I’ve always found it interesting how much time and energy we put into selling a home, only to reduce the entire experience to a “just sold” graphic once the transaction closes.
We spend weeks, sometimes months, developing a marketing strategy, communicating with sellers, negotiating with buyers and navigating challenges along the way, but so little of that work makes it into the content we share afterward.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with celebrating a closing. But I’ve always felt that the story behind the sale is often more interesting than the sale itself, especially when you consider what a prospective client is trying to figure out when deciding who to hire.
Most sellers probably assume any experienced agent can put their home on the market. What they don’t necessarily know is how that agent approaches marketing, how much effort they’ll put into a listing or how they’ll respond when something doesn’t go according to plan. Those are difficult things to communicate in a listing presentation when every agent is promising some version of the same thing.
For years, I’ve tried to give people a better understanding of our work by creating case studies of the homes we’ve sold. Initially, that meant compiling listing footage into a Reel with a longer caption explaining the transaction. More recently, I’ve been experimenting with carousels that tell those stories across multiple slides using footage we already created to market the property.
What I like about this approach is that people can see what working with us might actually look like, rather than simply taking our word for it.
The story is usually more interesting than the sale
We recently sold a property in San Pedro where we hosted nine open houses, mailed 500 postcards, ran digital advertising and created a video that generated more than 1.5 million organic views. We found a buyer and opened escrow, but shortly before closing, that buyer backed out, and we had to start again.
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We eventually found another buyer and successfully closed, but when we shared the case study, we didn’t lead with the sale price or how much marketing we’d done. We opened with, “Imagine finally selling your house. Then the buyer backs out right before closing.”
I liked that opening because it put the reader in the seller’s position. Most homeowners can imagine how frustrating that experience would be, and it naturally creates curiosity about what happened next. From there, we explained how we responded, got the property back in front of buyers, and ultimately closed.
We’ve used the same approach to tell different stories, including a transaction in Hesperia, California, where we coordinated a sale for sellers who had moved out of state, and a humorous carousel about a San Diego transaction that generated 15,741 views.
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Not every transaction needs an extraordinary twist. Sometimes the interesting part is a problem you solved, a decision you made, or the work that went into making the experience easier for your client. The challenge is recognizing those moments and figuring out how to communicate them.
How I’ve made the process repeatable
The storytelling portion generally takes me about 15 minutes, although gathering information and designing the finished post take additional time.
Before writing, I go through the transaction and take inventory of everything we’ve done. I want to know how many open houses we hosted, how many people attended, how many postcards we mailed, how much content we published and how many views our videos generated. I’ll also look at offers received and anything else that helps explain how the sale unfolded.
This has made me more conscious of documenting our work as we’re doing it. It’s difficult to communicate the effort behind a sale if you can’t remember the specifics, and having those numbers also makes it easier to evaluate what worked.
I then gather content we’ve already created, whether that’s property videos, walkthroughs, open house footage, or photographs. Repurposing footage gives that content another life, but agents could create something similar using listing photos.
Once I have everything together, I open ChatGPT Voice and talk through the transaction. I’ll explain the sellers’ circumstances, our approach, the decisions we made and anything unexpected. I don’t organize my thoughts beforehand because I find it more helpful to get everything out and work through the story conversationally.
What I’ve found particularly useful is having ChatGPT ask follow-up questions to identify the most compelling angle. Sometimes what I initially find interesting isn’t what another homeowner would care about, and that back-and-forth helps me consider their perspective.
Once we’ve found the angle, we work on the writing, particularly the opening two slides because Instagram can serve both to your audience. Lately, I’ve preferred carousels with moving video backgrounds, but we’ve also created Reels and experimented with humor. I’ve shared an editable version of our Canva template for anyone who wants to try the format.
A prompt to help you get started
If you want to try this with one of your transactions, open ChatGPT Voice and use this prompt:
“Interview me about [Address] I recently closed. Ask me one question at a time about the seller’s goals, our marketing strategy, the decisions we made, challenges we encountered and the outcome. Help me identify the most compelling part of the story and why another homeowner would care. Once we’ve found the angle, help me write a seven-slide Instagram carousel with a strong opening and a natural narrative. Use specific details and results, avoid generic sales language, and don’t invent anything.”
We’ve also been sharing these case studies in emails to our database, giving us another opportunity to demonstrate our experience to homeowners and agents who may eventually refer us business.
If you’ve been in the business for any length of time, you probably have dozens of transactions worth revisiting, with interesting stories buried in them. You don’t need a new closing every week to share those experiences, and you don’t need to make every transaction sound more dramatic than it was.
There’s tremendous value in helping people understand the work we do, particularly when so much happens behind the scenes. If we’re already investing all this time and effort into helping our clients, it seems like a missed opportunity not to share more of it.
Use this FREE Canva template to replicate these results.
Krys Benyamein is a Realtor with Allstars Realty in Southern California. Get connected on Instagram or LinkedIn.
