A smaller audience can build a bigger business

Corina Lessa Silva saw a business opportunity in the questions nobody was answering.

Brazilian buyers interested in Florida knew about Miami and Orlando. But information about living in Tampa was harder to find. Silva decided to give those buyers something else to consider.

About 12 years later, she has roughly 540 Portuguese-language YouTube videos about the area and a real estate business built on knowing who she wants to reach.

WATCH: HOW SHE PUT TAMPA ON THE BRAZILIAN COMMUNITY'S MAP 

For agents looking to develop a specialty or grow their international business, her experience offers a useful starting point: Find an audience, understand what’s missing and keep showing up with information they can use.

Speaking on Florida Realtors Live at the 2026 Florida Realtors Convention & Trade Expo, Silva, a broker associate with Tampa Bay Key Real Estate, said choosing a narrow focus can feel risky.

“A lot of people are afraid to be so specific, they feel like they’re going to lose business,” she said.

Her approach was to introduce buyers to a place they weren’t already considering, then help them picture a life there.

Give people a reason to watch

Silva’s first video was hardly a polished production. She had no microphone and didn’t know how to edit. Getting through the video took nearly eight hours.

But she knew what she wanted to show: what living in the community could look like.

That idea still guides her content. Her videos show a taste of the Tampa Bay and Florida lifestyle, including paddleboarding, kayaking and trips to Lightning and Buccaneers games, alongside model home tours and short discussions about the economy and housing market.

She also invites past customers to talk about their experiences in longer, podcast-style conversations. Those discussions let prospective buyers hear from people she has helped.

Her content gives viewers several ways to get acquainted with both the area and her business:

• Lifestyle videos show how people spend their time outside the house.
• Customer conversations offer firsthand accounts of buying and moving.
• Home tours introduce housing options.
• Market discussions explain what’s happening in real estate.

Stay visible before buyers are ready

Silva has posted long-form videos weekly on YouTube for eight years, improving the audio, descriptions and production along the way.

That consistency matters when working with international buyers whose plans may take years to come together. Someone researching a home may still be sorting out a move or business arrangements long before they’re ready to buy.

“So if they’re going to follow you for that long, you have to be consistent,” she said.

By the time some prospective customers visit her office, they tell her they feel as though they already know her. The videos have given them time to become familiar with her before their first conversation.

Keep the conversation going after closing

Silva’s follow-up includes recording customer information in her customer relationship management system and sending postcards for home purchase anniversaries and children’s birthdays.

Her WhatsApp group for past customers has taken on a life of its own. Members trade recommendations for roofers, restaurants, airline deals and other everyday needs.

The group gives customers a place to help one another while keeping them connected to the business that brought them together.

For agents starting their own niche, Silva recommends getting specific about both the audience and the service. Helping people retire in a particular city in Spain, for example, gives a prospective customer a clearer reason to seek out an agent’s expertise.

She also urges patience. Her own content and outreach took roughly one to two years to begin producing business, a timeline she cautioned would not necessarily apply to someone starting today.

Her advice is to create a business plan and prepare six months of content before publishing the first video. That preparation can help agents keep going when a video takes hours to make and draws only a handful of views.

“But if you are going to build trust, that takes time,” she said.

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