The Chris List™

The most underrated listing source in real estate isn't a Zillow zip code or a viral Reel.

It's the contact list already sitting in your database.

Most agents have hundreds, sometimes thousands, of past clients and people who know, like, and trust them already.

And most of those contacts haven't heard from them in months.

That's not a database. That's a pile of listings you're letting go to someone else.

This Thursday, I'm doing a free webinar on exactly how we turn that list back into listing appointments.

The messages, the timing, the CTAs. No fluff, just the playbook we use if you hire us for help.

​Save your spot here​

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

📝 [C]ontent: A coder got a religious exemption from AI

🛠 [H]ow-To: Make every screenshot you send look pro

🔬 [R]esearch: Do words like "Charming" help or hurt listings?

🎨 [I]nspiration: The brand that won by admitting it stunk

📈 [S]tats: Why AI blog posts can't crack #1

The Pope just dropped a 42,000-word essay on AI ⛪️

Here's a sentence I didn't expect to write in 2026: a software engineer convinced her employer to let her stop using AI on the job by filing a religious exemption.

Erin Maus, a 34-year-old in North Carolina and a Unitarian Universalist, told her employer that AI clashed with her faith on environmental and ethical grounds.

She lawyered up, looped in her local minister, and in mid-May the company granted it.

Her words: "I'm writing my code and reviewing my code by hand, which seems crazy to say. Just two years ago, how else would you do it?"

The timing isn't random.

Pope Leo XIV just dropped a 42,000-word encyclical warning that AI could undermine human dignity and displace workers if left unchecked.

And people immediately started reading it as a permission slip.

So I read the actual thing. It's way more nuanced than the headlines.

The Pope builds the whole document around two biblical construction projects.

The Tower of Babel: one language, one technology, one direction, built on pride and "self-sufficiency," that "sacrifices human dignity for efficiency."

Versus Nehemiah rebuilding Jerusalem's walls, where the work gets divided among everyone and "rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones."

His actual line: the choice "is not between a 'yes' or 'no' to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem."

This is not an anti-AI rant. His real argument is sharper than "AI bad."

He rejects the "it's just a tool" defense, writing that technology "is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it."

And the thing he flags as "particularly insidious" is the idea that people have to earn their worth by being productive or efficient.

His counter: dignity is "neither acquired nor earned."

Why this matters for agents:

There's a quiet backlash brewing against AI, and your clients are part of it.

Nearly a third of workers harbor negative feelings toward AI, including anxiety and resistance. That's not a fringe. That's a third of the people sitting across from you at the closing table.

So when you talk about how you use AI, don't lead with "it makes me faster."

A lot of people hear that as "you replaced the human parts."

Lead with the opposite: AI handles the busy work so you have more time for the conversations that actually matter. The 9pm panic call. The inspection that blew up. The first-time buyer who needs reassurance.

That's the Pope's whole test, applied to your business.

Is your tech making you more human with your clients, or less?

The agents who win this moment won't hide their AI. They'll be the ones who make it obvious that a real person is still in the room.

Your screenshots are marketing. Stop using the janky built-in tool. 🖼️

Quick gut check.

How many screenshots did you take this week?

A Zestimate to text a seller. A market chart for a post. A wonky clause to send your client. A listing comp for a buyer.

Now ask: did any of them look good? Or were they raw, cluttered grabs with sensitive info still showing and a random browser tab in the corner?

Screenshots are basically a content channel now, and most agents are publishing the ugly default version.

Here's how to fix it.

On a Mac: CleanShot X​

It replaces Apple's built-in screenshot tool and quietly becomes the thing you can't live without.

It captures standard screenshots, scrolling pages, screen recordings, and GIFs, then lets you annotate, polish, and share without leaving the app.

My favorite part is small, but it changes everything: the screenshot doesn't vanish after a couple of seconds.

It parks in a little overlay and stays there until you copy it or save it.

No more frantic race to drag it into Slack, a text, or an email before it disappears. You grab it, then deal with it when you're ready.

The other features that actually matter for agents:

Blur and redaction. One click to hide a client's name, address, or loan number before you send or post it. This alone is worth it.

Scrolling capture. Grab an entire long listing page or a full market report in one image, not five stitched-together screenshots.

Backgrounds and presets. The background editor adds colors, gradients, and social-ready presets so your screenshots stay visually consistent, which is how you turn a boring data grab into something that looks branded.

Pricing: a one-time $29 license that includes a year of updates, with optional cloud features on a subscription. No subscription trap for the core tool. Plus, they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.

On a PC: try Snagit

Do this today:

Install one of these. Then redo your next "here's your home value" text with a clean, blurred, branded screenshot instead of a raw grab.

Your communication instantly looks like it came from a pro instead of someone fumbling with Print Screen.

Looking polished in the small moments is how you earn trust for the big ones.

"Stunning." "Charming." "A true gem." Turns out the fluff works. 🏡

A new study out of the University of Chicago Booth School analyzed over $2 billion in Airbnb bookings to answer a question every agent secretly wonders about: does all that flowery listing language actually do anything?

Spoiler. It does.

The researcher used AI to break down 219,335 property descriptions into individual claims, then sorted them into three buckets: objective ("3 bedrooms"), weakly subjective ("near downtown"), and straight-up puffery ("luxurious," "gorgeous," "a gem").

Here's what moved the needle:

Puffery added .65 more booked days per year. Just by calling a place "stunning" instead of nothing.

Objective facts added .52 days. Basically the same as puffery, and often less, because "3 bedrooms" is already in the search filters. Redundant info doesn't sell.

Weakly subjective claims won with 1.0 extra days. Stuff like "near the beach" or "ocean view." Partly factual, partly vibes, and not already buried in a filter.

And the sleeper stat: adding a single exclamation point added 1.0 days per year. A free punctuation mark performed as well as a factual claim.

The kicker?

The study found almost no backlash. Puffing a listing didn't tank reviews or ratings (no more than .03 standard deviations).

So the "you'll just disappoint people" fear? Not supported by the data.

Why this matters for agents:

Your MLS remarks and listing captions are doing more work than you think, and you're probably wasting them.

Stop repeating what's already in the specs. "3 bed, 2 bath, 1,800 sq ft" is in the data fields already. Saying it again adds nothing.

Lead with the "weakly subjective" stuff instead: "two blocks from the water," "morning light in the kitchen," "quiet dead-end street."

Partly factual, not in the filters, and it's the single most effective category in the study.

Then don't be afraid to puff. "Charming," "bright," "move-in ready" actually pull their weight, and buyers don't punish you for it.

And use the exclamation point. It's free, and the data says it sells!

Burger King went on TV and admitted it sucked. It's working. 🍔

Most brands would rather eat glass than admit they messed up.

Burger King did the opposite, and turned it into a comeback.

In a 90-second spot called "There's a New King, and It's You," Burger King straight-up confessed: slow service, burgers getting squished by garbage packaging, food that "fell off."

​

Then it laid out the receipts. It fired its King mascot, poured money back into its restaurants, and reworked its decades-old Whopper recipe.

This wasn't a one-off stunt. It's the front end of a $700 million turnaround plan, and U.S. same-store sales are climbing again.

The wildest part: their U.S. president, Tom Curtis, gave out a phone number so customers could call or text him directly with feedback.

He got tens of thousands of voicemails and texts. Then he voiced the apology ad himself.

That's the move. Not "we've always been great." It's "we let you down, here's exactly what we fixed, and the customer is the king now."

Why it works: in shaky times, people trust the brand willing to say the quiet part out loud.

Admitting a flaw makes every other claim more believable. Pretending you're perfect makes all of them suspect.

The real estate steal:

Our industry has a trust problem, and most agents respond by polishing the image even harder.

More 5-star screenshots. More "#1 agent" badges. It reads like a brand that's hiding something, because half the time it is.

Flip it. Own the thing buyers and sellers already suspect.

"Most agents won't tell you when your house is overpriced. I will, even if it costs me the listing."

"I've had deals fall apart. Here's what I learned and how I protect my clients from it now."

"The commission question is fair. Here's exactly what you're paying for, line by line."

A post-closing survey where you ask clients what you could've done better, then actually publish the changes you made, will out-market a hundred "Just Sold" graphics.

Burger King turned tens of thousands of complaints into their best campaign. Your last 20 transactions are sitting on the same goldmine.

The agent who says "here's where I've fallen short and here's what I fixed" sounds like the only honest person in a room full of hype.

In a low-trust industry, that's the whole game.

AI content can rank. It just can't win. 🥇

Everyone's pumping out AI blog posts right now, so here's a stat worth pinning to your monitor.

A study ran 42,000 blog posts through an AI detector and cross-referenced the results with where those pages actually ranked on Google.

The headline finding: the #1 spot is 80.5% likely to be human-written, versus just 10% for AI-generated content.

That's not a small gap. That's a canyon.

But here's the nuance most people miss.

From position 5 on down, the gap basically disappears. AI content holds its own across most of page one. That's why 72% of SEOs say AI content ranks at least as well as human-written stuff. They're not wrong. They're just benchmarking against "page one," not "the top."

The real separation only shows up at the very top of the results.

Why this matters for agents:

If your goal is to show up for "best neighborhoods in [your city]" or "is now a good time to buy in [your market]," AI-assisted content will get you on the board. Use it.

But the #1 spot, the one that actually gets the clicks, still belongs to the human who added real local knowledge, real opinions, and real experience a model can't fake.

The play: let AI do the draft and the structure. Then add the stuff only you have. The off-market deal you saw last week. The school district nobody talks about. The street that floods. That's the layer that pushes you from page one to the top of it.

AI gets you in the race. You still have to win it.