Bigger. Better. Bolder. Inman Connect is heading to San Diego. Join thousands of real estate pros, connect with the Inman Community and gain insights from hundreds of leading minds shaping the industry. If you’re ready to grow your business and invest in yourself, this is where you need to be. Go BIG in San Diego!
A classy sign and some nice photos used to be all it took for an agent to call it a day on their marketing efforts. But these days, getting a well-shot home tour up on Instagram isn’t always enough to catch a potential buyer’s eye.
Brokerages and their agents — not to mention portals and mortgage lenders — are looking for more ways to win clients’ attention all the time. From recruiting celebrities for ad spots, to hosting wow-worthy events, to employing artificial intelligence and more, real estate professionals are stepping up their game, because in today’s uncertain market, there’s more competition for a less enthusiastic client pool.
TAKE THE INMAN INTEL SURVEY FOR MAY
Some new entrants to the real estate marketing space, including Mickey Alam Khan’s Luxboro and Compass agent Khaki Wennstrom’s invite-only network Métier Maison, have sought to expand expectations surrounding real estate marketing, but individual agents and other companies are also pushing boundaries in new ways through the use of AI and their own creativity.
What follows are a few new names and trends shaping the real estate marketing space today, as agents try to break through a challenging market in 2025.
A few new market entrants
Industry players are continuing to innovate with their marketing efforts by identifying gaps and building bridges between verticals.
This week, Mickey Alam Khan, former president of Luxury Portfolio International, launched a new luxury marketing firm called Luxboro that, in addition to helping firms and agents craft marketing and branding strategies, also provides agent upskilling services, curated events and conferences, and help customizing in-house research teams.
Mickey Alam Khan
“Having run so many firms in the luxury space … I realized the no. 1 thing that was missing, especially in luxury real estate, is a proper knowledge exchange and connection with genuine luxury brands,” Khan told Inman. “Because everybody’s so involved in their own industry, they don’t look beyond. And when you’re dealing with luxury, you can’t just be focused entirely on one vertical.”
Khan added that he saw a lot of “cookie cutter” solutions in the industry that only focus on one area, like marketing or technology, but fail to address a more complete picture to drive agent success.
“So what I’m trying to do,” Khan said, “is bring all these ingredients together for brokerages and for networks and say, ‘All right, I can help you. Our firm could help you with a marketing branding to help position you as a leader. We can help train your agents, not just give them all the Kool Aid about, you know, using one formula, and you’ll get 10 times more listings.’ A real education on what goes on in the larger world of luxury and how they can emulate that best practice stuff that I’ve done as an operator.”
Lauren Fox
HomeSmart also recently elevated its marketing offerings for agents through a revamped marketing platform called the Marketing Design Center. The MLS-integrated platform includes new AI and other automated tools for agents, including automated listing marketing packages, email client integration, a video editor, AI content and image editing, social media caption generation and scheduling, hundreds of customizable templates, QR code generation and more.
“It was really about [empowering] the agents with a seamless, AI-enhanced platform. To me, that’s what’s critical in today’s environment, is that it brings those modern marketing elements right to their fingertips,” Lauren Fox, the company’s vice president of marketing, told Inman. “It’s really not just keeping up with the latest trends, but about making sure that our agents stay ahead of those trends and have that accessibility available to them.”
Fox added that one of the biggest pain points for many agents is dealing with what she calls the “tech tax” in deploying their marketing, meaning piecing together various subscriptions and tools in order to create a full marketing package, which can get annoying and costly. That’s one of the advantages to the Marketing Design Center, is that it’s a one-stop shop for agent needs that is at no additional cost to them.
Khaki Wennstrom
Compass agent Khaki Wennstrom about a year-and-a-half ago softly launched a brokerage-agnostic referral network for top luxury agents across the country and select international markets that is also breaking new ground in luxury marketing and cross-collaborations.
Dubbed Métier Maison, the invite-only network connects agents with one another and other clients in different markets, as well as interior designers and other luxury brands that can help promote properties through bespoke collaborations.
Métier Maison recently brought fashion and lifestyle brand La Ligné to debut their spring collection at a $42.5 million Malibu listing represented by top Malibu agent Chris Cortazzo, who is also affiliated with Compass. The immersive experience brought high fashion and luxury real estate together to elevate a video home tour to a new level.
“We did an incredible all-day photo shoot, video shoot, and it’s been all over Instagram and social media, bringing eyes to that property from coast to coast,” Wennstrom said. “[It’s about] the exposure and aligning the right brands with each property and doing real estate differently.”
One of the photos taken during La Ligné’s photo shoot at Chris Cortazzo’s Malibu listing | Credit: Joao Canziani @joaocanziani
Artificial intelligence
From generating listing descriptions to video captions to editing videos and more, AI is quickly changing real estate and helping to ease certain pain points for agents when developing marketing materials.
Luxury Presence CEO Malte Kramer
Malte Kramer, CEO of marketing firm Luxury Presence, said that he sees virtual assistants, or AI-powered bots, changing consumer search behavior with ChatGPT, and AI-informed CRMs as having a big impact on agent marketing now and in the next few years. Kramer compared virtual assistants to having an intern that can monitor a website and make updates to it automatically.
“They still need supervision, they still make mistakes, but they can do a lot of work,” Kramer said. “So if you add them to an existing team, you can just be a lot more productive.”
With consumer search behaviors, Kramer added, more and more people are turning to ChatGPT rather than Google when they want to look up information about something. And Google, likewise, has started featuring AI snippets in their search results. That means that instead of solely focusing on SEO, agents and others who want to optimize their search results should also start doing so with optimizing for Large Language Models (LLMs) in mind.
“There are a lot of similarities to SEO, but there are also some very specific things that you need to do to make sure that your website and brand shows up when someone searches for, say, ‘Who’s the best real estate agent in Los Angeles?’ on ChatGPT,” Kramer said.
The CEO also said he foresees CRM experiences improving because new, AI-informed CRMs will be able to track client details and make updates more quickly to CRMs in real time.
“There will also be more voice-based data entry, so you can imagine just talking into your phone after you’ve met with the client, and the result of this and why it matters for marketing is that I think we’ll see much better data as a result,” Kramer said. “And obviously, better data means better targeting and better marketing.”
Events
Bolstering up a marketing plan with a well-executed event can also help a listing gain traction, Matt Lionetti of The Real Brokerage told Inman, but many agents tend to miss the mark.
Matt Lionetti
“I think there’s a lot of things, like parallels, and a lot of things you can do together to bring your event marketing, bring it back to your social and vice versa,” Lionetti said. “So I think if it’s done properly, it could be effective. And I think this is kind of a year to do it, when it’s a tougher year and I think a lot of people are pulling back on some of those things, like events. I think this is a year, if you can, to put your foot on the gas pedal. It could really separate you from the pack when the market does start coming back stronger.”
Métier Maison leans into this strategy with an event during Paris fashion week in coordination with the network’s Paris-based agent, Melissa Regan. The network is also hosting an exclusive dinner part in Aspen during the Food & Wine Classic in June at a $65 million listing in downtown.
“We’ve partnered with top luxury brands to bring experiences into these properties,” Wennstrom said. “So, I always ask my agents, ‘Oh you have a new listing, would they want to do anything? A dinner party? A photo shoot?’ And really get you the most exposure. Some clients are very private, and then there are some clients that are like, ‘Oh my goodness, we would love to have a fashion photo shoot here at our property to get more exposure.’ So really looking at each property and figuring out which properties are open to doing these very creative ways of getting your property seen.”
Video and visuals
Lionetti, who is known for his attention-grabbing videos and being a host of the Over Ask podcast, said that video continues to be a leading marketing strategy for agents across social media outlets. When creating his video content, Lionetti tries to figure out what the listing’s story is and lean into that story.
“The industry is moving so fast with AI and all that, that I think we can capture an actual emotion and make people feel like they can see themselves in the property, it goes such a long way,” Lionetti said. “So I think I’ve seen storytelling pick up more than I have in recent years. I think people are really trying to put that into their listings as well.”
Instagram carousel posts, in which users can share multiple photos or videos in a single post, also appear to be making a comeback in terms of performance, Lionetti added.
“It’s because you have more of a chance to be seen by more people,” Lionetti said. “Because when you have 10 photos in the carousel post, if someone you know looks at your post, then gets off the app, when they go back on the app, they’re probably going to see that post again with just a different photo from the carousel post. You have a higher likelihood of people actually seeing the content, which is always nice.”
Channeling the unexpected
Whether it’s funny, weird, emotional, or something else, the agents that do something unexpected with their marketing are often those who reap the biggest benefits in their business — and that’s a trend that will never go stale.
Take Janice Samson’s video posted a few weeks ago on social media, in which she begins the video by adopting the role of barista — which many people supposedly assume is her profession (incorrectly), due to her RE/MAX’s office’s location in the same building as a cafe. It’s a quick, 21-second video, but by the end, the viewer knows her name, her credentials, where she’s located and her RE/MAX affiliation.
@remax.jaret.cohn How does Jessica pull this off?! ☕️ We have no idea, but call Janice to sell your Midcoast Maine home 🏡 #fyp #maine #realestate #realtorsoftiktok #camdenmaine #remax ♬ original sound – RE/MAX Jaret & Cohn
Paired with Samson’s deadpan delivery, the whole thing is completely unexpected — and memorable. The video has been liked on TikTok over 15,000 times and shared over 5,000 times.
Lionetti said he’s seen similar trends in recent weeks where agents think outside the box, like discussing where they would hide during a game of hide-and-seek in a listing, or saying funny jokes while mimicking ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) into a microphone. But with those trends, the trick is to hop on them almost immediately after they begin, Lionetti said, because a week later, they can become stale.
“Now, it’s almost so obvious that it’s just overdone,” he said.
Instead, Lionetti advises other agents to try and come up with a new idea that will start the next trend.
“When I’m not watching real estate content, even a movie or a music video, I’m always thinking, ‘How can I put a real estate spin on this?'” he said. “But then as well, you can take a trend and maybe not do it the exact same way, and just take aspects of it and try and figure out, ‘What made this go so viral?'”
