Latest / Small Business Success with Fexingo: Local Companies, Main Street Stories, and Community Commerce / How a Local Realtor Used Neighbourhood Video Tours to Dominate Zillow
Transcript
- Lucas: If these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way, you might already know where I'm going with this — but I want to get there through today's story first, because it's one of those cases where the principle is almost absurdly simple and the result is completely outsized. Luna: Love those. What's the setup? Lucas: Alright. Mike Chen is a solo real estate agent in Portland, Oregon — specifically the Alberta Arts District. That's a tight, walkable neighbourhood with historic craftsman bungalows and a lot of local cafes. Mike started in 2022, right when the market was cooling, and he was getting maybe one or two buyer leads a month from Zillow. Meanwhile, his yearly budget for a booth at the neighbourhood street fair was about five hundred bucks. Luna: So he took that five hundred and put it into video? Lucas: Exactly. He bought a gimbal for his iPhone — the DJI Osmo Mobile, about a hundred and fifty dollars — and spent the rest on a cheap shotgun microphone and some time. His idea was simple: instead of filming standard home tours inside a property, he'd walk the block around each listing and talk about the neighbourhood. The coffee shop two doors down, the community garden, the fact that the street trees are London plane trees. He called them 'Neighbourhood Walks.' Luna: So the video is about the place, not the house. Lucas: Right. He posted them on YouTube, each video around three to four minutes, and he optimised the title and description for hyper-local search terms. For example: 'What it's like living on Alberta Street in Portland — coffee shops, parks, and commute times.' Not '3 bed 2 bath for sale.' Luna: And that worked because people searching for a neighbourhood are earlier in their journey than people searching for a specific listing. Lucas: Exactly. Mike told me that his first video took about two weeks to get its first hundred views. But the second one, about Vernon neighbourhood, got picked up by the Vernon neighbourhood association Facebook page and hit five hundred views in three days. That's when he realised the distribution channel was actually existing community groups, not YouTube's algorithm. Luna: So he wasn't just making videos — he was handing them to the neighbourhood association to share. Lucas: Yes. And that is the core insight. Mike started reaching out to neighbourhood association admins, local mom groups, even the Alberta Main Street organisation — which is a real nonprofit that does community events. He'd say, 'Hey, I made this video about your neighbourhood. Feel free to share it with your members.' And they did. Because it was free content that genuinely showed off their area. Luna: That's the opposite of a cold pitch. You're giving them something they actually want. Lucas: Right. Within three months, Mike had nine videos up and his YouTube channel was averaging about 1,200 views per video. But the real magic was in search. He started ranking on the first page of Google for queries like 'Alberta Arts District homes for sale' and 'Vernon Portland real estate.' Zillow's pages for those same zip codes were thin — just a grid of listings with no context. Mike's videos had walkability scores, mentions of the Saturday farmer's market, footage of the actual sidewalk. Luna: So he was out-contenting a billion-dollar platform by being more useful. Lucas: That's exactly it. By the end of 2023, Mike had done forty neighbourhood videos covering basically every pocket of Northeast Portland. His website traffic from organic search went from maybe fifty visitors a month to over two thousand. And here's the number that floored me: in 2024, he did thirty-seven transactions — thirty-seven — and twenty-two of them were in the Alberta zip code, 97211. That's about 40 percent of all homes sold in that zip code that year, according to Redfin data. Luna: Wait — a solo agent captured forty percent of a zip code's transactions? That's insane. Lucas: It's preposterous. And the buyers were coming to him already warm. They'd watched his video, they'd seen him walking the block, they trusted him before they ever called. His close rate on leads from the videos was something like 70 percent, compared to maybe 10 percent from Zillow leads. Luna: That's the trust premium. You can't pay for that. Lucas: You can't. And the cost side is just as striking. His total equipment investment was under five hundred dollars. He spends maybe two hours per video — one hour walking and filming, one hour editing on iMovie. So about forty hours a year for the whole library. Compare that to the thousands of dollars agents spend on Zillow's Premier Agent program, where you're paying per lead and competing against five other agents for the same call. Luna: So what's the catch? Why isn't every agent doing this? Lucas: That's the question I asked Mike. And he said two things. First, most agents think video has to be polished. They see the drone shots and the cinematic walkthroughs from luxury agents and assume they need a production budget. Mike's videos are literally an iPhone on a gimbal — he even leaves in background noise from traffic or a barking dog. It's authentic, not slick. Luna: Second thing? Lucas: Patience. He didn't see real lead flow for about four months. The first videos had maybe fifty views each. Most agents would stop after three videos. Mike just kept going because he liked making them. And the compounding effect kicked in around video ten or twelve, when the library started producing a steady trickle of views from search. Luna: That's the part that's hard to replicate — sticking with it when there's no signal. Lucas: It is. But the lesson isn't specific to real estate. Any local business that competes with a national aggregator — think house cleaners fighting Angi, or plumbers fighting HomeAdvisor — can do the same thing. Make content so specific to a neighbourhood that the national platform can't match it. And then give that content to the community groups who already have the audience. Luna: I was just thinking that. A local coffee shop could do a Instagram Reel of each neighbourhood's morning commute pattern. A dog walker could film the best walking routes in different parks. Lucas: Exactly. The principle is: be the most useful source of local knowledge, not the best advertiser. And that's worth a lot — especially if you're a solo operator on a Main Street budget. Luna: And speaking of value — if today's conversation gave you a concrete idea you might actually use, the way this show stays ad-free is listener support. It's at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Just a way to say the show moved your work forward. Lucas: Yeah, we don't run ads, we don't do sponsorships, and that's only possible because some listeners toss in a coffee now and then. If that's you, thank you. Truly. Luna: Alright. So back to Mike. I want to know one more thing — what's the video that performed best, and why? Lucas: It's a video about the Woodlawn neighbourhood, which has a big park and a very active neighbourhood association. That association shared the video on their Facebook page, and it hit about six thousand views. But the key detail: the video mentions that the park has a Saturday morning tai chi group. That's the kind of specific, non-transactional detail that makes someone think, 'This agent actually knows the area.' Luna: So the winning formula is: be specific, be useful, and hand your content to the people who already have trust. Lucas: That's the whole playbook. And Mike is now up to sixty-five videos. He hasn't paid for a lead in over a year. Luna: That's the dream. For any local business, that's the dream. Lucas: It is. And it's not a pipe dream — it's an iPhone, a gimbal, and a willingness to walk a block and talk about what you see. Luna: Alright, I'm off to film my neighbourhood. See you next episode. Lucas: See you then.