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Real quick before you dig in.
Tomorrow I'm at the BAM BBQ.
It's Byron and The Broke Agent's Q3 flagship event, and this year the whole afternoon is about one thing: the AI playbook for real estate agents.
How to use it for client conversations. How to use it for content. How to use it for the systems running your business.
I'm giving a session called "How to Create Viral Content Efficiently."
No fluff, no theory, just the exact workflow I'd hand you if we were sitting across the table.
Save your spot here 👉
Now, let's get into The Chris List...
📝 [C]ontent: A woman spent $4,750 to find a husband
🛠 [H]ow-To: The prompt every listing agent should have saved
🔬 [R]esearch: The referral is no longer the last step
🎨 [I]nspiration: Southwest made fun of Southwest and it worked
📈 [S]tats: Ready-to-send for the 27% discount nobody's advertising
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She spent $4,750 on billboards to find a husband. It worked. 💍
Meet Lisa Catalano. 42, Californian, tired of dating apps.
So she did what any perfectly normal person would do: plastered her face on billboards up and down Highway 101 with the URL MarryLisa.com and asked strangers to apply to date her.
The site had her photo, her non-negotiables (college-educated, no criminal record, aligned politics), and a stated goal: marriage and kids in 2-3 years.
Total spend? $4,750. Billboards, taxi ads, the website, plus wardrobe, makeup, and a photo shoot.
The results (per People):
4,000 dating applications between September 2025 and May 2026.
3,200 "genuine" ones.
Feature coverage on KTVU and the San Francisco Chronicle.
And this week she announced she found her guy. 35, Bay Area, checks every non-negotiable box.
Here's the twist that matters. She didn't meet him through the billboard. She matched with him on a dating app in January.
He had seen the billboard. He just never filled out the application.
Why this matters for agents:
Every marketer's dirty secret: the channel that gets credit is almost never the channel that did the work.
Lisa's boyfriend didn't apply on MarryLisa.com. But he knew exactly who she was when her profile popped up on the app, because a 14-foot photo of her face had been staring at him from I-101 for months.
The billboard did the branding. The app closed the deal.
Your business runs the same way. The client who "found you on Zillow" already saw your yard sign in their neighbor's yard, your name in their inbox, and your open house post three times.
Two lessons hiding in this billboard:
1. Weird works. She got national press because she did something absurd. Your ninth "Just Listed" carousel this month won't. What's your Marry Lisa moment?
2. Stop killing marketing that "isn't converting." The touch that closes rarely gets the credit. If you're about to cut a channel because you can't tie it to a closing, ask Lisa's boyfriend how he knew her name.
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The $2B ChatGPT prompt for listing descriptions ✍️
Remember the University of Chicago Booth study I broke down a few weeks back?
The one that analyzed $2 billion in Airbnb bookings and figured out exactly which words move the needle?
Quick refresher on what won:
Weakly subjective language (partly factual sensory stuff like "two blocks from the water") added 1.0 extra booked days a year.
Puffery ("charming," "stunning") added .65 days.
Straight facts already in the data fields? .52 days. Basically, the least effective.
A single exclamation point added 1.0 days. Free. Punctuation.
So here's the wild part. Every agent I know is using ChatGPT to write listing descriptions. Almost none of them are prompting it with the actual research on what sells.
They're pasting "write a listing description for a 3/2 in Winter Park" and taking whatever comes back.
That's leaving money on the table when the playbook exists.
Here's the prompt. Copy it, tweak the market details, use it forever:
You are rewriting an MLS listing description. Remove any claim already covered in the data fields (bed count, bath count, sq ft, lot size, year built). Rewrite in 4 short paragraphs using this ratio: 60% weakly subjective claims (partly factual sensory details like "morning light in the kitchen," "quiet dead-end street," "two blocks from the water"), 30% puffery ("charming," "move-in ready," "a rare find"), 10% hard facts only if they're unusual and NOT in the data fields. Include exactly 2 exclamation points. Max 180 words. Here's the listing details page: [PASTE] That's it. The whole thing.
Do this today:
1. Save it as a Custom GPT in ChatGPT (Explore GPTs → Create → paste the prompt as the instructions). Now it's a one-click tool every time you take a listing.
2. Or save it as a Claude Project if you're on Claude. Same idea. New listing? New chat. Paste the raw copy. Done in 20 seconds.
3. Feed it your last five listings and compare the output to what you actually wrote. If your version has "3 bed 2 bath 1,800 sq ft" in the first sentence, the AI just beat you.
The average agent uses AI to sound like a nicer version of the MLS. You're going to use it to sound like a researcher who knows exactly which words sell homes.
Every listing description you write from here on out is backed by $2 billion in booking data.
The competition is still writing "Welcome home..."
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Reviews now beat referrals. Yes, really. 📱
For 30 years, the entire real estate playbook has rested on one sentence: "my best clients come from referrals."
New data says your clients may not agree.
A BrightLocal consumer survey of 4,800 adults across the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia found that 62% of consumers now trust online reviews more than personal recommendations from friends and family.
Read that twice. Strangers on Google outweighing your client's actual brother-in-law.
The rest of the numbers back it up:
78% of consumers read at least 7 reviews before making a purchase decision. Not one. Not three. Seven.
Listings with verified purchase badges see 38% higher conversion than listings without them. The badge signals real, not paid.
And it's not just retail. This behavior is bleeding into every high-stakes purchase category, and few purchases are higher stakes than the biggest transaction of someone's life.
Why this matters for agents:
The referral will still send you the lead. But the reviews close the deal.
Here's what actually happens now.
Your client's cousin says "you have to call Jenny." That's step one. Step two, before they ever text you, is Googling your name and reading every review they can find.
If you have 12 reviews from 2022 and nothing since, that referral just cooled by half.
Three moves for this week:
1. Audit your review footprint today. Google. Zillow. Realtor.com. Facebook. Count them, and count the dates. Anything older than 12 months is decaying trust.
2. Ask every past client from the last 90 days. Not "if you have time." A direct ask, with the link, from your phone, right now. The ones who don't respond aren't mad. They forgot.
3. Respond to every review, especially the mid ones. A thoughtful reply to a 3-star review does more for a stranger reading it than another 5-star ever will. It shows you're a human, not a bot with a headshot.
Your referrals aren't broken. Your reviews are just doing the closing now.
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Southwest just made an ad about how bad Southwest used to be. 🛬
Southwest officially ended open seating on January 27, 2026, after 54 years of the greatest boarding gauntlet in aviation history.
And they're marketing the switch in the smartest way possible: by making fun of themselves.
The new ad (watch it here) is a fever dream.
A family sprinting through the terminal because Dad checked in a minute late. "Group C." Screaming. A middle seat panic attack. A guy trying to fake-save a row. Some poor woman yelling "I am not sitting in a middle seat" at a stranger.
Then it cuts to the calm. Assigned seats. Everyone chill. Problem solved.
Notice what they did NOT do. They didn't say "we now offer assigned seating." They didn't run a spec sheet of the new fare tiers. They didn't announce it.
They performed the pain of the old way, then let the new way sell itself.
That's the whole play. Show the chaos. The new thing looks like a gift.
Why this matters for agents:
Every buyer under 40 thinks real estate has always worked like this. Open the app. Swipe on listings. Book the tour on their phone. Sign the offer from bed. Wire the money in the morning.
They have zero idea what "this" replaced.
And you're missing the exact same play Southwest just made. The old way was insane.
You couldn't see what was for sale unless you drove to the office. Your agent handed you a three-inch binder with new listings faxed in weekly.
No lockbox app. Just a key on a hook and a 72-hour heads-up if you wanted to see the inside.
Loan docs got physically delivered. Or faxed. Three pages a minute while the machine screamed.
Steal Southwest's move for your next few posts:
✅ "Group C" energy Reel. Split screen: your buyer swiping listings on the couch vs. their parents driving to three brokerage offices on a Saturday to flip through the book.
✅ The fax bit. Prop comedy is undefeated. Pull an old fax machine, feed a purchase agreement through it, wait for the beeps. Cut to a DocuSign hitting their phone in 4 seconds.
✅ The "you have no idea" post. "Your parents saw 20 houses total before buying one. My buyers see 20 before breakfast on Saturday. Here's why that changes your offer strategy."
You don't have to yell about how good you are.
Show how bad it used to be and let the contrast do all the talking.
Southwest made an ad about their own worst feature. Sold the fix without ever pitching it.
Your turn.
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Foreclosures are back at 2019 levels. Here's the copy to work it. 🏚️
The numbers first, because they matter (The Washington Informer):
National foreclosure start rate: 0.24%. Seven-year high. Basically back to where we were pre-pandemic.
REOs are 1.3% of active listings. Small slice, but the behavior is loud.
The median REO sells at a 27.2% discount to its estimated value. That's not a typo.
REO listings pull 26.5% more page views than typical listings. And they sit 11 days longer on the market.
In Lake Charles, LA and Tuscaloosa, AL, foreclosures are over 7% of active listings.
If you're in a South or Midwest market, this isn't a headline. It's your Tuesday.
Translation: buyers are hunting for deals, distressed inventory is climbing, and most agents in these markets aren't talking about it.
Here's the copy that does.
🔪 Text to your buyer database:
Random one for you. Foreclosed home listings just hit a 7-year high, and they're selling ~27% under estimated value on average. Not for everyone, but if "get a deal, do some work" sounds like you, I'll build you a list of the live ones this week. Yes or no? 📣 Instagram/Facebook post:
The market you keep hearing about isn't the only market.
Foreclosure listings are back at 2019 levels.
The average one sells for 27% under estimated value.
They get 26% more views than normal listings.
And they sit 11 days longer, which is where the deal lives.
If "distressed" scares you off, cool. If it doesn't, we should talk.
📧 Email subject line for a sphere blast:
The 27% listing discount nobody's advertising 🤝 Script for the distressed homeowner conversation (the one most agents fumble):
"Before you do anything else, I want you to know two things. One, you have more options than you think. Two, I'm not here to list your house today. In DC, 70% of homeowners who go through the mediation program keep their home. Let me walk you through what that looks like, and if selling is the right call after, we'll figure that out together." 🎯 Neighborhood farming angle:
Pull the foreclosure filings in your ZIP. Not to prospect the owners (please don't be that agent). To know your inventory before Zillow does. When a buyer asks "what's out there under $X," you're the one with the list. The agents who win the next 12 months in these markets won't be the ones posting "great time to buy!"
They'll be the ones who can talk about REOs without flinching, and who know the difference between an opportunity for a buyer and a lifeline for a seller.
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Thanks for reading the entire list 😁
One more nudge before you go.
Tomorrow at noon ET, I'm sharing my exact viral content workflow at the BAM BBQ.
Free. Virtual. Two and a half hours that will change how you show up online for the rest of the year.
If you've been stuck posting "Just Listed" while scrolling past everyone who's actually growing, this is the one.
Grab your seat before it fills 👉
See you there,
Chris Smith
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