Less than one year ago, Jered Jones decided to merge his passion for music with his real estate career by creating real estate content on TikTok.
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Because of its focus on sounds and music, it seemed like the perfect platform for Jones’ needs.
He started writing and editing songs and creating different comedic sketches that displayed homes or otherwise showed that he is a Las Vegas-based real estate agent.
Jones thought he had hit gold recently when he was inspired to create a music video of an emo Realtor — just dejected by a homebuyer couple — trying to sell a $500,000 house with a pool.
For millennials who remember the peak of emo rock, the video is pretty hilarious. And it performed relatively well, racking up nearly 48,000 views on TikTok, but it wasn’t the break Jones was hoping for.
When that big break came, it arrived totally unexpectedly.
Coming into real estate
@jeredjoneshomes I’m just an elder emo trying to sell this house. 3785 Redwood St is a RARE pool home in Vegas for under $500K. Renovated top to bottom – New vinyl flooring, quartz counters, stainless steel appliances, bathrooms, and such pretty lights (nice!) ✨ Don’t you DARE tell me otherwise. Inspired by the great @Matt Cutshall Shot and edited by @Battle Born Media ♬ Pool Home Under 500K – Jered Jones Las Vegas Realtor
Jones has been into music since he was a kid, and always assumed it would be part of his career. That love of music led him to radio initially, where he began as a member of the street team and worked his way up to producer at local stations.
Radio brought Jones and his wife, Brittani, from Jones’ hometown of Las Vegas to Houston, but the city wasn’t the best fit for them. They decided to move to Brittani’s hometown of Cleveland with the goal of making it their permanent home.
By this time, they had two kids and Jones realized that the money he was making in radio wasn’t exactly cutting it to support their growing family, so he decided to get a real estate license.
Real estate ran in his family — Jones’ mom had been a Realtor for years, and he actually grew up helping her look up lockbox codes and addresses in the MLS from home while she was running around town. His sister is a Realtor too.
“I was [my mom’s] little transaction coordinator, I guess,” Jones said. “But I grew up not thinking I was going to do real estate.”
While Jones launched his real estate career, he was still working a split shift in radio in Cleveland, reporting morning traffic from 5 a.m. until 9 a.m., coming home to work on real estate until 3 p.m., then heading back to the station to report on evening traffic until 7 p.m.
“It was crazy,” Jones said. “And I was driving to downtown Cleveland from a really small suburb that was like 30 miles away.”
Jered and Brittani had met in Vegas while both were pursuing creative gigs — she has a degree in dance performance — and after some time in Cleveland, Brittani was itching to get back to Vegas to perform again. So the couple returned to the Sin City with their family in 2020, and Jered got his Nevada real estate license.
He had always thought that incorporating social media content into his real estate business was a great idea, but it took him years to get over the cringe factor of seeing himself on screen.
“Getting out of my own way and feeling more comfortable has always been an issue,” Jones told Inman. “So I think as I got more secure in myself, more secure in my career, I just felt like, music’s never going away from me either, and I’ve always wanted to incorporate music into everything I do. So I just was like, how can I blend music and real estate and comedy and real estate?”
A fun surprise
@jeredjoneshomes I am not kidding. Please. I am begging you. Help me convince my wife that we NEED to buy this house. Am I crazy? #vintage #vegas #historic #playboy ♬ original sound – Jered Jones Las Vegas Realtor
Since starting to create real estate social media content in earnest, Jones had been trying out different styles and formats of videos, from home tours to updates on Las Vegas, with some funny sketches thrown in there. When the idea for the emo Realtor music video hit him, he was excited because it felt like something different enough that could launch him into viral territory.
“I’m like, man, this one’s gonna push, this one’s gonna make it. It’s gonna go viral,” Jones recalled. “But it actually took the back seat.”
The emo video performed well enough, but it was nothing compared to what came next.
Brittani, who by this time had started working with Jered in real estate part-time, had found a unique property in Vegas that was run down, but had interesting features. And she thought it might be a good location to film content.
“It was completely trashed,” Jones said. “We walked inside, and I was assuming there were squatters in there — I had heard there were some homeless people living in there from the neighbors, and I like, have this big metal stake [in my hand] and am walking into this house like, ‘There’s gotta be people in here.'”
“But the more and more I walked in it, I was like, ‘Wait, this thing is a work of art — a masterpiece,'” Jones continued. “And then in the video, you can see I open this big back door and there’s this giant studio, which was [the owner’s] photography studio. [He] was a Playboy photographer. And I was immediately dreaming, ‘This is what every emo musician kid could ever dream of — my own venue. I can make a studio back here, I can put a stage back here.’ So that video was just as organic as it happened.”
As Jones realized the potential of what he was looking at during the TikTok video, his tone suddenly shifted from simple home tour to imploring viewers to help him convince Brittani that they should buy the house and refurbish it.
“Within the next two to three days, there were like a million views and my family and my friends and all of us were logging it and were like, ‘Holy shit, this is insane.'”
Not only did the video go viral, but Jered was able to convince Brittani to buy the home, and the couple are currently under contract. Jered also said that since it went live, he’s had multiple people who watched the video reach out to him wanting to work with him as their Realtor.
How the social media growth is going
Since Jones created that video at the end of August, he has also been able to generate several follow-up videos engaging with some viewers who commented on specifics about the house, and even did an interview with the man who did extensive interior stucco work on the home after getting connected with someone through TikTok who knew the previous owners.
His real estate social media content is still relatively new, but year-to-date, Jones said about 25 percent of his leads have come from social media.
About 40 percent of his leads in the past year have been through agent-to-agent referrals and the rest have come from his sphere of influence and other marketing efforts.
For now, he’s enjoying posting as regularly as possible (he shoots four or five times per week) and making original music for most of his videos in the process. Things are only just starting to take off for Jones, but he said he’s “excited” for the future and embracing being himself on camera.
“It’s just being yourself, putting yourself out there and then truly finding people who rock with that,” he said.
Jered Jones takeaways
- “Get out of your own way.” Don’t worry about trying to please everyone or be someone you’re not on-camera — embrace your own personality and don’t worry about the possibility of looking foolish. Put yourself out there.
- Post consistently on your chosen platform.
- Quality over quantity. Don’t force new content — if you need to sit on an idea for a day or two, that’s okay.
- Use the captions built into your chosen app.
- Try to keep videos on the shorter side — less than 90 seconds is best.
