In Search of Fresh Revenue Sources, TikTok Finds A Way Through Luxury Real Estate

It’s not all about the dancing. 

Or, as influencer Tori Wade explains, “If you have some beautiful walkway in a mansion, people are going to click on that video.”

Wade, 21, who has a strong presence on Instagram, TikTok and recently signed to Wilhelmina Models, moved to Los Angeles from her hometown of Sydney, Australia two months ago to join Clubhouse BH—one of the several ‘content houses’ that have cropped up around the Los Angeles area. This trend of bringing social media stars to live together in luxury mansions began informally a decade ago when a group of YouTube stars rented a home in Venice Beach that came to be known as The Station. Originally these houses were called ‘collab houses’ but the moniker has recently morphed to ‘content’ houses, reflecting the shift toward a business model that needs an endless stream of content to keep audiences engaged and, therefore, maintain profitability. 

At 12,000 square feet, Clubhouse BH is a 7-bedroom house currently home to about half a dozen content creators with many others coming by to use the location as a place to film. It is one of five such homes managed by Clubhouse Media Group, the company which manages this group of creators out of about 50 total creators on its roster. Clubhouse Media Group, which goes by its stock ticker CMGR, leases the properties, often for tens of thousands per month, and provides a staff of cleaners, cooks, drivers and make-up artists as well as the assorted equipment needed to create the photos and videos. 

“The inflection point was around 2019 when I read the S-1 filing from Endeavor,” said Chris Young, co-founder and President of Clubhouse Media Group, referring to the parent company for talent management of many sports and entertainment stars. Young, previously an entertainment lawyer who had managed stars as Daisy Keech as well as many event launches, says, “I noticed that the one portion of the business that was really making a lot of money for them was their new media. They were investing in their talent and creating intellectual property with them. I realized that there was something there where if you gather all those elements together: physical spaces, digital talent management and the ability to invest in them. All those conglomerate factors, gave me the push to say [this could] be really interesting.”

While paying an influencer to promote brands or products is nothing new the addition of luxury real estate into the mix means even more avenues for profit begin to emerge—as well as ways for skilled influencers to elevate themselves from the rest of the noise on the internet. Traditional advertising centers around a brand or product being prominently featured, but today’s successful influencers know they need to come up with ways to get followers to click on a video or gallery of pictures so that followers see what is being promoted. 

“It's all about the atmosphere. If you have something that looks luxurious, then people are going to click on that,” says Wade, who notes how hard it can be for creators to access the right filming locations. “My biggest struggle when I was back home in Sydney was I'd get in my car and drive around and I would try to find locations to film videos. Being in this house there are unlimited amounts of backdrops. She cites the movie theater where she conducted this interview from as an example. “I did a photo shoot yesterday and then I also filmed a dancing video in here. You wouldn’t think it [was the same room].” 

Luxury real estate agents take note. The next generation of high net worth home buyers won’t look to the number of parking spaces, bedrooms or guest houses as sought-after amenities, but the number of varied wall textures both inside and outside the home. 

Beyond providing visually-appealing backdrops, when it comes to content houses the money is in the merging. Having a team of stars in one house makes it easy to appear in each other’s feeds, broadening the audience for each creator, and gives each of them more opportunities to create original content any time of day. With the sheer volume of content being produced there is enough raw material to repackage the creative assets multiple times over. A management company can then bundle photos or shortened video clips and sell them again, profiting from them once more.

“It’s a reason why we have different houses with different niches,” says Young, who oversees other houses such as the antic-filled Dobre house, Clubhouse Europe and the Roz Family. One of the next groups CMGR is bringing into a content house will focus on creating NFT products. 

Wade also adds a content house can be appealing for established celebrities to come visit. 

“The house is such a conducive environment for them to want to stick around and hang out,” she says. “As opposed to a production studio, where they come in and they do their thing, and they want to get out. They all the stick around for hours. It's created an environment where people want to just stay and socialize.” She mentions a recent stint saying, “It was like crazy town. That was two days straight where I would walk into I room and...there would be a new celebrity in the house.” Recent famous names who who stopped by Clubhouse BH include Paula Abdul, Travis Barker and Offset. 

That doesn’t mean these houses aren’t without challenges. As Young describes it CMGR is trying to professionalize an industry which is still nascent in its trajectory. This can mean providing media training or financial literacy assistance to the creators, as well as helping them navigate the contracts of advertisers. CMGR also created an advisory group with experts from the medical, wellness, human resources, education and counseling fields.

“The industry is constantly changing,” says Young. “It's often hard to have long term strategies. There's this constant need for for pivots and changes to our model of execution. Adapting our business model to encompass that is probably the single largest threshold that we try to overcome.”

For the creators themselves the challenges are much closer to home. 

“Everything you do as an influencer is your brand,” says Wade. “Your work is your future. You are your own boss at the end of the day. Everything is up to you.”