A song for every property

What I’ve been doing with music and property videos at Countrytyme, and why the cost matters.

With the slowdown in the real estate market, we’re having to be more creative and resourceful in how we reach customers and market our properties. The growing popularity of short-form videos on social media is just the kind of wave we want to surf to help us reach that goal. My custom AI toolset has been key to making this possible.

I’ve been making songs for some of our Countrytyme listings, then building videos around them. The songs are about the actual properties. If there’s a porch, a firepit or a creek in the lyrics, you’ll see it in the pictures.

I want people to get a feel for spending time there. A wooded lot can look a lot like the next wooded lot when you’re scrolling through listings. Music gives me another way to show what I like about a particular place.

Once we have the song, we can make several videos at the same time. Morgan’s Crossing got a full tour and three short versions. That gives us enough material to introduce the property and follow up later without having to start over each time.

What would this normally cost?

A custom song and a set of property videos can get expensive pretty quickly. Amazing Audio Ads puts a professionally produced local-business jingle at $1,000–$5,000. RoomLift lists a standard property tour at $300–$600, plus $50–$100 for each additional social cut.

Those prices cover different kinds of production, including filming, so they aren’t a quote for these videos. They do give you an idea of what businesses pay to have music and video made for them. Spending that kind of money on every cabin lot would be hard to justify.

Suno’s monthly plans are $10 for Pro and $30 for Premier. I also have my other AI tools and my time in this, and we’re using property photos we already have. But I can make songs for multiple listings with the same subscription, then use each song across the whole campaign.

This is part of what I’m bringing to Countrytyme. I’ve put together a way to give individual properties their own music, a full video and follow-up posts at a cost we can work with. I’m deciding what to feature, working out the sound, choosing what’s worth keeping and getting it into a form we can use. The tools let me do a lot more of that work.

Enough material for a campaign

The Morgan’s Crossing shorts each cover something different: the cabin, the land and a weekend there. The cabin and land versions are held back for follow-up posts. We can bring the property around again with something else to show people, using the same song so it starts to sound familiar.

That was something I wanted from this. If we’re already working on the property, let’s make the different versions together and have them ready. We can schedule them out instead of posting one video and moving on.

Creekview has a full tour, a Facebook version and separate shorts for the creek, the cabin and the terrain. There’s more to show than will fit in one post.

Getting the music right

I use a Claude skill called Tofu to help produce the songs. It’s a set of instructions and reference material that includes what we’ve learned from earlier attempts. Claude looks at the listing and photos, helps with the lyrics and writes the directions for Suno, which generates the music and vocals.

For Eagles Roost, we went with a relaxed country song, a whistled hook and some fiddle. The Adirondack chairs in the lyrics are the chairs in the photos. I like those details because they make the song about that cabin.

Creekview took a little more work. I had friends floating down the creek on tubes, with a cooler in the middle, in mind. I asked for a yacht-rock feel. The first version was too slow. We changed it, then managed to cram too many styles into the next one. The third came out as summer country, and that’s the one I picked.

All three rounds happened the same day. I listen, tell it what I don’t like and try again. We save those corrections in the skill so there’s something to work from next time.

Putting the video together

After I choose the song, the photos are timed to the lyrics. When it sings about the porch, the video shows the porch. We also use the rotating 3D map from the Countrytyme website so people can see how the land lays out before they drive over.

There’s still checking to do. On Creekview, we caught copy that said 50 feet of creek frontage when the listing described a creek about 50 feet wide. We fixed it and exported the video again. Those mean two very different things.

I’ve written before about working with AI and having to check what it actually did. This is another example. Claude and Suno do a lot of the production work, and I make the decisions about what we put out.

I want to see which videos get people interested enough to ask about a property or come visit. In the meantime, we have original music and several finished videos for each of these listings, and I can keep using what I’ve built for the next property. That’s a useful addition to what I can do for Countrytyme.