David Lemon has built a real estate business on Instagram buzz

Among the pantheon of instantly recognizable St. Louisans, the people who get stopped when they walk into a restaurant or a coffee shop, David Lemon is an outlier. He’s not a TV personality or a professional athlete. He’s never run for office, been on a billboard, or competed on The Voice.

He is, simply, a guy who sells houses. A real estate agent, one of approximately 9,000 in the region. But because he’s so damn good at social media—and because he has a distinct look (trucker hat, longish hair, mustache) and consistently amusing patter—his reach exceeds his bio. He has 49,000-plus followers on Instagram, where he regularly posts videos of houses for sale that garner hundreds of comments and thousands of likes. When people come up to him at restaurants, they don’t say, “There’s that real estate guy.” They say, “Hey look!” They know his catchphrase.

The whole phrase is “Hey look, there’s a house.” It’s how Lemon, 33, starts each real estate video, and from there, he’s off—a Realtor/comedian expertly cutting between rooms, comedy bits, and wide-eyed appreciation for what he’s seeing. He’s pretty much up for anything: He brought a Kermit puppet into a winsome house off Cherokee Street (he has an ace Kermit impression). He employed a fake British accent in a Holly Hills castle, and tried a crane pose in Maplewood (neither was quite ace, but they were fun). 

Lemon studied sports broadcasting at Truman State, and worked for Saint Louis University basketball and the Cardinals, as well as various marketing jobs, so he understands video. You only have to watch his first truly viral Instagram video, a tour of a wacky house in Lafayette Square posted in July 2023, to see both his skill and his schtick on full display. There’s not a dull moment. “I’ve never felt more like a Disney princess in my life,” he remarks at one point, draping himself on a library ladder a la Beauty and the Beast. 

That video, Lemon will tell you, is the one that changed everything. It scored 600,000 views, 71,039 likes, and a host of followers. “It popped off overnight,” he recalls. “My wife woke me up. She was, like, ‘You did it.’ ‘I did what?’ She said, ‘Your hard work paid off.’” 

Nearly two years later, Lemon’s videos routinely pop off overnight. But these days, it’s more than that. Other Realtors ask him to feature their properties (he has to be choosy), and so do other businesses. He even gets invited to media events. Like it or not, he’s become something of an influencer. (He doesn’t like it.) 

“I do not see myself as an influencer by any means,” he says. “I like to see myself as a St. Louis storyteller, OK? And obviously through my ‘Hey look, there’s a house’ series, that’s me doing a character, doing a bunch of bits, right? But I’ve made a lot of friends over the past 11 years post-college being in St. Louis, and a lot of these friends have started amazing businesses, and they’ll say, ‘Hey, do you mind maybe doing a video for us to help our business off the ground?’ And I’m like, yeah, if you’re a good person and you’re a good friend to me, I’ll do that.” 

Fortunately for Lemon, his videos don’t only give him a level of recognizability around town; they also bring in business. The field of real estate agents is incredibly crowded, in St. Louis and across the U.S., and scratching out a living has gotten harder as interest rates have slowed home sales and a landmark legal ruling has halted longstanding industry practice on commissions. The National Association of REALTORS reports that the average agent handled 10 transactions in 2023, down from 12 the prior year, even as median income declined to $55,800. Some agents are simply moving on; federal stats show a 4.8 percent decrease in people working in the industry from June 2022 to June 2024.

Lemon’s local fame has become a great calling card. “I started getting direct messages from individuals saying, ‘Hey, I love what you do,’” he recalls. “‘You seem genuine, and you love the city of St. Louis. I’m buying in the city of St Louis in a year or six months.’ Then I started building out a pipeline.” Last year, he was part of the deal for 25 home sales.

While Lemon looks the part, he doesn’t actually live in South City: He and his wife split the difference between her job in West County and his passion for the city and own a home in Brentwood, where they’re raising their young son. But a big part of his following are young people who love the city, who resent the fear and loathing that some exurbanites seem to have for it, and who are happy to see its housing stock defended as well as explored. Brentwood may be home, but it’s far less interesting. 

He does have a long-term plan, however. He originally got into the real estate business in part because he wanted to see the city, but also because he was interested in affordable housing, and the toll of redlining. At Truman State, he’d read Colin Gordon’s Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City and found himself thinking about things he’d never encountered as a kid growing up in Lake St. Louis. When he bought investment properties, he did so with an eye toward helping artist friends have a place to live, not stockpile wealth, and now when he dreams, he dreams about becoming a developer to achieve the same end. He’s learning the business and making connections (it helps that through his side gig, as a host of the Overarching podcast, he’s gotten to meet not just real estate people, but political people). 

But he’s not rushing things. Right now, he’s thinking not about the buildings he’ll develop but the houses he’ll showcase, and the buyers he’ll help find their first (or second) real grownup house. These days, he enjoys being a full-time real estate agent.

“Personally, I do see myself in the Realtor world for the known future,” he says. “There is so much that I still have to learn.” That’s true even if he could teach a master class in marketing.