For Jim McDonner, standing out as a new real estate agent meant doing something different.
After retiring from the U.S. Navy and starting a second career in real estate, Jim entered one of the country’s most competitive housing markets. Northwest Arkansas is home to Walmart, Tyson Foods, and J.B. Hunt, with roughly 40 new residents moving to the region every day. At the same time, more than 4,000 licensed agents are competing for their business.
"I started exploring different ways to build a network using AI," Jim said.
Instead of producing the same listing videos and market updates as everyone else, Jim chose to focus on education. Every week, he answers the questions buyers and sellers ask most often, creating videos that explain the market rather than just advertising homes.
After discovering HeyGen, Jim built a workflow that enables him to consistently publish educational videos, connect with relocation buyers before they arrive in Arkansas, and compete with agents who have spent decades building their businesses.
Replacing hours of editing with a repeatable workflow
Before HeyGen, creating a single video could take up most of the day. Jim researched topics, wrote scripts, collected B-roll, recorded narration, and manually put everything together inside Canva.
"I would spend hours editing each video," he said. "I simply don't have that much time."
To improve quality, he hired a professional videographer to produce a series of 12 videos. While the results were good, the process remained expensive and time-consuming. Even then, he managed to publish only one or two videos each week and often skipped weeks entirely.
"It wasn’t very consistent," he said. "It’s no surprise my channel didn’t gain any traction."
Jim knew that consistency would decide whether video became a real business driver, but he needed a workflow that would fit into a hectic real estate schedule.
Building an AI-powered content system
After completing an AI certification course, Jim started testing dozens of AI tools to build the right technology stack for his business. Today, his process is almost completely automated.
He uses Manus to research the latest market trends, ChatGPT to draft scripts, Gamma to create buyer and relocation guides, and HeyGen's Video Agent to produce polished videos using his brand assets.
Every Monday morning, he plans the week’s content, writes his scripts, generates five videos, schedules each one, and then gets on with the rest of his week.
"I can spend three, four hours at most on a Monday morning and create an entire week's worth of videos and schedule them in advance," Jim said.
Instead of manually tweaking every transition, Video Agent automatically creates engaging visuals, captions, and locally relevant B-roll.
"The Video Agent is what I use almost exclusively these days," he said.
The realism also surprised him. "I was quite surprised that you could take basically a still picture and recreate the mannerisms," Jim said. "Most people don’t realise it unless I tell them."
Reaching more buyers through educational videos
Since adopting HeyGen, Jim has moved away from generic market updates and towards educational content built around actual questions from buyers.
"If someone asks me a question that really resonates with me, I make a small note," he said. "Then I write a script and create a video on that."
The strategy has steadily grown his audience. His YouTube channel now has more than 1,000 subscribers, while his TikTok and LinkedIn audiences continue to grow. More importantly, he is seeing a clear shift in who is watching his content.
When he first launched his channel, most of the viewers were other real estate agents.
"I would say that now probably 70% of my audience falls within that key demographic," he said, referring to buyers between 25 and 45 years of age.
His videos have also started bringing in business. One educational listing campaign helped sell a $650,000 property in just seven days on the market. Another video attracted buyers relocating from Memphis.
He has also received enquiries from California after running targeted educational video campaigns in areas from where people frequently relocate to Northwest Arkansas.
One of his most successful videos explained why Zillow's Zestimate often differs from the actual market value. The video became so popular that a shopper recognised Jim by his voice while he was walking through Sam's Club.
"She came up to me and said, 'Hey, I’ve just watched your video on Zillow,'" Jim said.
For Jim, that moment confirmed that his educational approach was working.
Building a modern real estate business with AI
Jim believes AI has become one of the biggest competitive advantages available to newer real estate agents.
Without it, he says he would still be manually editing videos, publishing irregularly, and finding it difficult to reach relocation buyers outside Arkansas.
"I wouldn’t have come anywhere close to the audience I’ve reached now," he said.
Today, he not only relies on HeyGen for his own marketing but also recommends it to other agents. He is preparing to conduct a training session for the 24 agents in his brokerage, showing them how to build consistent video workflows using AI.
"It’s probably the easiest way I’ve found to create a professional-quality video," Jim said.
As he continues to grow his business, Jim sees video as the cornerstone of modern real estate marketing.
"To reach people, especially the younger group of buyers, you have to do it through video," he said.
And for him, HeyGen has made that possible.
