Armin is a Toronto real estate agent. His listings are strong, his production is good, and for a long time his content only ever reached people already shopping for a condo. Then he posted 45 seconds about the World Cup ending, and 1.4 million people watched it.
The problem was not the content quality
This is the part agents find hardest to hear, so let us start there.
His listing videos were not bad. The footage was clean, the properties were genuinely good, the edits were tight. The problem was that every single video answered a question only a buyer would ask.
If your content only speaks to people currently in the market, your reach is capped at the size of that market on any given week. In Toronto that is a small, extremely contested pool that every other agent in the city is also shouting at.
He was making good content for an audience of maybe a few thousand people. Meanwhile the agents growing fastest were making content for the whole city and converting a fraction of it.
What the video actually was
The World Cup had just ended. He filmed himself, unscripted, reacting to it. In Farsi, for his own community. It ran about 45 seconds.
There is no property in it. No price. No call to action. No mention of real estate at all.
It did 1.4 million views.
Why it worked
Three things, and none of them are luck.
It was culturally timed. The World Cup ending is a moment where an entire community is already feeling something at the same time. Content that plugs into a shared emotional moment does not need to manufacture attention, it borrows attention that already exists.
It was in his own language. Posting in Farsi for a Farsi-speaking Toronto audience did not shrink his reach, it concentrated it. The video landed hard with a specific community, which drove the engagement rate up fast, which is what pushed it out to everyone else. Speaking narrowly is often how you travel widely.
It was actually funny. Not brand-funny. Not marketing-department funny. He was genuinely amused and it read as real. Audiences have an extremely accurate detector for a professional performing personality versus a person having one.
The part agents get wrong about this
The wrong lesson is "post random stuff and hope."
The right lesson is that people hire an agent they feel they know. A video that makes 1.4 million people feel like they know you is doing the exact job your listing videos are trying to do, just far earlier in the process and at 100 times the scale.
When he does post a listing now, it lands on an audience that already likes him. The listing video did not get better. The audience receiving it did.
The listing video did not get better. The audience receiving it did.
What we actually changed in his strategy
We did not stop making property content. That would be silly, it is what generates the enquiry.
We changed the ratio and the job of each piece:
- Content built to travel. Personality, culture, humour, opinions about the city. No property required. This is what grows the audience.
- Content built to convert. Property tours, neighbourhood breakdowns, pre-construction explainers. This is what turns the audience into calls.
Roughly two of the first for every one of the second. The first group is not a distraction from the business, it is what makes the second group work at all.
You can see the range of what that looks like in practice across our real estate work, including the pre-construction and bilingual pieces we shoot for the same client.
The honest caveat
Not every culturally timed video does 1.4 million views. Most do not. This was his best performing piece of content ever and we are not going to pretend it is reproducible on demand.
What is reproducible is the underlying structure: consistently making content that a person with no immediate intent to buy would still choose to watch. Do that every week and you will land one of these eventually. Do only listing tours and you mathematically cannot.
If you want a breakdown of which formats are travelling right now, we publish the outlier data for Toronto real estate with the actual numbers.