“It’s 9:30 and they’re scrolling.” Jon Reusch is describing the consumers every listing is competing for, and the page they meet on most listing platforms: remarks, then photos. The format has barely changed in twenty years. Reusch wanted something that would make them stop.
Reusch is the operating principal of three Keller Williams franchises in Metro Detroit and an investor in a fourth. The role, he explains, “is like the chairman of the board, typically the majority owner.” His firms are number one in market share in Metro Detroit. The network has nearly a thousand agents and does about 5,000 sides and 1,500 to 2,000 listings a year.
At that volume, marketing is a question of how every listing gets told, not just the best one. Home Stories was his answer.
The listing page is twenty years old
Reusch starts from the consumer’s side of the screen. “The experience on some of the traditional platforms are now 20 years old,” he says. “It’s listing remarks with photos, usually a certain order, but not always.”
A format that has stopped changing looked to him like an opening. “I just thought it was ripe for disruption.” The test he set was specific: “I was looking for something that would disrupt or stop the scroll, if you will, around marketing listings and telling the listing story better.”
A baseline that holds at scale
What Reusch values in Home Stories is the story told around each property. “I really believe in the story that is shared around each property and it allows us to keep a baseline of marketing branding across every listing, which is very difficult to do at scale.”
Scale is the difficulty. “Firms that have 10, 15, 20 agents may be able to do that,” he says, “but when you cross a hundred agents, 200 agents, 300, to have that consistency and that marketing that truly stops the scroll, Home Stories, I think, matches that at a really high level.”
For a network of Reusch’s size, consistency is the point of the exercise. Every agent markets a different home, but the standard of presentation can stay the same whichever agent a seller chooses.
AI that still involves the agent
Reusch’s interest in AI comes with a condition. “It’s great branding and marketing with the technology of AI that allows the consumer to get information and like properties faster, and it still involves the agent.”
The consumer moves faster; the agent stays in the picture. For an operator whose business is the agents in his network, that condition matters as much as the speed.
Less chaos, then calm
Reusch evaluates technology as an owner and operator, and he is direct about the result. “It checked every box I was looking for in regard to being an owner operator, that it was just an absolute slam dunk.”
His reading of the moment is that the industry is in a cycle. “We’ve been in chaos for a minute, and then you get consolidation and then back to calm.” In his view, Home Stories does the consolidating: “It consolidates a lot of the chaos out there of how do I embrace AI? How do I get on video? How do I do done-for-you marketing at scale? It really consolidates a lot of that.”
The questions he lists are ones every brokerage leader is asking at once: how to use AI, how to get on video, how to deliver marketing for agents at scale. Reusch’s argument is that one partner can answer all three together. He expects that to put his network ahead. “I think we’ll be leading this industry in terms of that for a very long period of calm again.”
A very long period of calm again.
What this means for a brokerage
Judge marketing by the scroll.
Reusch asked one question of every option: does it stop a consumer mid-scroll? Templates that look like every other listing page do not.
Set one baseline for every listing.
Consistency is easy with 10 agents and hard with 300. A shared story format gives every agent the same starting point.
Answer the AI question once.
Offer agents a done-for-you route to AI and video, so each of them is not working out how to embrace it on their own.