The story behind one of my most unconventional listing videos, why I decided to skydive into a property, what it took to pull off, and how experiments like this (and our cinematic King’s Grant short film) have changed the way I think about real estate marketing.
I've always wanted to skydive into a listing.
I don't know exactly when I first said it.
It was probably years ago, half joking, while talking about increasingly ridiculous ideas for real estate videos.
But it stuck.
Someday, with the right property, I was going to jump out of an airplane and land at my own listing.
The problem is that doing something outrageous just for attention isn't particularly difficult.
Doing something outrageous that actually makes sense for the property is harder.
Eventually, the right opportunity came along...
This wasn't a video concept I wanted to force onto a conventional house in a subdivision.
It needed space.
It needed the kind of property where arriving from several thousand feet above it didn't feel completely disconnected from what we were selling.
When that listing came along, I finally had my excuse.
The property itself was a departure from the luxury beach homes people often associate with me.
I wanted the video to immediately communicate:
This isn't another house tour.
And dropping out of the sky seemed like a reasonably effective way to accomplish that.
There's a big difference between saying, “I should skydive into this listing,” and actually doing it.
So, rather than actually doing it, I kind of did it - by constructing a storyboard, taking geo-referenced satellite image screenshots at varying heights, and plugging myself in to an AI-generated skydiving-listing video.
So, my hook became, "I always wanted to skydive into one of my listings", knowing people will probably want to see where that video was going.
I needed to put it together fast, but with great care so it appeared real enough that you'd question it - or possibly watch it a couple times just to come to your conclusion.
Either way, it was a strategy to rack up "minutes watched" in my video analytics, and that's exactly what started to happen.
The video did exactly what I hoped it would do.
A lot more attention than another conventional walkthrough beginning with me standing in front of the property saying:
“Welcome to my newest listing.”
People stopped. They watched. They shared it. They talked about it.
Even my mother saw it and said: "Why didn't you tell me you were going skydiving!?!"
Expectations around great real estate marketing have become unbelievably high, and sellers expecte agents to produce beautiful content.
There are incredible photographers, drone pilots and videographers working in this industry.
But that creates another problem. Beautiful has become normal.
A perfectly exposed twilight photograph of a luxury home doesn't automatically stop anyone anymore.
Neither does a drone orbit.
Neither does cinematic music.
Those things still matter. I use all of them.
But the hook is what matters most. And today, you need multiple hooks to KEEP people interested.
That's increasingly how I think about listing marketing.
First:
Why should somebody stop?
Then:
Why should they care?
Then:
Why might the right buyer want to own this?
Skydiving solved the first question.
The rest of the video still had to answer the other two.
This wasn't my first go-around with publicly-posting AI-generated / AI-assisted video content...
About a month or so prior, I had the opportunity to market a property in the King's Grant community in Fenwick Island, I wanted to do something completely different.
That eventually became a short film built around the mythology of the King's Grant.
Instead of immediately showing countertops, bedrooms and water views, we created a story.
Pirates.
A ship.
A storm.
Fenwick Island centuries ago.
A mysterious legend beneath the water.
It became far more ambitious than a normal listing video had any reason to become.
And that was exactly the point.
The finished short film was incredibly well received.
People watched it who had no intention of buying the townhouse.
They talked about it.
They shared it.
Some probably wondered why a Realtor had made a miniature historical pirate movie to sell a property.
That's fine with me. Because they remembered it.
And they remembered King's Grant.
That experience changed my thinking even further.
We tend to put real estate content into a very narrow box.
Listing video.
Property tour.
Agent introduction.
Market update.
Just listed.
Just sold.
There's nothing inherently wrong with any of those.
But consumers aren't sitting down at night hoping somebody shows them another four-minute real estate walkthrough.
We're competing for attention against everything else on their screen.
Movies. Sports. YouTube. Instagram. News. Friends. Family.
A million other things that are more interesting than an advertisement.
So maybe the answer isn't always to make a better advertisement.
Sometimes the answer is to make something people actually want to watch.
And then let the real estate live inside it.
We may revisit King's Grant.
We're now about a month away from launching another listing there.
This time, on the ocean side.
And yes, I've been thinking about a sequel.
I'm not sure that every creative real estate video needs to become a cinematic universe.
But once you've sunk a pirate ship off the coast of Fenwick Island, it's difficult to go back to slowly pushing open the front door while inspirational music plays.
The challenge with the next one will be the same challenge I had with the skydive:
Don't repeat something just because it worked once.
Find the thing that belongs to this property.
The location is different.
The ocean side creates an entirely different setting.
And if we revisit the King's Grant story, it needs to move forward rather than simply recreate what people have already seen.
That's the fun part.
I'm sure there are easier ways to sell real estate.
I'm certain there are cheaper ones.
I could sell these properties without the video content.
But it's what I love to do. And it separates me from the thousands of other agents in the area.
I could have marketed King's Grant without pirates.
And there will always be properties where beautiful photography, strong pricing and disciplined conventional marketing are exactly what the listing needs.
But unusual properties deserve unusual thinking.
My job isn't simply to put a property into the MLS.
It's to figure out how to make the right people notice it, understand it and remember it.
Sometimes that means drone photography.
Sometimes it means a catered event.
Sometimes it means an extremely detailed analysis of land.
Sometimes it apparently means spending months making a pirate movie.
And every once in a while, it means jumping out of an airplane.
Kind of.
