About Home Stories

Narrated cinematic films from listing photos

Agents send the photos they already have, and Home Stories color grades each image, adds people, and turns the stills into motion that looks shot on a camera rather than panned across like a slideshow. Every film carries a voiceover, read by one of Home Stories’ AI voices or by a clone of the agent’s own voice. The MLS Tour Package ($149) is a narrated tour of up to 60 seconds; the Lifestyle Marketing Package ($499) tells the same home as a 1–2 minute story about the life it makes possible.

Article pages in the Home Stories publication

Every listing gets a magazine-style article page on homestories.ai, with galleries built around what makes the home distinct, such as an outdoor kitchen, a spa bathroom, or golf course access. The page links to the agent’s brokerage site, and leads from it go directly to the agent. Lifestyle Marketing Package listings are also featured in the publication and on Home Stories’ YouTube channels.

Social clips, staging, and translation

Home Stories produces vertical clips for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts ($99 per clip). Virtual staging ($29 per image) adds furniture, people, and lifestyle moments, and it can show a home in another season. Narration can be translated into Spanish, Mandarin, and other languages for buyers abroad ($59 per language).

Lifestyle discovery for home buyers

Buyers browse the Home Stories publication by city and search its homes in plain language, by room, style, feature, or location, instead of working through a portal’s dropdowns. Behind the search, the lifestyle graph builds a map of what each buyer can’t live without, what they would like, and what would be a stretch, and carries it across every home they see.

A voice concierge for buyers, now in beta

Buyers can talk to an AI voice assistant on Home Stories property pages at any hour, asking about the home, the neighborhood, or the agent. It hands qualified leads to the listing agent, along with the buyer’s lifestyle profile, so the agent knows their priorities before the first showing.

Films of homes that don’t exist yet

For developers, the Cinematic Rendering Package (from $899) turns architectural renderings into photorealistic imagery and a film of up to two minutes, and the Land Concept Package (from $1,799) imagines a property on raw land in a film of up to three minutes. Ari Afshar of Voyage Real Estate at Compass used a concept film to market a 1960s Pacific Palisades ranch as the estate its hillside lot could hold. He calls the process “night and day” next to the rounds of drawings and notes at rendering companies, and says, “Most people who come to the open houses have thought that it was an actual done home.”

Home Stories is built for both sides of a sale. The first three differences below are for home buyers; the rest are for agents and brokerages.

Buyers search by the life they want

A listing portal asks buyers for beds, baths, a price range, and a zip code. Home Stories lets them search in their own words, by room, style, feature, or location, and its lifestyle graph learns their priorities as they go. The Lifestyle Ladder, Home Stories’ framework for seeing a buyer’s whole life, explains the gap with four bedrooms, which might really mean room for two kids and somewhere to work. A filter can’t see the difference.

Buyers see a home lived in

Listing photos and most renderings show rooms with no one in them. Home Stories adds people and small signs of life, like a table set for dinner by the pool, kayakers heading out from a lakefront dock, or steam rising from a kettle on the stove, so buyers can see themselves living there, and every film is narrated, so they’re told what they’re looking at. Chrissy Smith, President of Badger Peabody & Smith Realty, points to the kettle in one of her brokerage’s films: “That’s not something that I would have been able to do.” The illustrations below imagine the kinds of places those scenes happen: a poolside terrace, a lakefront dock, a kitchen.

Buyers can ask about a home at any hour

Most listing pages give buyers a contact form. On a Home Stories property page, a buyer can talk to the voice concierge, now in beta, at any time of day, and ask about the home, the neighborhood, or the agent.

Agents start from the photos they already have

A videographer means another schedule, another visit to the property, and one video file at the end. Home Stories works from existing listing photography and returns the film and the article page together, plus any social clips you order. Most listing packages are ready for review within one business day. Sara Roberts, VP of Digital Innovation at Slifer Smith & Frampton, says production takes a fraction of the cost and time her brokers’ video used to.

Agents get human editors and creative direction

AI handles production, and people are responsible for the finish. Every MLS Tour film gets a 30-minute human quality review, human editors review every asset in the Lifestyle Marketing Package, and the creative team brings ideas of its own; for Afshar’s listing, it designed the estate from scratch. Roberts singles out “the human in the loop,” and says of the team: “They take it a step further, are able to bring their creativity to the table.”

AI assistants can find an agent’s stories

Listing portals and the MLS describe a home in filters and data points, and a post on Instagram is largely invisible to AI assistants because there is no transcript to read. Every Home Stories film is narrated, so YouTube and AI assistants such as ChatGPT get a transcript describing the home and the place around it. Each story is also published as an editorial feature on homestories.ai, where it can be found and cited.

An agent’s listings keep working after the sale

Most listing marketing stops working the day the home closes. A Home Stories story stays published, and over time an agent’s stories add up to a body of work under their own name and their brokerage’s: proof a seller can see before the listing appointment. The Listing Story Model, published in the Home Stories library, calls this Story, Surface, Sell: every listing should win the next one.

Home Stories serves both sides of a sale: the buyers looking for a home, and the agents, brokerages, and developers who represent homes.

Home buyers

• Buyers of distinctive and luxury homes who want to feel a home’s character before comparing its specifications.
• Buyers choosing a place as much as a house, deciding which neighborhood or town fits the life they want, with city pages for Miami, Vail, Aspen, San Francisco, New England, Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle.
• Buyers early in a search, browsing for inspiration, often on their phones, before they are ready to filter listings. They can search in their own words from the start.
• Buyers abroad, who can hear a home’s story narrated in Spanish, Mandarin, and other languages when the listing agent adds translation.

Agents, brokerages, and developers

Since 2025, Home Stories has delivered more than 2,700 films for about 900 real estate agents and teams, with homes in 30 states (as of September 2026).

• Luxury listing agents who want each listing to help win the next one. Kayce Driscoll, an agent in Miami: “I recently won a $22M listing in large part because of them.”
• Brokerages that run marketing centrally for their agents, such as Badger Peabody & Smith Realty, which uses Home Stories on all of its luxury listings across central and northern New Hampshire, including the Lakes Region, western Maine, and Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.
• Brokerage marketing and innovation teams that need a creative partner able to meet an established luxury brand’s standards, such as Slifer Smith & Frampton in Colorado’s resort markets: Vail, Keystone, Breckenridge, Aspen, and Steamboat, with an office in Denver.
• Agents selling a property’s potential, where the buyer is paying for what the home could become, like Afshar’s Pacific Palisades listing.
• Development sales teams and developers who need a story before construction. Roberts says Slifer can start telling it “long before the hole is dug in the ground.”
• Keller Williams agents, who can connect KW Command and order from listings already in their account.

Founders

Gary Portney, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, is a serial entrepreneur with more than two decades of building and exiting enterprise technology companies. He started at Oracle, then as SVP of Sales at Vicinity Corporation helped take it from zero to $30 million in revenue, an IPO, and an acquisition by Microsoft. He went on to co-found Ventaso (acquired by Siebel Systems) and to found KonaWare (acquired by Trimble Navigation), Convoke Systems (a $75 million private equity exit), and Adtoniq. Before Home Stories had a product, he spent months talking with industry experts, visiting open houses, and showing prototypes to agents; today he leads enterprise sales, investor relations, and partnerships. LinkedIn

Shawn McGaff, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, leads product, AI architecture, and engineering at Home Stories. His work in AI began nearly 20 years ago at a startup where he built a graph neural network for follower recommendations on Twitter and content recommendations across social platforms. He then spent more than a decade building OblongPixel, a B2B revenue growth agency that served more than 800 customers, from local businesses to Oracle and Amazon Web Services, including realtors, brokerages, and hospitality brands such as Hyatt, Hilton, and Marriott. For the last seven years he has been a fractional CMO and executive for B2B AI startups, and in Seattle he co-directed Startup Grind and has produced video for CreativeMornings for more than eight years. “When wielded correctly, AI allows us to produce marketing stories that look hand-crafted, not generated.” LinkedIn

Leadership

Brian Harmon, Creative Director, is a filmmaker trained in cinematography and film production at Biola University, with a theater background from Western Washington University. Shawn first hired him at OblongPixel for its video production work, and Brian later founded Snohomish Film Company, a video production agency, with his wife. At Home Stories he runs the creative team and sets the standard for what the AI produces: work that could pass for hand-crafted production. LinkedIn

Randy White, Director of Marketing Operations, has spent more than two decades in product, content, brand, and growth marketing. He spent 18 years at the Los Angeles Times across advertising systems, marketing management, and category revenue, and at Internet Brands he led marketing for ApartmentRatings.com, making it the multifamily industry’s second-ranked ratings and reviews site, behind only Google. At Home Stories he runs the publication, its more than 25 hyper-local YouTube channels, and social and distribution strategy. LinkedIn

Advisors

Sara Roberts, VP of Digital Innovation at Slifer Smith & Frampton, has spent more than 21 years at the firm, the first real estate company in Vail, rising from graphic designer to Director of Online Media, Vice President of Marketing, and her current role. Slifer is a founding member of the Forbes Luxury Council, and Sara advises Home Stories on how independent luxury brokerages work.

Jon Reusch, Operating Principal of three Keller Williams franchises in Metro Detroit and an investor in a fourth, is a Keller Williams Approved Trainer. His firms have nearly 1,000 agents and the number one market share in Metro Detroit. He came to real estate from higher education and leadership development, led nearly 400 agents as a KW Team Leader, and coached with KW MAPS before buying his own market center. He advises Home Stories on how agents think, how brokerages run, and how to work within a franchise.

Ari Afshar, a founding agent at Compass in Los Angeles and founder and CEO of Voyage Real Estate, has been involved in hundreds of millions of dollars in luxury transactions and works across California, New York, and Miami. Voyage was an Inc. 5000 company four years running, from 2019 to 2022. Ari is a member of the Forbes Real Estate Council, co-founded the restaurant discovery platform TableCard, and is an Ambassador at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. He advises Home Stories on how affluent buyers think about luxury.

Why we built Home Stories

Most agents already knew a listing deserved a story. Telling one for every listing took a videographer, a writer, an editor, and someone who understood how discovery works, so most agents didn’t do it, even in luxury. The idea for Home Stories came from Brian’s video production clients: real estate agents kept asking him for AI-powered property storytelling, and when he took the concept to them, the response was immediate. Gary and Shawn founded Home Stories in 2025 to remove the production barrier: the agent brings the photos they already have, and Home Stories handles the rest.

The team

Home Stories is headquartered in San Francisco and has about 15 people. Its human video editors, who review every film before delivery, and its client services team work from Latin America. Shawn and Brian are based in Washington State, Randy runs marketing operations, and a few more people cover business development and operations.

Getting started

Agents create an account, choose a package, and upload the listing photos and property details they already have. Keller Williams agents who connect KW Command from their Properties page skip the upload, because their listings and photos flow in automatically.

Production

Home Stories writes the script, color grades and enhances the photos, adds people and motion, and narrates the film. A human editor reviews the result before delivery. Brokerage marketing teams can bring their own briefs, and the creative team adds ideas of its own.

Review and revisions

Each video has a review room in the Home Stories dashboard, where the agent leaves notes on the film and photos and messages the team. Listing packages include one round of revisions for tone, emphasis, and details, and developer packages include two; additional rounds may be billed.

Distribution

Home Stories publishes the story in its own publication and, for Lifestyle Marketing Package listings, on its YouTube channels. The agent gets the film, the clips, and an embed link for their MLS video tour, Instagram, email blast, brokerage site, and their own YouTube channel.

Turnaround

For most listing packages, the first draft is ready for your review within one business day. For orders placed through Command, that day is counted from payment. Developer packages are ordered through sales.

Communication

Email hello@homestories.ai or use the contact form, and the team replies within 24 hours. Once an order is in, notes and messages go through that video’s review room.

Who founded Home Stories?

Gary Portney, the CEO, and Shawn McGaff, the Chief Product Officer, founded Home Stories in 2025. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, and Shawn, who has been building AI systems for nearly 20 years, runs engineering.

How does Home Stories help home buyers?

Home Stories helps buyers search by the life they want instead of by data filters. They can browse homes by city, search in their own words by room, style, feature, or location, and talk to the voice concierge, now in beta, while the lifestyle graph maps what they can’t live without across every home they see.

How is Home Stories different from hiring a videographer?

A videographer gives you one video file. Home Stories starts from the photos you already have and delivers a narrated film and an article page, plus optional social clips, with publication on homestories.ai and, in the Lifestyle Marketing Package, on YouTube, for less than traditional videography costs.

How much does Home Stories cost?

The MLS Tour Package costs $149 per listing for a narrated video of up to 60 seconds, an article page, and a human quality review. The Lifestyle Marketing Package costs $499 per listing and adds a 1–2 minute storytelling film, enhanced photos, three virtually staged images, and a feature in the publication and on YouTube.

How long does it take?

For most listing packages, the first draft is ready within one business day of upload, and you review it in your Home Stories dashboard.

Is Home Stories made with AI?

Yes. AI produces the motion, the added people, the photo enhancement, and the narration from your photos, and human editors review every package before delivery.

Can the narration be in my own voice?

Yes. Home Stories can clone your voice for the narration, or you can choose one of its AI voices.

What does “published in Home Stories” mean?

Your listing becomes a feature on homestories.ai, a luxury publication organized around lifestyle discovery, with hyper-local YouTube channels. The article page links back to your website, so the search credibility passes to you, and any leads it generates go directly to you.

Why does narration matter for AI search?

AI assistants and YouTube search read transcripts, and a film with no voiceover has none. Every Home Stories film is narrated, so the systems buyers ask about homes and neighborhoods have words to understand and cite.

Does Home Stories interview homeowners?

No. A magazine or newspaper home feature usually means an interview with the owners. Home Stories tells the property’s story without interviewing homeowners or exposing personal details, and you control what information is shared.

Does Home Stories work with Keller Williams?

Yes. The KW Command integration is generally available: Keller Williams agents can connect Command from their Home Stories Properties page, which brings in their listings and photos so they can order without uploading anything.

Can Home Stories market a home that hasn’t been built?

Yes. The Cinematic Rendering Package turns architectural renderings into a photorealistic film, and the Land Concept Package imagines a property on raw land from site photos and reference images.