WELCOME

Happy Wednesday! I am coming to y’all on the fly because apparently sitting still isn’t in my job description anymore. I speak in Dallas this weekend, then I fly straight to Anaheim. Once Anaheim wraps, I’m off the grid for real, heading to Greece, Turkey, and Italy. OMS, I could not be more excited!

I have a little time before I disappear into the Mediterranean, so let’s talk about what’s been bugging me for weeks. Everybody’s obsessed with “stopping the scroll,” but I have to say that stopping the scroll isn’t the win most think it is. That’s why today we’re talking about attention as an asset, why many are wasting the opportunity, and what actually happens after you’ve got somebody’s thumb to stop. (Grab your coffee and settle in because I went off on a bit of a tear today.)

Speaking of things worth your attention: Power Suite x PopStore is putting on a dinner called The Table, and I want to see you there. It’s Sunday, August 2nd at 6pm in Anaheim, the night before Tom Ferry kicks off, and it’s built for women who are ready to grow. No stage, no nonsense, just a seat at the table with Kelly Anne Harris and me, plus a room full of ambitious women having real conversations about building brands that actually stand out. Ask your questions, share your ideas, leave inspired. The best conversations happen around the table. Spots are limited, so don’t sleep on it!

THE REALITY OF REAL ESTATE

Atlanta Edition

We got into this a few weeks ago, but it’s still on my mind. As y’all know, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became federal law. One of the parameters of this bill is that corporations can’t just come in and buy up houses anymore. Before you scroll past this thinking it’s some far-off policy thing that doesn’t touch your business, trust me, it does. Directly. Especially if you’re in Atlanta. I’m pleased that GA Senator Raphael Warnock added a specific provision within it caps institutional investors at 350 single-family homes. Anything beyond that triggers steep fines (up to $1 million per violation or three times the purchase price).

So, what does it all mean in plain talk? Well, hopefully, it gives the police officer, the firefighter, the teacher, regular everyday Bobby and Susie, an actual shot at buying their first home, their next home, or building generational wealth through real estate. It gives the mom-and-pop investor a real chance to compete for a property, instead of getting steamrolled at closing by a hedge fund with a blank check.

I need everyone to sit with this number for a second: in the Atlanta market, over 60% of homes between zero and $500,000 with three bedrooms or more were being bought by entities intending to use them as rentals. That includes homes built-to-rent by big private-equity-backed builders like Lennar. Sixty. Damn. Percent. Now, somebody’s going to comment and tell me, “Glennda, that’s not the real number; it’s actually 13%.” Now, they’re not wrong… if you’re looking at the entire Atlanta market from zero to $22 million. But that’s not the number that matters to a first-time buyer. The number that matters is the one in their price range, in their bracket, competing against their actual budget. And in that bracket, it was over 60%. This is why regular people felt like they couldn’t win a bidding war for years. They weren’t losing to another family. They were losing to a spreadsheet.

Now, I never get mad about opinions, and I don’t get out of sorts when people disagree with me. What makes my head spin around and snot fly out of my nose is when somebody posts something inaccurate for their own benefit (whether it’s clout, for an app, for vanity, etc.) and doesn’t care that regular agents are going to believe it and make decisions based on a lie.

Case in point: I watched a video from a guy claiming the Atlanta market is down 25%. I called bullshit. I challenged him to give me one actual zip code in Atlanta that’s down 25%. Because you don’t get to scare an entire market to sell your app. This guy decides the way to respond isn’t to give me a zip code. It’s to make a whole other video about me. See, a while back, this same guy posted that agents should be using Zillow Showcase because it gets more views on your listings. I commented on it, and not to be mean because that isn’t my style. I commented that according to his own Zillow profile, he hadn’t sold a house in four years… so maybe don’t tell agents to bet their listings on a platform strategy you personally haven’t used to sell a damn house in half a decade, while you’ve been busy building a media company on the side.

Instead of sitting with that, he goes and makes a whole new video basically going, “Poor me, Glennda’s coming for me,” using my name to get himself more attention. The leveraging of what I’ve built is what gets my goat. Using my name as a vanity play instead of just answering the actual question: where’s your zip code?

I guess the reality here is that agents deserve accurate information, not a scare tactic meant to drum up business. If you’re going to put something out into the world that affects how a fellow agent runs their business, it better be true or we’re gonna have words.

STORYTIME WITH GLENNDA

Attention Is an Asset; Stop Wasting It

We need to talk about the scroll. Every agent I know is obsessed with stopping it. They’re all, “Stop the scroll, stop the scroll, stop the scroll,” like it’s the finish line but it isn’t. Stopping the scroll is step one. This is simply the cover charge to get in the building. What you do after someone stops is the whole damn point, and most agents never even get there because they’re too busy congratulating themselves on the view count.

Let’s talk about how you actually stop someone’s thumb. And more importantly, what you do with them once you’ve got their attention, because attention you don’t use is just attention you wasted.

How You Actually Stop the Scroll

I’m sorry to have to break it to y’all but people don’t stop scrolling because your video is pretty. (Yes, I know how much effort you put in to make it a vibe and that’s why I just apologized.) You want to know why they really stop? They stop because they see themselves in your video. That’s the whole secret. You’ve got to show the trauma, the drama, or the friction because if someone doesn’t think what you’re saying applies to them, they are gone, baby, gone, and the algorithm will never send them your way again.

Here’s how I think about it: show the best picture, the worst picture, or the limbo picture. Limbo is the money shot, by the way. Limbo is the first circle of hell for a reason because nobody knows how to sit in “I don’t know.” So when I post a front picture of a house buried behind a wall of trees and say, “Do you want to buy this house you can’t even see?” that’s not a gimmick. That’s me handing somebody a question they didn’t know they had, and now they’ve got to know the answer. That’s a stopped scroll with a purpose.

Viral Isn’t the Same as Valuable

Now here’s where I need you to sit down and grasp tightly, because this part makes agents mad. I saw a video a while back. This was AI-generated where an agent jumped out of a plane. As she’s careening towards earth, she said, “Everybody says land in water to break your fall, but really, you want to land at 123 Banana Street.” This video was cute and it was clever. It was great because she landed at that Banana Street property and began to walk the listing. It was a regular listing video with a spin that I loved. This video pulled something like 500,000 views and 70,000 hearts. I thought, Damn, I need to find whoever made this for her.

Then I did a little digging. You know what that video did for her business? Not a damn thing. The listing expired or it got withdrawn. She did not sell that house. And I noticed that she had 3,000 followers before the video and roughly 3,000 followers after. Half a million people watched a woman skydive into a real estate listing and not one of them did a single thing about it. Oh, my stars and stripes, that is basically a magic trick where people are amazed for a hot minute, they clap, and then they walk away and forget your name.

I see this all the time and my buddy Brian is proof. Brian’s a loan officer, and years ago he worked at McDonald’s in high school. One day the district manager comes in, all in a lather, and tells him 35,000 chicken nuggets are missing from inventory. That’s like a whole truckful! Brian starts doing the math out loud in his video. He figures he personally ate 30 to 50 nuggets a day, just doing “quality control.” He figured if he was doing that, and there were ten other employees, times however many shifts and he wonders out loud if that’s where the 35,000 nuggets went, one bite at a time. He posts this musing as a video. Guess how many views he got.

Ten million views, y’all! Ten. Damn. Million.

But, did the video of his Ocean’s Eleven-style nugget heist get him a single mortgage lead? No, ma’am, not even one. The video did nothing for his business. Yes, it was hilarious, and yes, it was relatable. I bet half of Atlanta has thought about those McDonald’s nuggets since, yet while he stopped the scroll, he failed to move the needle on what pays his bills. That’s the trap. A big number feels like proof you’re winning, but without action behind it, it’s just a big number.

What Actually Compels Someone to Act

The video that has done the most for my business this year didn’t have a fraction of those views. I sat down at my kitchen table, mad as hell, and hit record. A buyer three days from closing tried to tell me his brother had some emergency and needed his closing money, so could my seller just knock $15,000 off the price? I told the whole story straight into the camera (no script and mad as a wet hen) and said I hoped to God he didn’t actually have a brother, because I remembered lying about my own grandma being sick in seventh grade and thinking I’d spoken her getting sick into being.

That video ran eighteen minutes long and pulled 56,000 views. In terms of numbers, it was nothing compared to that skydiving video, nothing compared to Brian’s nuggets. However, that video got 3,700 hearts, 408 comments, 616 shares, and it brought me more new followers than anything I’d posted in 60 days. People watched the whole thing. Every metric that actually matters, meaning skip rate, save rate, share rate, comment rate, beat everything else I’d posted. I didn’t plan a single second of it. I was just mad on my client’s behalf, and I let people see it.

That’s the difference between stopping the scroll and compelling action: one is a performance, the other is a real person telling the truth about something that matters to somebody watching.

So, What Do You Actually Do With This?

My advice here is to stop chasing the video that gets you discovered by strangers who’ll never call you. Start making the video that makes the fifteen people who already sort of know you pick up the phone. You don’t need to go viral; you need to be valuable. And you’ve got to bring that value consistently to an audience who trusts you enough to act on what you say.

Also, don’t get sucked into this bro-culture nonsense where the loudest, most machismo version of content wins. You don’t have to scream from the rooftop. In addition to bringing value, bring compassion. Bring the truth, even when it’s messy and you’re mad and your hair’s not done. That’s what gets someone off the couch and into your DMs asking when they can see a house.

Attention is an asset, so it’s key to spend it like one.

GLENNDA’S GURU

Welcome, Nykia Wright!

I am just thrilled to be sitting down with Nykia Wright. Let me say this—Nykia Wright does not do small moves. Oh, no. She’s the CEO of the National Association of REALTORS®, and before that she ran the Chicago Sun-Times through a full digital transformation and a merger with WBEZ. She has fifteen-plus years advising the likes of MIT, McDonald’s, and Toll Brothers, plus her own SaaS company on the side. This Carnegie Mellon and Dartmouth MBA brain is running the biggest voice in real estate. Whoa.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been more impressed by someone! I don’t want to just listen to Nykia; I want her to lead me to the promised land, so if you want to be inspired, look no further!

Thank you, Nykia!

GLENNDAISM

Today’s Words of Wisdom

GLENNDA BAKER & ASSOCIATES

Meeting the Moment

Everyone knows how much I love a grandma house. That said, I have a special place in my heart for homes designed to meet the moment. My new listing at 373 Glynnwilde Drive NW in Marietta does just this.

This home actually understands how you live now. You want a terrace level with a full second kitchen and bedroom for the in-laws or the college kid who boomerangs home, done. You want a content studio for podcasting or building your brand, it’s already built in, no garage conversion required. There’s a wellness room if you’re into that, a media room for game day, and a main-level guest suite so nobody’s climbing stairs at Thanksgiving.

Upstairs, the owner’s retreat is a whole vibe with a closet that out-dresses most boutiques. And there’s a deck backed up to nothing but trees so you can just breathe. Nearly an acre in Harrison Oaks, top school district, minutes from everything. What I love is that this one’s not asking you to choose between luxury and real life because you can have both.