly impartial advisor your client has is you.

No vendor pays you to recommend a lender. No portal funds your CMA. Your only incentive is your client's outcome.

Lean into that. Loudly. It's the most valuable position left in real estate.

Instagram just launched a $3.99 cheat code for your Stories ⚡️

Instagram just dropped its first-ever subscription tier.

It's called Instagram Plus, it costs $3.99/month, and buried in the feature list is the closest thing to a "2x your Story views" button agents have ever gotten.

Here's the headline feature: Story Extend.

Your Stories now stay up for 48 hours instead of 24.

Think about what that means if you post listing content. You drop an open house Story on Saturday morning, and instead of it vanishing before half your audience wakes up, it's still live all the way through Sunday night.

Double the window. Double the eyeballs. Same content, zero extra work.

For weekend buyers actively scrolling for their next home, that's the whole game.

But Story Extend is just the entry point. Here's the rest of the playbook for your $3.99:

📊 Story Rewatch Insights = your content lab. It shows you how many times each Story got rewatched. You post 10 a week and have no clue which ones land. Now you know exactly which topics, hooks, and formats are good enough to watch twice. Make more of those.

🎯 Multiple Story Audiences = the sleeper feature. You can build unlimited custom lists: buyers, sellers, past clients, your sphere. Post a buyer-market opportunity and send it ONLY to your buyers. Seller content goes only to sellers. That's CRM logic applied to your Stories.

📌 More Profile Pins = pin 6 posts instead of 3. Build a full "best of" portfolio at the top of your profile so every new visitor gets your strongest stuff immediately.

🧹 Post to Profile Without Feed = load your grid with listing photos and neighborhood content without spamming everyone's feed every time.

If you're not posting Stories consistently yet, fix that first.

But if Instagram is already a real business tool for you, $3.99 to double your Story window and finally see what's working is the easiest upgrade you'll make this month.

That's less than your Saturday coffee.

The internet killed the open house. Then the internet got boring. 🏡

The Harris Poll surveyed 2,068 Americans, and the headline finding should be pinned above every agent's desk:

79% of consumers say online shopping lacks the "magic" of an in-person find.

That stat isn't about real estate. It's about everything.

Clothes, furniture, electronics. But it describes your open house better than any data NAR has ever published.

Here's what's driving it. People are cooked on screens. 81% of Gen Z say they wish they could disconnect from digital devices more easily.

The average person lives their entire life through a rectangle, and they're starving for something they can actually touch.

The ripple effects are everywhere:

71% say print catalogs and magazines feel more authentic than digital campaigns. J.Crew brought back their print catalog after a seven-year break. Amazon launched a holiday toy catalog. Digital-first brands are going analog. On purpose.

73% of Gen Z and Millennials look forward to receiving catalogs in the mail. Your just-listed postcard doesn't feel like spam anymore. It might actually be the most interesting thing in their mailbox.

88% of consumers say physical experiences that go out of their way to engage them are easy to remember. And 71% say a great in-person brand experience deepens their connection and loyalty.

The biggest number for open house strategy: 77% of consumers say a great in-person brand experience influenced them to make an immediate purchase.

Not "think about it." Not "visit the website." Buy.

Why this matters for your business right now:

Every agent is fighting for attention on the same rectangular screens. The feed is crowded, the ads are ignored, and 66% of consumers say online experiences blur together.

Your open house doesn't blur together. Your handwritten note doesn't blur together. Your neighborhood market report printed on nice paper doesn't blur together.

The agents winning the next five years will be the ones who figured out that the most powerful thing you can do in a digital world is show up in person.

Make your open houses cozy. Make your mailers personalized. Make people feel something when they walk through that door.

Because apparently, the whole world is craving exactly what you already have: a reason to put down the phone.

Brands spent a fortune fighting over the World Cup. Steal their playbook for free. ⚽

The World Cup kicked off in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and the marketing arms race is already nuts.

​Three campaigns stood out, and all three have a lesson buried inside.

Nike went first with "Time to go off script."

Instead of a big hero film (which they also did with "Rip the Script"), they dropped a collage of signed Polaroids teasing a 12-week campaign with 42 people:

Ronaldo, Mbappé, Haaland, plus Kim Kardashian, Serena Williams, and Travis Scott.

Grainy photos. Real signatures. Built to be reposted.

The whole point is staying visible for three straight months instead of blowing the budget on one ad nobody remembers by Friday.

Adidas went cinematic with "Backyard Legends," a 5-minute street football film starring Timothée Chalamet trying to beat an undefeated neighborhood crew.

The cast: Messi, Bad Bunny, Bellingham, and AI de-aged versions of Beckham, Zidane, and Del Piero.

Old legends meet new stars. Nostalgia meets right now.

LEGO quietly won the whole thing. "Everyone Wants a Piece" put Messi, Ronaldo, Mbappé, and Vinícius Jr. around a table building a LEGO trophy, and a kid finishes it.

The result? 314 million views in 24 hours. Getting those four in one room is the marketing equivalent of a solar eclipse.

Here's the thread: none of them sold the product first. They built a moment people wanted to share, then let the brand ride shotgun.

Your version doesn't need Chalamet. It needs a reason for your town to look up.

The Realtor World Cup marketing checklist:

✅ Go local. It's hosted HERE. Tie your content to your city's watch parties, bars showing matches, or the neighborhoods filling up with fans.

✅ Don't make one ad. Make a series. Like Nike, spread it out. A "Match Day Open House" every weekend of the tournament beats one post.

✅ Cast beyond real estate. Partner with a local sports bar, taco spot, or brewery for a viewing event. Borrow their crowd.

✅ Make the product the action, not the pitch. LEGO didn't say "buy bricks." They showed the build. Show the lifestyle, not the listing.

✅ Tap nostalgia + now. A "homes that have hosted 40 years of game days" angle hits different than another price drop graphic.

✅ Give people a reason to share, not just see. A bracket giveaway, a "guess the score, win a prize" contest, a jersey raffle at your open house.

The bar is low.

Everybody else is posting "Just Listed" while the entire country is watching soccer in your backyard.

Elon Musk just became a trillionaire🤯

On Friday, Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire.

Not a billionaire. A trillionaire.

A number so large the human brain literally isn't built to process it.

So, The New York Post tried to help people understand it. And buried at the bottom of their breakdown was this:

With $1 trillion, Musk could buy approximately 2.7 million homes in the U.S.

Based on the current average home price of $370,320.

2.7 million homes. Let that land for a second.

The other comparisons are genuinely unhinged:

If you stacked one trillion $1 bills on top of each other, the pile would reach 67,866 miles high. That's more than a quarter of the way to the moon.

If you laid those same bills end to end, they'd stretch 4 million miles past the sun.

A million seconds ago was June 1, 2026.​
A billion seconds ago was October 1994.​
A trillion seconds ago was 30,000 BC, during the last ice age.

And Musk's fortune is larger than the GDP of 197 countries.

Why this matters for your clients:

The average American is so numb to big numbers that they've lost perspective on what their own home is worth.

Real estate isn't just where people live. It's the most accessible form of wealth-building available to normal humans.

Your job isn't just to sell homes. It's to help people understand what they're actually buying into.