At Badger Peabody & Smith Realty, agents have a marketing team behind them. Chrissy Smith, the firm’s president, oversees the work for all of its agents, giving sellers a consistent experience regardless of who represents them.
That responsibility covers homes across central and northern New Hampshire, including the Lakes Region, as well as western Maine and Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Smith looks for ways to present those properties well while giving agents more time with clients. Home Stories became part of that work after a test on one agent’s own home.
A film sellers asked for
Smith started with a single property. “The video came out great,” she says. Within a week, another seller asked their agent for the same treatment: “I want one of those videos. How come I don’t have one?”
The request showed Smith that sellers were noticing the films. Her response was to make more of them. “These are so good, we’re just going to keep going,” she recalls thinking.
Home Stories gave the brokerage a way to develop a property’s photographs into a film, adding movement and scenes of people enjoying the home. For a brokerage serving lakefront and mountain communities, those scenes could help buyers picture the setting as well as the house.
Keep agents focused on selling
For Smith, marketing is a service the firm takes responsibility for. Sellers should receive the same marketing experience whichever agent they list with. “Our philosophy is that our client comes first,” she says.
Handling that work centrally also takes production tasks off the agent’s list. Smith describes the demands that can follow a new listing: deciding how to market it, creating social media content and making a video. Each is work that competes with appointments and showings.
“We’re freeing up our agents to show, list, and sell property.”
Home Stories supports the marketing Smith’s team provides. Agents can spend their time representing the property, with the brokerage taking care of how it is presented.
Small details make a home feel lived in
The effect Smith singles out is steam rising from a kettle on the stove. “What a nice effect. That’s not something that I would have been able to do.”
A lit stove and a steaming kettle give the kitchen a sense of use. Smith values that kind of detail, along with the ability to enhance photographs and add people to a property film.
Her firm has produced videos with real people before, including kayakers at a lakefront property. She sees a similar purpose in the scenes Home Stories creates: help buyers imagine spending time there. The case-study film’s AI visualizations show a couple on a porch with a dog beside them, then kayakers passing a wooded shoreline.
“It can be just little subtle things like that that make a big difference.”
By the time of the interview, Smith had expanded the work across the firm’s luxury listings. “We’re doing this on all of our luxury properties,” she says. Home Stories had become part of the marketing her agents could bring to a seller, backed by a film that showed what the service could do.
What this means for a brokerage
Let a listing lead the trial.
Start with a property your team knows. Smith’s first film gave her something concrete to assess and other sellers something to ask for.
Support the agent’s work.
Make property marketing a service the brokerage provides, so agents can devote more attention to clients and showings.
Give the setting a role.
Use people and movement to show how a home might be enjoyed, from a kitchen in use to kayaks on the lake.