The Chris List™

I just did something I've wanted to do for years.

Instead of asking 10 agents what's working in their marketing, we asked 462 of them.

Real operators. Most closed $10M+ in 2025. Many cleared $75M.

What's compounding, what's collapsing, and what's hiding in plain sight.

The full 2026 State of Real Estate Marketing report is the most honest look at agent marketing I've ever seen, and this entire Chris List is built around it.

Let's get into it...

📝 [C]ontent: The "X is dead" lie that's costing you deals

🛠 [H]ow-To: AI is handing you 7 weeks a year. Here's where it goes.

🔬 [R]esearch: Marketing isn't overhead anymore. It's the business.

🎨 [I]nspiration: The legacy brands quietly smoking the cool kids

💡 [S]wipes: 5 short-form hooks built from the data

Mark Twain read his own obituary and had to correct the record 💀

The famous line: "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."

It's the most useful sentence in marketing, and almost nobody applies it correctly.

Every industry has its death narratives.

Vinyl was dead (it now outsells CDs). Radio was dead. Email was dead in 2009, 2014, and again last year.

Here's the pattern: the "X is dead" story is almost always told by people who don't actually pay for X.

Real estate is the worst offender on the planet.

"Direct mail is dead." "Zillow is broken." "Nobody opens email."

You've probably heard all three this month.

So we checked. And the data flipped the whole narrative on its head.

Yes, 13 of the 21 channels we measured deliver zero leads to 70%+ of the agents using them. The portals and ad networks dominate that failure list.

But watch what happens when you segment by who's actually paying:

📬 Agents who consistently invest in direct mail rate their leads good-or-excellent at 7× the rate of non-payers.

🏠 Agents who actually fund Zillow rate leads good-or-excellent at 10× the rate of the free users.

The "broken" story collapses the second you separate the customers from the commentators.

The free user who dabbles, gets garbage, and declares the channel dead is the loudest voice in every Facebook group.

They're not wrong about their results. They're wrong about the channel.

The lesson: Before you adopt any "X is dead" narrative in 2026, ask one question.

Is the person telling it an actual paying customer? Or are they just narrating their own underfunded experiment?

Most channels in real estate aren't dead. They're underfunded by people who never gave them a real shot.

AI is saving the top agents 7 weeks a year ⏰

Here's a number that should stop you cold.

32% of agents now save 6+ hours every week with AI.

That's a full workday every week.

Stretch it across the year, and it's 300+ hours, which at a normal 40-hour week is nearly 7.5 weeks of work handed back to you.

Almost two months. Gone from your to-do list.

Now here's the problem the report exposed: most agents don't redeploy those hours. They just fill them with more busy work.

That's not leverage. That's augmentation with extra steps.

So the real question isn't "are you using AI?" 63% of agents already use it daily. The question is what you're using it for, and whether you're putting the saved time where AI can't go: relationships, listings, hard conversations.

When we stripped the hype off and looked at what agents actually use AI for, here's the breakdown by modality:

✍️ Text: 86% of every single AI task. Listing descriptions. Emails. Market research. Social captions.

The writing work that used to eat your week. This is the whole game right now, and it's where the saved hours come from.

Build this workflow first. Saved prompts, repeatable templates, a clear sense of which tasks belong in the system.

🎨 Visual: 13% of tasks. Image generation, listing graphics, basic video assists. Useful, growing, but still a side dish.

🎙️ Audio: 1.5% of tasks. Voice notes, transcripts, the much-hyped cloned-voice calls. Basically a rounding error.

Here's the play:

1️⃣ Nail the text workflow. Pick your 5 most repeated writing tasks. Build a Claude Project or custom GPT for each. Stop starting from scratch.

2️⃣ Redeploy, don't refill. Block the saved hours for listing appointments and sphere calls. If you fill them with more admin, you've gained nothing.

3️⃣ Start practicing image, video, and voice now. They're 14.5% of tasks today. The agents who own those workflows in 2028 are the ones quietly building them in 2026, while everyone else is still arguing about whether AI works.

The text future is already here. The image, video, and voice future belongs to whoever starts this week.

For half of real estate, marketing isn't overhead it is the business 📊

We asked 462 agents a brutal question: if your marketing stopped completely for 12 months, how much of your business would vanish?

The answers should change how you think about every dollar you spend.

46.5% said they'd lose more than a quarter of their business.

21% said they'd lose half or more.

Only 26% were confident they'd lose less than a tenth.

Here's the twist: the agents most exposed aren't the rookies. They're the veterans who spent a decade building marketing engines that now quietly produce most of their pipeline.

They have the most to lose because they actually built something.

And that 26% who'd barely notice? Don't envy them. Most of them aren't relationship wizards. They simply haven't built a marketing engine yet, so there's nothing to lose.

That's not resilience. That's a vacancy.

Now here's where it gets uncomfortable.

85% of agents say their sphere and past clients engage with their content. The audience is there. They're watching. They're liking.

But when we asked what would happen if social media disappeared tomorrow, only 19.3% said they'd take a serious hit.

Sit with that gap.

85% have an engaged audience. Only 19% have turned it into something they'd actually miss.

That gap is the entire opportunity.

Most agents are posting into the feed. They're not building anything they own outside of it.

They're renting an audience on a platform that can change the rules, throttle the reach, or vanish overnight.

The 19.3% who'd feel real pain are the ones who crossed the line from "I post sometimes" to "this is a business asset I own."

The takeaway: Your followers are not your audience. Your email list is your audience. Your followers are a lead source for the list.

If everything you've built lives on someone else's platform, you don't have a marketing engine. You have a tenant agreement.

The "boring legacy brands" are quietly smoking the cool kids 🥊

Everyone loves a disruptor story. The scrappy startup eats the dinosaur. The cool new brand makes the old one look ancient.

It's a great story. It's just frequently wrong.

Look at LEGO. A literal 90-year-old plastic-brick company that, while flashier toy brands collapsed, quietly became the most powerful toy brand on Earth by out-innovating everyone on digital, film, and community.

The "old" brand was the disruptor the whole time.

We found the exact same thing buried in our brokerage data, and it broke the lazy assumption that legacy franchises have fallen behind.

The cool-kid read says the tech-forward brokerages lead on innovation and the legacy houses are dinosaurs. The data said: not so fast.

🏛️ Berkshire Hathaway reads as the most traditional brand in the building. Yet 28% of their agents put real budget into AI search, the highest rate of any major brokerage.

And 88.5% send email monthly or more, also the highest in the dataset.

Not the loudest. The most quietly disciplined.

🏛️ Coldwell Banker, another "legacy" name, posted the highest email cadence of all eight brokerages (47.8% send weekly or more) and the top long-form video production rate (56.5%).

The supposed dinosaur is shipping more YouTube videos than the startups.

Meanwhile, the assumption that the flashy brands automatically win?

eXp has the highest daily AI usage in the entire report (84.2%) but gets out-leveraged on hours saved by independent brokerages, who had to build their own stack because nobody handed them one.

The Realtor takeaway: Stop assuming the loud, shiny option is the innovative one. And stop assuming your "boring" tools are behind.

The quiet, disciplined, unsexy stuff (consistent email, long-form video, a real AI workflow) is what's actually compounding.

LEGO didn't win by being cool. It won by being relentless at the fundamentals while everyone else chased trends.

Be the brokerage hiding in plain sight. Boring and disciplined beats flashy and inconsistent every single time.

5 short-form video hooks built straight from the data 🎯

Before the swipes, here's why I'm giving you exactly five.

It's not a random number. It's the single most important threshold in the entire report.

We cross-tabbed short-form posting cadence against whether content actually drove deals.

Watch the curve:

📉 0 posts/month: 24% say content led to deals.

📈 1–4 posts/month: 44%.

🚀 5–15 posts/month:66%.

🔥 31+ posts/month: 78%.

The big unlock isn't going from 10 to 30. It's getting from sporadic to consistent.

Five posts a month nearly triples your content-driven deals versus zero.

And if you've been at it for 4+ years, it compounds into the biggest finding in the whole report: 4+ years of creating + 5+ short-form posts a month = "a lot of deals" at 9× the rate of agents with neither habit.

Tenure builds the library. Cadence keeps you top-of-mind. Together, they're unstoppable.

So here are 5 hooks, built from this report, that you can post this week and hit your number:

1. The contrarian / local-authority hook "Most agents will never tell you this, but the homes that sell fastest in [City] aren't the ones with the biggest ad budgets. They're the ones marketed like this. 👇"

2. The myth-buster hook "'Just throw it on Zillow and it'll sell.' That's the worst advice I hear from sellers in [City]. Here's what actually gets your home sold for more."

3. The 'you're sitting on it' hook "If you've owned your home in [Neighborhood] for more than 5 years, you're probably sitting on way more equity than you think. Let me show you what that actually looks like right now."

4. The hard-truth hook "Your house could sell in a week, or sit for 60 days. The difference isn't the market. It's the first 7 days. Here's what has to happen before the sign goes in the yard."

5. The 'behind the scenes' authority hook "Here's what I do every single morning before 9am to sell homes in [City] faster. Most agents won't put in this work, and your sale pays the price."

Steal these. Tweak them in your voice. Post one every few days.

Just don't stop at four. Five is where the deals start.