The storyteller: The Agency’s Lesley Shea on marketing that matters

In the rarified world of ultra-luxury real estate marketing, nothing is left to chance. Every detail, from the adjectives in the listing description to the color of the orchid on the kitchen counter, is scrutinized, critiqued and sometimes even argued over. In all the boardroom debates, one deceptively simple question guides every decision: Does it tell the right story?

Ask Lesley Shea. A former head of marketing for Compass, among other luxury brokerages, Shea helped craft marketing campaigns for estates with $100 million-plus price tags. Today, she applies that experience as a Realtor at The Agency in Monterey, California, selling homes in the $1-2 million range.

This made me curious. Do the skills translate? Can C-suite marketing strategies really help sell “everyday luxury” listings?

I recently sat down with Shea to find out. She walked me through the ultra-luxury marketing tactics that work at any price point, shared her hard-won advice for new agents and even gave me her best performing script.

Lesley Shea: By the numbers

• Market: Monterrey Peninsula, California
• Niche: Second homes, luxury listings
• 2024 sales volume + sides: $9,100,300 + 5 sides
• Primary lead generation strategy: CRM and referrals
• Highest ROI real estate software: Less Annoying CRM

No pressure, no diamonds

After a decade climbing the slippery ladder to the C-suite, Shea landed her dream job: head of marketing for Compass in Northern California and Nevada. Her timing couldn’t have been better. The company went public just seven months after she signed her contract.

Paired with Compass’ aggressive expansion in the Bay Area, the IPO turned an already enviable role into one of the most influential positions in residential real estate marketing. But the pressures of leading a 50-person team through the pandemic were taking their toll. She was already dangerously close to the edge of burnout when tragedy struck. Her father passed away after a long battle with mental illness.

The loss became the catalyst Shea needed to transform her life. Her role at Compass was creative, prestigious and lucrative. It was everything she had thought she wanted, and she had worked tirelessly to get it. But in her grief, she somehow managed to stumble into the courage to face a hard truth. One that she had been desperately trying to ignore: Her dream job was making her miserable. She wanted out.

Shea had always been secretly envious of the listing agents she worked with. They seemed happy. They were actually having fun at work. She also knew she wanted to help people navigate difficult life transitions, both professionally and in her personal life. So she did something brave, something most people only daydream about while they watch Selling Sunset. She quit her cushy six-figure job and got her real estate license.

Storytelling 101: Market to people, not price points

As a newly-minted agent, Shea had a problem. She was used to marshalling a small army of world-class marketing professionals to create campaigns. Now she was on her own. The Agency offers robust marketing support for its agents, more than most brokerages, but it was still a far cry from the seemingly unlimited budgets she had at her disposal when she was running her team.

Worse, she began to question the utility of the hard-won skills she spent the last decade acquiring. Would the same playbook she used to market $100 million-plus estates work on the luxury starter homes she would need to cut her teeth on as a new Realtor? She was skeptical. Luckily, after touring some of her brokerage’s priciest listings, she had an epiphany:

“I spent the day visiting three of our priciest listings, $35 million, $30 million and $63 million. And I came back to my little 1960s, three-bedroom California ranch, never remodeled, and sat in my backyard, just loving where I lived. I was thinking back through all these homes, and they all have kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms and toilets. They’re all the same. They’re just on different levels. The campaigns might be bigger and flashier, but at the end of the day, it’s really the people you’re marketing to — the buyer and seller — who matter most.”

• How to apply this strategy: To tell the right story, you need to understand the people you’re telling it to. Their hopes and dreams, their anxieties and fears. Buyer personas and profiles of the buyers and sellers in your niche, gleaned from real-world data, can help. Corporate marketing teams like Shea’s use personas to guide their decisions, from choosing a logo down to the orchids I mentioned earlier. They offer a handy shortcut to answering their mission-critical question: “Does it tell the right story?”

At a minimum, you should know:

• Their life stage and motivation: Where are people in their journey, and how does that translate to the home they’re looking for (or selling)? For example, empty nesters respond to very different stories than young professionals.
• Their values: Are they more conservative or more progressive? Family-first or career-driven?
• Their lifestyle priorities: What matters most in their next home and neighborhood? Do they work from home or commute? Does proximity to a top school district outweigh walkability, restaurants or retail?
• Their fears: What keeps them up at night? Affordability? Sky-high Mortgage rates? Making a wise long-term investment?

Pro Tip

If you already have a sizable database, your CRM can be a data goldmine for building personas. Emails, texts and notes from client conversations can reveal incredibly useful insights about your audience. Don’t have time to dig through your CRM? Hire a virtual assistant to do it for you. For a 30,000 foot view of the people in your farm area, the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey offers free, annually updated demographic data at the county level.

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Set the stage to sell the dream of home

In 2026, even brand-new agents know the oldest cliché in real estate: Realtors are part financial advisor, part therapist. Savvy top producers who understand sales psychology add a third crucial role: hypnotist.

If that sounds too woo-woo for you, consider this: according to Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman, 95% of purchasing decisions happen subconsciously. Or, as Barbara Corcoran put it, buyers choose with their hearts and justify with their heads. Like hypnotists, successful real estate marketers appeal to subconscious desires, whether they realize it or not, no pun intended. They know that in marketing, facts and figures almost always lead to failure, not fortune.

But buyers can snap out of that nearly hypnotic emotional decision-making state faster than you think. Even minor issues with the home, dingy carpeting in the primary suite, or a depressingly empty living room, can easily break the spell. That’s why luxury marketers obsess over them, and why you should too. Skilled storytellers understand this intuitively. Here’s Shea:

“Nothing in marketing matters unless the house looks good. So spend money on curb appeal. Stage it. Absolutely stage it. And to the best of your ability. You’re going to have clients who just don’t want to. But no photographer in the world can make a house that’s not very appealing look appealing.”

• How to apply this strategy: Don’t break the spell. Invest the time, money and effort to make your listing as attractive as possible for your audience.

I know, I know. Home staging is expensive. Landscaping costs a fortune. But Shea isn’t suggesting you drop $25,000 to stage a $150,000 home for six months. That would be ridiculous. A good rule of thumb: decide what you can afford to spend, then add 30%.

If your budget is truly stretched to the breaking point, consider virtual staging. You can create hundreds of stylish, hyper-realistic virtually-staged photos with Collov AI for (much) less than you probably spend on coffee each month.

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Avoid shiny-object syndrome

Shiny object syndrome, flitting from one trendy marketing strategy to the next on a whim, is a deadly epidemic in real estate. It kills careers faster than anything else I can think of, and I’ve been obsessing over agent performance for a decade now. Here’s why: Just because a marketing strategy works for someone else does not mean it will work for you.

Shea’s advice? Choose marketing strategies that match your personality. Good marketers try everything once. Exceptional marketers, like Shea, understand the value of specialization. They focus on what they know will work for them. The difference is everything.

• How to apply this strategy: Pick two or three marketing strategies that actually fit your personality and commit to them for at least six months. Ignore the hype, if you can. Going viral does not automatically mean more leads.

Not convinced? Ask Gail DeMarco. At 68 years old, she closed nearly $40 million in 2025, mainly from leads generated on her 3-year-old YouTube channel. Early on, she discovered something that changed how she thought about going viral: A local team’s channel was getting 10 times as many views as hers. She looked them up on the MLS. They were barely selling anything. Views and likes, even millions of them, aren’t leads. Stop chasing them.

If you do decide to jump into a trendy marketing strategy, take Shea’s advice. Only try it if it fits your personality. If it does, make sure you have a proven gameplan to follow. Considering YouTube? Check out Gail DeMarco’s exact step-by-step YouTube strategy below:

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Invest in a CRM you’ll actually use

If I could somehow manage to convince the NSA to let me send a text message to every Realtor in the country tomorrow morning, this is what you would wake up to: “The best CRM is the one you actually use!

” Another well-worn real estate cliche, I know. But it’s a cliche for two good reasons.

First, because like all cliches that last, it’s catchy. Second, because it’s true. The right CRM can easily help you double your GCI and keep you from pulling your hair out. Okay, okay: The right CRM can keep you from pulling ALL of your hair out. By the fistful. After three weeks on the job.

Here’s Shea:

“So many agents lose their people. They close a deal, move on to the next one, and maybe send a gift as a thank-you. There could be an automated email marketing campaign to wish them a happy anniversary. But if you’re really watching your contacts in a CRM, then they come up, and you can shoot a text and give them a call.”

• How to apply this strategy: Invest in a CRM that works for your unique business and work style without overwhelming you with features. Then, use it. Every. Single. Day.

Look, I get it. Most real estate CRMs on the market these days still fall into one of two camps: Cheap and borderline useless, or eye-wateringly expensive and packed with confusing bells and whistles you’ll never use. Finding the middle road is key.

Shea was adamant that new agents should avoid splashing out on pricey CRMs with overly-complicated features. She tried one and hated it.

Luckily, Lone Wolf has a solution: Lone Wolf Relationships. As the name suggests, Relationships comes with everything you need to build and maintain relationships at a fraction of the price of competitors. You’ll get handy AI and texting features, pre-written emails and thoughtfully-built workflow automations that actually make your job easier.

Lesley Shea’s best script

As promised, here is Shea’s best online buyer lead script. Like all the great scripts, it’s straightforward and wildly persuasive. Who can resist real estate FOMO? It’s Zillow’s entire business model.

“I would really love to help you. Thank you. I’ve seen what you’re interested in. By the way, would you like to see the properties that you don’t get to see on Zillow?”

Unfortunately, it’s just not very well known, but there is a large part of our market that either never makes it to Zillow. Or, it does, but only after real estate agents have been aware of the property and we’ve been able to prep our clients and get them ready to see it.

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The full picture

Know an agent who is thriving despite the odds and has actionable insights to share? We’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us here: [email protected].