Today is April 13 and it is of double importance to Mark Pires, a realtor with Berkshire Hathaway Home Services in New Canaan, Connecticut. First, it is his birthday – and, on behalf of the WRE News family, here is wishing Mark a very Happy Birthday!
Also, tonight at 8:00 p.m. EDT is the debut on YouTube of Pires’ seventh feature film, “Back to the FutureMark.” According to the promotional material for this release, “FutureMark is from 2769 and he travels through time creating historical events from our past only to have the credit stolen by famous characters like Moses, Leonardo Davinci, Magellan, Abraham Lincoln and more!”
While the majority of realtors have used online video for straightforward promotional presentations of key property, Pires has used the medium as an entertainment platform for a daily music-comedy show. And in terms of “daily,” we mean literally every day – beginning with his first YouTube livestream on New Year’s Eve in 2018, when he offered a quick talk to promote his services in his market.
“I said to myself, ‘I am going to go online real quick and remind people that I am a realtor,’” he recalled “And I said, ‘For 2019, remember that I am a realtor.’ Because I’ve had a lot of friends who bought homes but didn’t even think about me. The next day, I got up and thought, ‘Wow, that was a pretty cool message.’”
Pires shot and posted another video for New Year’s Day, this time reminding potential viewers that his consultative work as a realtor came at no cost. He kept doing variations of these videos on a daily basis until his pre-realtor career path began to permeate his work – Pires was a former actor who played a Romeo for a year in “Romeo and Juliet” at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theater when he was 18 and a singer/songwriter whose music appeared on MTV. While eschewing show business for real estate, he found himself in the public eye in 2013 when he began using the then-new drone technology to achieve aerial shots of luxury properties he represented – word of that strategy created a flurry of media coverage in Connecticut.
For Pires’ YouTube show – originally called “Mark Pires Real Talk” and now called “Mark insPires” – the presentation is a free-flowing, usually unscripted mix of commentary and improvised music. Many of Pires’ “Real Talk” performances find him upon the BeatSeat, an instrument that he invented and promotes as a “drum for guitarists.” Pires very occasionally has guests join him on his show, but for most of the nightly livestream he responds to questions and comments from viewers – including one regular who inexplicably keeps asking Pires to sing the novelty tune “Crabs for Christmas.”
Using green screens and digital video technology, Pires has shot several film parodies where he plays all of the characters, often using split-screen effects. One of the most ambitious was the 2021 “Supermark vs. Batmark!” with Pires playing variations of the iconic superheroes, a proprietary villain called Dick Facce (who turned up in previous Pires productions) and Dr. Wayne Doppler, a scientific intellect who happens to be the tallest man alive. All of his films are unscripted, with Pires improvising dialogue around a bare-bones plotline.
“I’m able to cohesively make a movie,” he said. “And I think that’s unique in itself. Most people require production teams, they need writers, they need lighting, they need all kinds of directors, and I don’t really care, I’m just going to go out there and allow my creativity to drive every everything that happens. And I’m also understanding what the most important details in life are, which is you really have to stop worrying what other people think about what you do – just have to really fully express yourself. Because that is what’s important.”
Pires’ videos are strictly labors of love that he creates on his own time and his own dime – his real estate work is his career focus, and he stated that over the past six months he enjoyed “the best real estate career,” including a successful closing on a luxury property that had been on the market for years but eluded sales by other realtors. Still, he has no reason not to enjoy the best of both worlds – and “Back to the FutureMark” will be Pires’ 1,563rd consecutive video posting to his YouTube channel, which currently has close to 11,000 subscribers. And while he may not be challenging MrBeast for YouTube audience dominance, he is happy in doing what he is doing.
“I had this kind of motivation on a daily basis that no matter who comes to see the show, that I need to keep balanced myself in a negative world,” he said. “So, going out there and putting on this show keeps me where I need to be in order to stay happy in a world where I think it’s very hard to be happy in 2023. I’ve got to do something tonight in order to entertain people – and whether I entertain one person, five people, a million people, it’s all the same to me.”
For more information and to see Mark Pires’ YouTube videos, check out his channel “Mark insPires”
Photo from “Supermark vs. Batmark!” courtesy of Mark Pires
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