Luxury agents say story is their weakest step
Luxury agents sell some of the most storied homes in the country. So it was striking to watch a ballroom full of them stand up and admit that story is the part of their marketing that needs the most work.
It happened at Keller Williams Luxury Symposium 2026 in Chicago, during a fireside chat between our co-founder Shawn McGaff and KW Luxury’s Brady Sandahl. A slide with three words went up: Story, Surface, Sell. Sandahl asked every agent to stand for the one they most needed to improve. Story drew the largest group.
McGaff wasn’t surprised. “The infrastructure of this industry does not encourage storytelling,” he says. For twenty years the systems agents work in have asked for bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, and lot size, and for most of that time a great set of photos and an accurate spec sheet were enough to do the job.
They aren’t enough anymore. By the National Association of Realtors figures McGaff cited on stage, about 60 percent of home searches now begin with a question to a chatbot. The buyer asks about a life, and the assistant answers from whatever it can read. A spec sheet gives it very little to work with.
A listing without a story now goes unseen twice: once by the buyer, and once by the AI the buyer asked first.
In this article, we unpack the playbook McGaff laid out in that conversation. It covers why AI has changed who listing marketing is for, the two frameworks we use to find a home’s story and put it to work, and the five production steps that turn photos an agent has already paid for into a narrated film. Throughout, Sandahl adds the view of a working agent who runs his own team, including where he sees agents get this wrong.
Key takeaways
- AI now reads listing marketing before buyers do. Assistants such as ChatGPT answer home search questions from what agents have published.
- Buyers search for a lifestyle, and portals only filter data. A life can only be described in a story, written or spoken.
- The Listing Story Model has three steps. Story: show the life a home makes possible. Surface: publish where people and AI look. Sell: bring those stories to your next listing presentation.
- The Lifestyle Ladder finds the story in four rungs. The Home, the Place, the Life, and the Lifestyle Map. Most agents rush the first one.
- AI reads transcripts, not footage. A narrated film can be found. A tour set only to music cannot.
- Listing photos can become a narrated film in five steps. Choose, stage, storyboard, animate, narrate.
Write for two audiences: the buyer and the AI they ask first
Start with what hasn’t changed. “The fundamentals of storytelling are holding true,” McGaff says. People have been passing stories around a fire for as long as there have been people, and a hook and an arc still do the work they always did. “What’s changing is how you create it, how you produce it, and where you distribute it.”
Distribution is the first shift, and it favors the individual agent. “We’re in this golden age of distribution,” he says. “For a long time, distribution was all locked up in a couple of central powers. But now every single one of you has the ability to create a piece of compelling content that has a good hook, a good story arc, distribute it, and reach potentially millions of people.”
The second shift is the one most agents haven’t planned for.
“People are not the only ones paying attention to your stories anymore. Now AI is paying attention to your stories.”
“That’s becoming an intermediary between you and the people that you’re trying to get listing contracts from, trying to sell the homes to,” McGaff says. “That AI is actually interpreting your stories and personalizing it for the users on the other end.”
If that sounds like a problem for a few years from now, consider how fast it arrived. “Three years ago, nobody knew what this was except a bunch of AI nerds like me,” he says. “Now, over half of home searches are using it. What is it going to look like next year?”
Sandahl frames the same change from the agent’s chair. Not long ago, he points out, you told your story at the table you were sitting at, to the people in the room.
“You no longer have the same type of table or the same type of room where this story is being told. It’s a completely different world.”
Why lifestyle is the one thing a spec sheet can’t supply
At the luxury level, the product was never the building. “You’re selling what is the life that this person can live here,” McGaff says. “And when you think about it that way, you’re going to have better connections with the home buyers, because that’s how they’re thinking about it already.”
Buyers have always wanted to search that way. The tools wouldn’t let them. “We have amazing portals that are showing all these statistics, but there’s no filter on the portals for ‘I want this lifestyle,’” he says. “I want to be a car collector and I want my kids to have a great backyard. There’s not a drop-down filter for that. It’s not a piece of data. It’s a story about a life that that person wants to live.”
A chatbot will take that question as asked. New parents ask which neighborhood fits the life they’re about to lead, often in a city where they already live. “They’re asking ChatGPT that,” McGaff says. “ChatGPT reads through the YouTube scripts. It reads through the articles that you put. And it synthesizes that into an answer.”
Which sources it reads is a moving target. “Three months ago, LinkedIn wasn’t cited at all. It was invisible to ChatGPT. Now it’s in the top five most cited sources,” he says. “And YouTube is in the top three for all of them.”
For an agent, that adds up to three working rules:
- Describe the life, not only the property. The question buyers ask is about how they want to live, so the answer has to be too.
- Put it in words. An assistant can only use what it can read.
- Publish in more than one place. The sources AI trusts change by the month, so no single platform is a safe bet.
Treat every listing as the pitch for your next one
The framework we use to act on those rules is the Listing Story Model. It has three steps, and McGaff is quick to say it isn’t tied to our product: “This is a framework that you should be thinking about, whether you use us or not. This is where the industry is going.”
Story: show the life a home makes possible.
“First you have to figure out what the story of the property is,” McGaff says. “What is special about it? What is the lifestyle it leads?”
Surface: publish where people and AI look.
“If nobody sees or hears your story, did it even happen? Does it exist? You’ve got to put it where both AI and people see it.”
Sell: bring the stories to your next presentation.
“Bring that body of work, that library of stories, to your next listing appointment to show people this is what you represent. This is the lifestyles that you sell.”
Find your weakest step first
The model doubles as a diagnostic, and it takes about a minute. Ask yourself which of the three you most need to work on:
- Story, if your marketing for one home could describe any home.
- Surface, if the work is good but few people, and no AI, ever encounter it.
- Sell, if you have strong past work that never shows up in a listing appointment.
If your answer is Story, you’re in the same position as most of that Symposium ballroom. The other obstacle agents named when Sandahl asked what holds them back was time. The rest of this playbook takes those in order: how to find the story, then how to produce it without giving up days.
Slow down on the bottom rung
To find a listing’s story on purpose, we use the Lifestyle Ladder. It has four rungs: the Home, the Place, the Life, and the Lifestyle Map. Each one takes in more than the rung below it.
Start with the home, and stay longer than feels natural
“We start at the bottom of the ladder, and we think about the home,” McGaff says. “We think about what is special about that.” This rung is the spaces and the daily moments they hold, and it is where the specific, filmable details come from.
It is also the rung Sandahl sees agents skip. He has been pushing his own team’s property stylist to spend more time with the listing agent on exactly this, and he had a pointed message for the fastest-moving agents in the room, who he says are “very quick to race from one to four.” The home’s spaces and daily moments, he told them, are “not something we should race through. And that’s a behavior you may have to change.”
“If we miss number one, we’re going to potentially miss the market that can buy the home.”
Then zoom out to the place
The second rung is the neighborhood and the routines around the home. The trap here is listing amenities. “It’s not that, oh, cool, there’s a café on the corner,” McGaff says. “What’s the story of that café? What does that enable? Oh, they can walk there every Saturday morning, and they can have their coffee. And think of it visually. What is that life? Because that’s what you’re going to be painting a picture about.”
Put the first two rungs together and you reach the third. In McGaff’s words, it’s “thinking about the home and the place as a cohesive unit to enable a story of a life.”
Interview the seller, even the private ones
Nobody knows the life of a home better than the person who has been living it, and in our experience sellers are far more willing to talk than their agents expect.
“We’ve actually talked to a few where the realtor told us, ‘Oh, they’re very private. We’re not sure they’re actually going to like this, but they’re willing to talk with you,’” McGaff says. “And then they light up. They get excited because they just spent the last five years, ten years, longer living in that home. They know what the life of that home is. Maybe they don’t want to let all the details of their life out, but they do want to share what the place could be.”
Map the home the way you’d map a buyer
The top rung is the Lifestyle Map. “This is not rocket science,” McGaff says. “It’s what are the non-negotiables? What are the wants? What are the reaches, the stretch goals? And how much of the life I want can I afford?”
Every buyer carries the same three rings. Budget decides how far into them they can reach.
Most agents already do this for buyers, whether or not they’ve ever drawn it. “They just had their first kid,” McGaff offers as an example. “They’ve got to have room to grow. They’ve got to be in a good school district. These are the non-negotiables.” The conversation moves outward from there.
Run the same map on the listing
The less familiar move is to point the map at the home instead of the person.
“You can take this home, and you can think about what kind of non-negotiables would this home meet,” McGaff says. “What are the downsides to the home where it wouldn’t matter to a person that that’s a downside? What kind of life would somebody need to lead where this home would actually be perfect, regardless of the downsides?”
Answer those and you know who the story is for. From there, he says, “you’re just matching the home’s lifestyle map with the right person, the audience.”
The common mistake: putting everything in the center
“Everybody tends to put everything into the non-negotiables,” McGaff says. “Everybody wants everything. But very few people have the budget to have everything. There’s trade-offs. Even with $100 million homes, there’s trade-offs. Maybe they would have preferred the other side of the hill. So the hard part is actually sussing out the true non-negotiables.”
The only way to find them is to ask, which is where Sandahl puts his emphasis. He credits the strongest agents he knows with being great interviewers first, the kind who know exactly why a client is buying on one island and not the next one over.
“I strongly, with a lot of grace, recommend that you focus more on their non-negotiables than you communicating your sales pitch.”
A simple way to practice, borrowed from the exercise Sandahl ran at the Symposium: write down the one question you ask that most reliably gets a client to reveal a true non-negotiable, then trade it with a colleague.
Turn the photos you already paid for into a film
Knowing the story doesn’t help if you never have time to tell it. Sandahl put the objection on the table for his top producers: I don’t have time for this, and I don’t want to learn how.
McGaff’s answer begins with an asset every luxury listing already has. “I’m sure all of you invest in photography in your luxury properties,” he says. “So you all have these amazing assets that are just ripe for usage.” With current AI tools, those photos can become a narrated film in five steps. We do all five for the agents we work with, and the steps are the same if you’d rather do it yourself with other tools.
Choose the photos that carry the life.
Go through the full set and pick the highlights. “It’s facing sunrise, so imagine coffee in the morning on this deck,” McGaff says. “This kitchen is awesome. Oh, and it’s got a movie theater. These are the key highlights.”
Stage those moments, with people in them.
“You can now add people into these images. You can show people living the life that we established would be amazing and enabled by this property.” A few extra photos taken on the way out of the neighborhood are enough to tell the café’s story as well. His caution: follow the guidelines and regulations that apply, and don’t show only families.
Storyboard for attention.
Decide the arc before generating anything. Starting outside and moving in is the classic sequence. Space the highlight moments through it, because, as McGaff notes, “every single social platform is optimizing for video right now. Even LinkedIn.” They all measure how engaged viewers stay.
Turn each photo into a clip.
Video models differ. “Some of them are really good at animating humans. Some are better at fast camera movements.” Match the model to the shot. The bar is footage that looks filmed, not “the Ken Burns slideshow with the crossfade dissolving and the music.”
Narrate it.
An AI voice can read the script, including a clone of your own. As Sandahl points out, that removes two common objections at once: agents who don’t like their voice, and agents who don’t want to be on camera. And some properties, McGaff says, simply call for “a cowboy voice or a British accent.”
One finishing step matters more than it sounds. Listing photos are usually shot bright and a little clinical so every detail shows. “When you’re telling stories, you want that more editorial approach,” McGaff says. We regrade every image so the film feels like “Architectural Digest is covering your property.”
What the result sounds like
The film McGaff showed at the Symposium was for 4945 Saxton Hollow Road in Colorado Springs. Its narration never gives a bedroom count. It describes a day: the sound of the stream and coffee on the covered deck, the kitchen becoming the center of the house as dinner comes together, friends around the wood-fired pizza oven, a movie downstairs once the evening winds down. Living there, it says, “feels like having your own private Colorado retreat hidden among the pines.”
Done alone, McGaff estimates, a film like that would take an agent days. That gap is the reason we built the process into a service.
Say the story out loud, then put it everywhere
Narration does more than carry the film. It is the part AI can read. “They’re looking at YouTube videos, they’re not actually looking at it for the most part,” McGaff says of the assistants. “They’re actually reading the transcripts. They’re reading the story. That’s what they’re searching through.”
“A tour video that’s just music that you post on Instagram is basically invisible to AI.”
Sandahl made a point of repeating it for the room: “AI is looking at the script in the video. That is something different today that did not apply years ago.”
One format isn’t enough either. “You need video, and you need voice, and you need written content,” McGaff says. “So now you need an article about it. You need to write a blog post about it. Now you can take clips from it, and suddenly you’ve got social content for the next couple of weeks.” The whole thing, he adds, becomes “this content engine that just kind of runs itself, all starting from you establishing a story and investing in photos.”
In practice, one finished story should end up in at least these places:
- Your own YouTube channel, with the narrated film. McGaff calls this out specifically as part of how AI comes to recognize an agent’s name.
- A written page, an article or blog post built from the script.
- Short clips on Instagram, LinkedIn, and anywhere else you already have an audience.
Bring the library to the listing appointment
The third step of the model pays off with repetition. “As you have ten, twenty properties that you’ve done this process through, you now start being able to pull from that library,” McGaff says. “And that’s going in your listing pitch. ‘Oh, yes, you love snowboarding. Well, did you check out this house that I sold?’”
The library also makes the pitch itself easier to build. Give an assistant like ChatGPT or Claude that body of work, he says, and it can do half the job of tailoring a presentation to the seller in front of you. “It actually becomes an asset that makes you more effective, and with less work, as you build up that library.”
Check whether AI knows your name
The same library decides whether an assistant recommends you. By the NAR figures McGaff cited, fewer than 10 percent of realtors come up in ChatGPT at all, and the ones who do aren’t necessarily the biggest producers.
“It’s not a reflection on your performance. It’s not about your volume. It’s who happens to have the right content in the right place right now.”
You can find out where you stand in a few minutes. Our free AI visibility report needs no account. Enter your name and website and it emails back whether the assistants find you, which agents in your market come up most often, and which YouTube videos are being cited there.
When to hand the production off
Not every agent should be doing this work personally, and Sandahl is candid about where he stands. “I recognize my greatest strength in production is to find business and convert business,” he says. “It’s not for me to try to do this.”
For agents who feel the same way, this is what working with us looks like:
- You send photos and listing remarks. Keller Williams agents can connect Command, so listing data flows in and ordering takes a click.
- A draft arrives the next business day. You comment directly on the video, and our human support team makes the edits.
- You get the full set. That means the film and an article page with a gallery, and any leads from the page go straight to you.
- We publish it and so do you. The film goes to one of our roughly 30 hyper-local YouTube channels, and you receive every asset for your own. All of it is structured for AI to crawl, with your name on it.
Two newer products extend the same idea. Every property page now has a conversational voice agent, in public beta, that answers a buyer’s questions and pulls up clips from the film as it talks. And Editorial Agent Pages tell the agent’s own story with an interview film, an article, and all of their properties in one place; Robin I. Smith’s page is one of the first. For a fuller picture, see Jon Reusch’s case study.
Start with your next listing
Sandahl’s case for doing this now comes down to how clients choose. Sellers are making decisions faster than they used to, and people who have never worked with you are choosing on lifestyle. Past business, he warns, is less settled than it feels.
“Your clients, even your most loyal clients, are revalidating the decision to work with you.”
None of this requires a new strategy for your whole business. It requires one listing done differently:
- Sit with the seller before you write a word, and ask what a day in the house is like.
- Decide who the home is perfect for, downsides included.
- Tell that story in words an assistant can read and pictures a buyer can watch.
- Publish it in more than one place, under your name.
- Keep it where you can find it for the next listing appointment.
Then do it again on the listing after that. Each one adds to a library you can sell from.
Common questions
What is the Listing Story Model?
The Listing Story Model is a three-step framework from Home Stories for getting lasting value out of a listing. Story: show the life the home makes possible. Surface: publish that story where both people and AI look. Sell: bring your finished stories to the next listing presentation. Each listing becomes an asset that helps win the next one.
What is the Lifestyle Ladder?
The Lifestyle Ladder is a four-rung method for finding a listing’s story. The Home is the spaces and daily moments inside the property. The Place is the neighborhood and the routines around it. The Life is what the home and place make possible together. The Lifestyle Map sorts what someone wants into non-negotiables, wants, and reaches.
What is a Lifestyle Map in real estate?
A Lifestyle Map is three rings: non-negotiables in the center, wants around them, and reaches, or stretch goals, at the edge. Budget decides how far into the rings a buyer can go. Agents can draw the map for a buyer, or for a home by asking which non-negotiables it meets and which of its downsides would not matter to the right person.
How do AI assistants like ChatGPT find real estate listings and agents?
AI assistants answer home-search questions by reading published text, including YouTube video transcripts and articles, and assembling a reply from it. A narrated video and a written article about a listing give the assistant something to read. A video tour set only to music gives it nothing.
How do you turn listing photos into a video?
Five steps: choose the photos that carry the lifestyle, stage those moments with people in them, storyboard the sequence so highlights are spaced to hold attention, convert each photo into a video clip with an AI video model, and add voice narration. Regrading bright listing photos toward an editorial look improves the result.
On stage
Shawn McGaff
Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Home Stories
Shawn leads product, AI architecture, and engineering at Home Stories. He has been building AI systems for nearly 20 years, and presented the Listing Story Model and the Lifestyle Ladder in this session.
Brady Sandahl
Director of Growth, KW Luxury
Brady hosted the conversation. He leads growth for KW Luxury, the luxury division of Keller Williams, and runs the Brady Sandahl Real Estate Group in Palm Springs, California.
Read the full transcript
Lightly edited for readability. Off-mic exchanges and audience members addressed by name are left out.
Opening and introductions 0:00
Brady Sandahl: We’re going to have a different conversation. How many of you, like me, might be meeting with a seller and there are other people that they’re meeting with? Cool. How many of you have a property that you’re struggling to think, will the market actually agree with the price? A few of you. How many of you think that you might have a property that’s a little bit tired, or you haven’t been able to find the story of that? And how many of you are trying to figure out how you create a story where people will connect with you, people will connect with the properties, enough to where they’ll call or text or email? So I’m going to invite someone on the stage, and we’re going to have a conversation around storytelling. Shawn, come on up!
Shawn McGaff: It’s a pleasure.
Brady Sandahl: All right, so this is going to be a little different. We’re going to have a conversation with Shawn. Shawn is with a company called Home Stories. How many of you have heard of Home Stories? In fact, you’ve got people that are...
Shawn McGaff: We’ve got some progress going.
Brady Sandahl: Here’s the good news. This is not a sales pitch. This is a conversation around helping you figure out what your brand voice may be, and the importance of telling stories about who you are and the properties that you represent. So, a couple of questions.
Storytelling in the age of AI 1:37
Brady Sandahl: What’s changing around storytelling now?
Shawn McGaff: Everything and nothing at the same time. The fundamentals of storytelling are holding true. So, you know, oral history, right, that’s like the oldest form of what humanity is. I mean, think about cave people sitting around a campfire, you know, talking and having that shared history. It’s literally what created our society. And the fundamentals of that haven’t changed. What’s changing is how you create it, how you produce it, and where you distribute it. We’re kind of in this golden age of distribution. You know, for a long time, the actual distribution was all locked up in a couple of central powers. But now, every single one of you has the ability to create a piece of compelling content that has a good hook, a good story arc, distribute it, and reach potentially millions of people. And you can literally do that every single day. But what’s changing even more is that people are not the only ones paying attention to your stories anymore. Now AI is paying attention to your stories. And that’s becoming an intermediary between you and the people that you’re trying to get listing contracts from, trying to sell the homes to. And that AI is actually interpreting your stories and personalizing it for the users on the other end.
Brady Sandahl: So I see two sides of this, or I would say two different groups in this. You have some individuals who are completely dialed in, glued to their devices, using AI at a high level. And then you have others who are not using the devices the same way, have not dialed in, and are not as clear as what’s going on. Is that happening?
Shawn McGaff: That’s absolutely happening. But it’s just a shift that’s taking time. You may have seen the stat recently from NAR about how over half of home searches are starting with a chat bot now. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity.
Brady Sandahl: Over half of them?
Shawn McGaff: 60%.
Brady Sandahl: Of searches for properties?
Shawn McGaff: Yep. Because they’re starting with lifestyle. And it’s not just like, oh yeah, the kids are doing it. There’s more than half of the population. That means it’s required that everybody is doing it. I have older relatives that are addicted to it. But it’s all age ranges. And the adoption is just continuing to accelerate. Because this technology, it didn’t even exist three years ago. Three years ago, nobody knew what this was except a bunch of AI nerds like me. Now, over half of home searches are using it. What is it going to look like next year? Right now, there’s a divide. But we’ve never seen technology disperse as fast as this has.
Brady Sandahl: I think we can agree that back in the day, not too long ago, you told a story at the table you were at. You told a story in the room that you were in. And you no longer have the same type of table or the same type of room where this story is being told. It’s a completely different world. The second thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve never seen a society adopt something as quickly as they have. And I think people are looking for content.
Why lifestyle connects with buyers 5:33
Brady Sandahl: It’s become an addiction. So when we think about some agents might not realize this is happening, others see it happening all the time. Why is lifestyle the glue that gets people back to storytelling or finding the story? Why is lifestyle the thing now?
Shawn McGaff: I mean, we’re not really selling homes here. Like, this isn’t just a piece of real estate.
Brady Sandahl: At luxury.
Shawn McGaff: At luxury. It’s not just a building. You’re selling what is the life that this person can live here. And when you think about it that way, you’re going to have better connections with the home buyers because that’s how they’re thinking about it already. See, the problem, lifestyle for a long time, everybody wanted to search based on lifestyle, but they couldn’t because, you know, the whole industry, we have great data sharing. We have amazing portals that are showing all these statistics, but there’s no filter on the portals for I want this lifestyle. I want to be a car collector and I want my kids to have a great backyard. There’s not a drop-down filter for that. It’s not a piece of data, right? It’s a story about a life that person wants to live. And what’s changed, why this is becoming even more powerful than it already was, is that the chatbots can help assemble that picture if you give them the content they need to do that. Because I think over half of the searches that happened that people are starting their search for homes, they’re starting with things like, what neighborhood is right for the life I want to lead? Even when they already live in the city, they’re saying, hey, I just had my first kid. What’s the up and coming neighborhood like? What’s the spot for me? And they’re asking ChatGPT that there was never a drop-down filter for that. There was never anything like that. But ChatGPT reads through the YouTube scripts. It reads through the articles that you put. And it synthesizes that into an answer.
Brady Sandahl: Is that why you started the company?
Shawn McGaff: That’s exactly why. What we see is this entire shifting landscape that, I mean, we haven’t seen a shift like this in a long, long time. And we think that there’s an opportunity to basically get ahead of this. Because right now, right now it’s the Wild West. It’s kind of out of control. And every week that goes by, you know, ChatGPT is citing different sources. They’re looking at different videos. Three months ago, LinkedIn wasn’t cited at all. Like, it was invisible to ChatGPT. Now it’s in the top five most cited sources, right? And YouTube, YouTube is in the top three for all of them. And so, but that’s just changing constantly. There’s no universal place to house these stories. And that’s really what was inspiring us to do it, is we want to give the tools, but also the publication, the channels to shape that narrative, you know, on the behalf of all of you.
Brady Sandahl: You’ve created this lifestyle ladder. How does that show up? What does that look like?
Shawn McGaff: Yeah. Yeah, I actually have, let’s see if we can, I have a graphic for that.
Story, Surface, Sell 8:57
Shawn McGaff: So we actually, we have two things. So this is what we call the listing story model, which leads into the lifestyle ladder. And it’s story, surface, sell. It’s three S’s, right? Story, first you have to figure out what the story of the property is, right? What is special about it? What is the lifestyle it leads? Then you have to surface it. You know, you ever heard the saying, like, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s there to hear it, did it make a sound? It’s the same thing with a story. If nobody sees or hears your story, did it even happen? Does it exist? You’ve got to put it where both AI and people see it and then sell. Bring that body of work, that library of stories to your next listing appointment to show people this is what you represent. This is the lifestyles that you sell. And this is not a Home Story specific thing. This is a framework that you should be thinking about, whether you use us or not. This is where the industry is going.
Brady Sandahl: I want to take a moment. Just go back one slide.
Table exercise: where to improve 10:06
Brady Sandahl: So I’m going to have you turn to your partner or someone at the table and share with them or ask them, do you think you’ve got to work more on story, showing the life a home makes possible, surface, publish where people and AI look, or do you need to focus on selling, meaning sharing those stories at the next time you present? So just take 90 seconds. Share where you believe you need to focus on next. By a show of hands, how many of you believe that story is where you need to raise the bar? Wow. I’m going to ask you to stand up. If you just raise your hand, stand up so we can see how many, what percentage of is around story. Okay, great. Thank you. You may sit down. How many of you would say surface? You can stand up. We can see you. Okay. Perfect, thank you. And how many of you are needing to focus on sell? Selling, would you please stand up? Okay, excellent. So it looks like story was number one. Does this surprise you?
Shawn McGaff: No. This is what I would expect, because the systems within the industry haven’t really encouraged storytelling for the last 20 years.
Brady Sandahl: Wait, say that again.
Shawn McGaff: The system, the infrastructure of this industry does not encourage storytelling.
Brady Sandahl: Because they were focused on four bedrooms, four baths, 4,000 square feet on a blank, blank-sized lot that maybe had some kind of view.
Shawn McGaff: Exactly. It’s a bunch of data points.
Brady Sandahl: Okay. So if you were clear on how to tell a story at a better, deeper, larger level, do you think you could unlock more listing and sale opportunities? So we’re completely, first of all, we’re not on a script, and now he’s like, what are you doing? I’m collecting selfish market research. What has kept you from telling a story? Just shout out anything. What’s kept you from telling a story? I think for me, I don’t know how I would do it. I mean, I’m just now understanding how to save a Google file.
Shawn McGaff: You can ask ChatGPT about that.
The lifestyle ladder 14:34
Brady Sandahl: Okay, so knowing that that’s, then walk us through this model.
Shawn McGaff: So really focusing on the story here is what we call the lifestyle ladder. So we start at the bottom of the ladder, and we think about the home. And we think about what is special about that, and we’re going to dive a little bit more in on the next slide. Then, once you’re thinking about what’s unique, you move up the ladder, you think about the place.
Brady Sandahl: Let’s pause. Okay. I’ll tell you, this is something that our team is going through right now. We’ve had to challenge our director of magic, our property stylist, to spend more time with the agent who’s become the listing agent to answer number one. How many of you have noticed that the buyers are more selective than they’ve ever been? And how many believe that the buyers aren’t willing to pay what the sellers are asking, even if we think it’s a good value? And how many times have we missed the mark when the mark should never have been missed? Now, how many of you are drivers? You’re like, what time does this end? Okay. Drivers, I’m only talking with you. You’re very quick, we’re very quick to race from one to four. Did you see how quiet the room got? I’m going to put a challenge into the drivers’ minds. The home, the home spaces and daily moments is not something we should race through. And that’s a behavior you may have to change. All right, now you can go to number two.
Shawn McGaff: That’s good. That’s wonderful. You enacted it.
Brady Sandahl: I’m an agent. I know what this is. If we miss number one, we’re going to potentially miss the market that can buy the home.
Shawn McGaff: 100%. So then you zoom out, climb the next rung of the ladder, and you think about the place. It’s the neighborhood, the routines around it. And when we’re thinking about that, what are the lifestyles that that area enables? It’s not that, oh, cool, there’s a cafe on the corner. But what’s the story of that cafe? What does that enable? Oh, they can walk there every Saturday morning, and they can have their coffee. And think of it visually. What is that life? Because that’s what you’re going to be painting a picture about. And that’s what takes you up to that next rung is thinking about the home and the place as a cohesive unit to enable a story of a life. And a lot of the people, the sellers that you’re representing, we’ve been interviewing a lot of sellers and talking to them. And they light up when they hear about, oh, telling the story of the home I’m selling. We’ve actually talked to a few where the realtor told us, oh, they’re very private. We’re not sure they’re actually going to like this, but they’re willing to talk with you. And then they light up. And they get excited because they just spent the last 5 years, 10 years, longer living in that home. They know what the life of that home is. And maybe they don’t want to let all the details of their life out, but they do want to share what the place could be because they understand emotionally the power that that has.
Lifestyle maps and non-negotiables 18:18
Shawn McGaff: And so you end up, as you climb this ladder, being able to assemble what I call the lifestyle map. And every person in every home has one of these. This is not rocket science. It’s what are the non-negotiables? What are the wants? What are the reaches? The stretch goals? And how much of the life I want can I afford? And so a lot of us, we’ve done for years, whether we knew it or not, we’re talking to people. We’re saying, okay, yep, they just had their first kid. They got to have room to grow. They got to be in a good school district. These are the non-negotiables. And then you move out. But you can do the same thing for a home. So you can take this home, and you can think about what kind of non-negotiables would this home meet? What are the downsides to the home where it wouldn’t matter to a person that that’s a downside? What kind of life would somebody need to leave where this home would actually be perfect regardless of the downsides? And that is what I call the lifestyle map because then you’re just matching the home, the home’s lifestyle map, with the right person, the audience.
Brady Sandahl: All right, so how many of you are primarily working with sellers? How many of you are primarily working with buyers? Yeah, some of you.
Table exercise: better buyer questions 19:44
Brady Sandahl: I want you to turn to your table partner, and I want you to share with them a question you’ve used that positions you into the inner circle to understand a non-negotiable. You have two minutes. One minute for each of you. One minute for each of you. Sharing is caring. Sharing is caring.
Finding the true non-negotiables 21:16
Brady Sandahl: How many of you learned something new? A new question, a new thought, a new idea by that activity? Good. Okay. So the goal is to get into the non-negotiables. You understand exactly the non-negotiables, and then you get into the wants, and then you get into the reaches. Is there anything unique about that three-circle strategy that you need to share with them?
Shawn McGaff: No, I mean, it’s really just about keeping it simple, right? Everything kind of lives on a spectrum, right? And it’s just trying to keep it simple because one of the things that I’ve seen, and I’ve worked in many different industries at this point, but everybody tends to put everything into the non-negotiables. Everybody wants everything, right? But very few people have the budget to have everything. I mean, there’s trade-offs. Even with $100 million homes, there’s trade-offs. Maybe they would have preferred the other side of the hill. I don’t know. But everybody thinks there are a bunch of things in the non-negotiables, but that’s not true. So the hard part is actually sussing out the true non-negotiables. That’s really hard.
Brady Sandahl: So can I make an adjustment to the slides? I think I would enlarge this, and I would share this with everyone you know who works with buyers. Every buyer carries the same three rings. Budget decides how far into them they can reach. Now, the good news is we’re going to have a gentleman come on stage this afternoon to talk about how you look for the clues and the cues about someone’s concern they can’t qualify for what they want. No guarantee they’re going to get all three circles, but that, to me, should be larger, and it could become a T-shirt. I strongly, with a lot of grace, recommend that you focus more on their non-negotiables than you communicating your sales pitch. So I’m going to challenge everyone in the room to ask more questions throughout the next couple of days.
From listing photos to a story 24:56
Shawn McGaff: So one of the things that I really want to talk about is... Okay, so you’re coming up with what’s special about the property. Now, how do we actually tell the story of the property in this new era of AI and all these tools that are cropping up?
Brady Sandahl: And I’m going to pause. Because right now I can feel some of our significant producers, and you know who you are. I don’t have time to do this. I don’t want to learn how to do that. Don’t worry about that. Let’s focus on this. How a listing becomes a story. Okay?
Shawn McGaff: And so it all starts with your photography, right? Right. in your luxury properties, right? So you all have these amazing assets that are just ripe for usage. And what we can do now with the tools on the market, Home Stories being one, but there’s lots and lots of tools that do all sorts of different cool stuff, is you can convert them into videos that actually look like videos. Not the, like, Ken Burns slideshow with the crossfade dissolving and the music. Like, actually cool videos that look nice, look like they were shot with a real camera. And really importantly, you can now add people into these images. You can show people living the life that we established would be amazing and enabled by this property. Now there’s a bunch of, like, rules you got to make sure, like, don’t only show, you know, families. Don’t, you know, like, adhere by guidelines and regulations. But you can now actually help people envision the life that is possible within here with this virtual staging, with putting people in, and with showing the life around it. You don’t have to go take a bunch of video of the neighborhood, snap a couple extra photos on the way out, and suddenly you can tell the story of the cafe down the street as well. And all of it can be narrated, right? So the AI voice narration, you don’t have to do it all yourself. You can clone your own voice now if you don’t have time to narrate all of them yourself. And it sounds great.
Brady Sandahl: Or you’re concerned that you don’t like the voice you have.
Shawn McGaff: Yeah, yeah. That happens all the time.
Brady Sandahl: Some people don’t want to be on camera. There are a few people that have some fear around that, and there are some people that have a desire to control all of that. And they no longer have to have those two concerns.
Shawn McGaff: And, you know, sometimes a specific property just demands a cowboy voice or a British accent. Like, you know, there’s just some of these properties. They just need that, and you can have it now, right?
Brady Sandahl: Agreed.
Shawn McGaff: And that voice narration, that’s really important, because when I mentioned that AI is watching and learning, they’re looking at YouTube videos, they’re not actually looking at it for the most part. They’re actually reading the transcripts. They’re reading the story. That’s what they’re searching through. So a tour video that’s just music that you post on Instagram is basically invisible to AI. Like, from an AEO perspective.
Brady Sandahl: So I think we need to be really clear and make sure we say that, again, that AI is looking at the script in the video. Right? So that is something different today that did not apply years ago. Just a couple years ago. So everything starts with great photos, and I would believe that everybody has a professional photographer they use to capture the listing photos. And then you go into being able to add appropriately the right people or the right concepts into that. Then what happens?
Building a library of content 28:56
Shawn McGaff: Then you use that to produce even more content. So from there, you now have this amazing, you know, this asset that is kind of the central piece of telling the story of the home. But you’ve got a script, but now you need to be multimodal. I don’t know how many of you have started to hear that coming from the AI circles. You need video, and you need voice, and you need written content. So now you need an article about it. You need to write a blog post about it. Now you can take clips from it, and suddenly you’ve got social content for the next couple of weeks because you’re just taking pieces of it. And then you can repurpose that. And it becomes this content engine that just kind of runs itself, all starting from you establishing a story and investing in photos. And that’s where you want to get to is you get this feedback cycle of you’re building a library of content that becomes more valuable over time because as you have 10, 20 properties that you’ve done this process through, you now start being able to pull from that library. And that’s going in your listing pitch. You know, that’s showing, oh, yes, you love snowboarding. Well, did you check out this house that I sold? Like, you have all these assets that ChatGPT can work with. You can ask Claude to do half the work for you once you have that library, customize that pitch. And so it actually becomes an asset that makes you more effective and with less work
Storyboarding and video production 30:29
Shawn McGaff: as you build up that library.
Brady Sandahl: So what happens next?
Shawn McGaff: So what we think about, the process that we think about is, all right, you get a bunch of photos, right? You get a photo dump. The first thing is, like, going through there and really thinking about which ones are important to tell the lifestyle. So when you say, okay, the lifestyle, oh, it’s this great deck. Imagine coffee. It’s facing sunrise, so imagine coffee in the morning on this deck. This kitchen is awesome. Oh, and it’s got a movie theater, right? So these are the key highlights. So this is what you’re going to want to spend the time to actually enhance with people, right? You want to stage those, make them look as good as possible. Then you’re going to think about the overarching storyboard. What’s the arc of your video? And try to sequence it. You know, there’s, like, a couple high-level sequences, you know, the classics start on the outside, go in, you know, what’s important, and then space out these key highlight moments because this is all optimized for engagement, right? We all live at the behest of the algorithm now. And so the algorithm, they’re all looking at engagement for video. And just to note, every single social platform is optimizing for video right now. Like, even LinkedIn, right? Even their algorithm wants video, and they’re looking at how much people are engaged.
Brady Sandahl: Are we putting the storyboard together?
Shawn McGaff: So it depends on how you approach it. So if you work with us, we handle all of this. We have an agentic platform with humans in the loop. So we’re fully done for you. We make it as easy as possible. This is something where if you want to DIY it or if you want to use other tools, yeah, you go through, and you would have to do the sequence.
Brady Sandahl: Okay. All right. So storyboard’s number one. Okay.
Shawn McGaff: Then you convert every single one of these photos into a video clip. And so every one of these, there’s a bunch of different video generation models out there that are varying in quality and cost. Some of them are really good at animating humans. Some are better at fast camera movements. Again, that’s something we spend a lot of our time optimizing for, so we’re using the right thing for the right clip. And then you stitch it all together with this beautiful narration. And you end up with the final kind of video. And we don’t have to watch this whole thing, but just to, like, play, like, 30 seconds, just to kind of show...
Brady Sandahl: I’m going to play 60.
A property film in action 33:19
Film narration: At 4945 Saxton Hollow Road, living here feels like having your own private Colorado retreat hidden among the pines. Mornings begin with the sound of the stream and coffee on the covered deck, while deer or wild turkey move quietly through the trees. Inside, the fire is already going, sunlight filters through the forest, and the whole house feels warm, grounded, and connected to nature. As the day unfolds, everyone finds their own rhythm. Someone settles into the study, kids spread out downstairs, and the kitchen slowly becomes the center of the home as dinner comes together. Weekends are made for staying in. Friends arrive, the wood-fired pizza oven gets going, drinks move out to the patio, and the evening stretches around the outdoor fireplace. Later, everyone heads downstairs for movies, games, and time together without ever feeling crowded. When the house finally quiets down, the primary suite becomes a retreat of its own with a fireplace, deck access, and the forest just outside. And beyond the property, trails, ponds, and the Black Forest landscape are always there when you want to explore.
Brady Sandahl: Wow, pretty.
Shawn McGaff: So that’s a couple things about that,
Editorial imagery and distribution 34:50
Shawn McGaff: is that everybody now, a lot of the listing photos, they’re shot in that HDR style, right? It’s very bright, it’s a little bit clinical, but you can see all of the details, and it’s very clean. And so one of the things that, when you’re telling stories, you want that more editorial approach. So one of the things we find very important is retouching all of the images. So all the photos we get are that HDR, but we recolor-grade them to give that more editorial look, which makes it more engaging. So you want to do the same sort of thing with yours and make it more like, you know, Architectural Digest is covering your property rather than, you know, here’s the clinical look at this home.
Brady Sandahl: So an agent that decides to run this play by themselves might spend hours on this.
Shawn McGaff: Oh, yeah, easily, easily, days.
Brady Sandahl: Versus what it takes Home Stories to create. Like, how long is that?
Shawn McGaff: We deliver all of our properties within the next business day.
Brady Sandahl: Wow.
Shawn McGaff: So you give us photos in your listing remarks, and you get the draft the next business day.
Brady Sandahl: The complete property page.
Shawn McGaff: Yeah, so part of what we do, I was telling you about multimodal, is every one of ours, it’s not just a video, it’s a whole playbook. So we write a whole article page, it’s got a gallery. Any leads that come from that go straight to you, and it becomes part of our publication. We actually have about 30 hyper-local YouTube channels that are all for different geographies, so we publish the lifestyle videos to those channels on your behalf. You get the assets as well, so you can have your own YouTube, your own Instagram, your own LinkedIn, post it everywhere. We try to encourage you to blast it to every audience you might have and build up that audience. And all of this, of course, is optimized for AI discoverability, making it easy to crawl for ChatGPT.
Brady Sandahl: Some of our agents are far along in AI, and you know who you are, but does AI recognize the name? Does it recognize your name, my name, their name?
Shawn McGaff: Yeah, so that’s exactly what we’re trying to influence. We want it to recognize the name. So every one of these, your name is prominently put on there. We’re rolling out new products that are about editorial, telling your story as well. And that’s really the goal. And how you influence that is more than just us. It’s having your YouTube channel. The stat I told you earlier from NAR, over half of home searches are starting on ChatGPT. Well, the other stat that was part of that, less than 10% of realtors are recognized and coming up in ChatGPT.
Checking your AI visibility 37:48
Shawn McGaff: So speaking of if it knows your name, we actually do offer a free AEO audit. You don’t have to have an account. Scan the QR code. You put in your name, your website, and it’ll email you a quick PowerPoint about, okay, does it find you? Do you show up in the results? It also shows you what agents in your area are showing up most often. It also looks at what YouTube videos are being cited by ChatGPT. So it kind of just gives you a little idea of what’s going on in your market and how far along you are. Because if ChatGPT recognizes you or not, it’s not a reflection on your performance. It’s not about your volume. It’s who happens to have the right content in the right place right now. It’s a huge opportunity.
Brady Sandahl: And you have put together a lifestyle package that you’re willing to give away to certain people at Symposium. Talk us through that.
Shawn McGaff: Yeah, so we will be raffling off four lifestyle packages. You have to come to our booth, and you have to put your business card in our little thing. And we’ll be raffling off two of them tomorrow. And then what that includes is a lifestyle video. So that’s our package. That’s a one to two minute video. We color grade it. We add people into a few of the scenes. You get the article page, distribution on YouTube, all that kind of stuff. And so if you’ve got a listing coming up and you want to win this, go put your business card in or fill out one of our little blank cards and throw it in there.
Brady Sandahl: I can’t... I guess at this moment in my career and being in production at the level that I am, I recognize my greatest strength in production is to find business and convert business. It’s not for me to try to do this. I would just simply have you do that for me and the clients I represent.
The Home Stories workflow 39:55
Brady Sandahl: So what else do we need to know about what it is you do and how easy you make it for us?
Shawn McGaff: Yeah. So our goal really is to make it as simple as possible. And so you give us photos, you give us property remarks, and actually, for all of you, you barely even need to do that because we are integrated with Command. So when you sign up for our platform, you can authorize Command and your listing data will flow into our platform and you can just click submit. Say, I want one for this one, I want one for that one. And we already have the photos and all the property remarks and all of that. You’ll get an email the next day with the draft. We have a cool review tool so you can add comments right on the video and say, oh, that was good, but I want this other shot or I want to add people here. And then we give you the draft and our support team of humans will make sure those edits actually happen. And all of this is, it’s just the beginning. Like, we are rolling out
Voice agents and agent profiles 41:01
Shawn McGaff: brand new things all the time. So one of the things, if you go check us out on our website, we have a live conversational voice agent on every property page now. This is a public beta. We’re actually releasing a new version very soon. But you can talk to it and ask questions and it can pull up clips from the video as you’re talking to it. So it can walk potential homebuyers through the property and really personalize the answers to them. That’s going to be growing like crazy. So we actually have a new product rolling out. We’re calling Editorial Agent Pages. So what it is, is it’s a page all about you. And Robin is one of our first. You can go watch her story later. We interviewed her to make a really awesome video with her amazing story of what makes her special, her career, and then there’s an article all about it. It’s all within our publication for all the properties that Robin is doing. So they all flow into that one place. And this, again, is optimized for AI discoverability. We’re trying to feed ChatGPT and Gemini the content it needs to recommend you when somebody’s asking, what agent do I work with in my area?
Brady Sandahl: Well, there will be clients who will always go to their agent and agents who will only work with the clients they’ve worked with. We’re talking about getting an agent to people they’ve never worked with before and how those people can validate their decision based on what you offer.
Shawn McGaff: Yeah. Right. Exactly. Again, this part was a little salesy. I apologize.
Brady Sandahl: No, no, no. I’m not going to let you apologize. I love it. You’re hired. No, no. We live in this economy where sellers are making decisions faster. Our agents, you, have to be better equipped to find the pathway for them to make the decision to select you. I’ve gone on way too many appointments where the agent has not figured out what the client wants and provided the tool, and this might be the tool and this may not be the tool yet, but the message here is your clients, even your most loyal clients, are revalidating the decision to work with you, and the people who don’t know you, you need to be aware of why they’re choosing. It’s now based on lifestyle, and these are the solutions that agents need to have to be competitive in this marketplace. In a market where leverage works, this is the leverage
Shawn McGaff: We are very responsive to your ideas and your needs. During this time, we’ve got a booth right over there behind that curtain. Come to us and talk to us about what potential you see, because we are building this for you as much as the home buyers.
Brady Sandahl: As we roll through the final moments, are there other slides
Shawn McGaff: These are the important ones. We have lots of case studies on our website as well. Shout out to Jon Reusch. He has been an amazing advisor to our company, and he really shares what he saw in our system and where we’re going. So if you want to dive deep in what this means, take a look at his video and his article.
Closing reflections 44:44
Brady Sandahl: I have a quick question for the group, and it’s going to require some participation. How many of you believe that you could improve your skill on telling the story of a listing you have or a listing that you want? Raise your hands. How many of you, by a show of hands, have a story about who you are and how you’ll show up for the client that you’re being interviewed by? How many of you believe there might be room for both? Okay. Honest question. What more do you need to know to understand the importance of both? Well, here’s what we’re sure of. You’re going to take a 10-minute break. And when we come back, the second half of the day will be more ahas. So please join me in thanking Shawn and Home Stories.
Shawn McGaff: Thank you, everyone.