How Bunny Terry Built a $45M Santa Fe Real Estate Business From Digital Content, Community, and Gratitude

In November 2012, three months after she moved to Santa Fe, Bunny Terry was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. She still has the prognosis letter her doctor wrote so she could cash out her life insurance policy. It said she had twelve months to live.

Fourteen years later, Bunny leads a small team at REAL Broker that is on pace for roughly $45 million in sales volume this year, and more than 85% of that business comes from her digital presence. On this episode of The REI Agent, host Mattias Clymer talks with Bunny about starting over in a closed luxury market, why she markets the city instead of the houses, how a 67-year-old teammate became a YouTube lead machine, and the question she stopped asking after her husband died.

If you’ve ever felt too late, too old, or too far behind to build a business on content, this conversation is for you.

How did Bunny Terry get started in real estate?

Bunny says she became an agent “completely out of necessity.” After 28 years as a paralegal in Albuquerque, she was a single mom who wanted to move home to Logan, New Mexico, a lake town of about 1,100 people. She got her license in 2004 and co-founded a brokerage, Ute Lake Premier Properties, with her cousin. For ten years they sold everything from $30,000 lake lots to multimillion-dollar ranches.

In a town where she knew everyone, business came easily. Bunny compares it to “shooting fish in a barrel.” That turned out to be a weakness later on. She and her partner knew how to be involved in their community, but they had never had to create business from scratch.

Her paralegal years helped her in one practical way: she knew how to read a contract, and she knew how to keep herself “out of hot water.”

What did it take to break into Santa Fe as a newcomer?

Bunny moved to Santa Fe in August 2012, still loyal to a lake development project back in Logan. Her cancer diagnosis that November meant a year of treatment, surgery, and more treatment. Her partners in Logan kept her on the books and kept splitting commissions with her, so she didn’t move her license to Keller Williams in Santa Fe until 2014.

That first stretch was lean. From August to December of 2014 she sold two houses, and she had to borrow money from her son to attend a national conference. What she did have was consistency:

She showed up at 8 a.m. every day, alongside the veteran agents she affectionately calls “the old dogs.”
She signed up for floor duty every time she could.
She attended every training and meeting and took every open house anyone offered.
She got deeply involved in the Cancer Foundation for New Mexico, building community around a cause she believed in.

“I don’t know how you do this business if you’re not willing to get involved in your community,” Bunny says. Mattias adds that the 2014 market was much slower than the 2020–2021 boom many newer agents remember, when houses could sit for months. Growth in that market took steady effort over years.

How did a cancer diagnosis change the way she runs her business?

Bunny grew up on a farm with a father, Kenneth Terry, whose answer to hard times, even when his crops washed out, was: “If life was any better, I would have to be two people.” During her treatment, he asked her every day to name what she was grateful for. That practice became the basis of her book, Lifesaving Gratitude.

She is careful about how she frames it: many pieces of her medical picture worked in her favor, and she is not saying that people who don’t survive weren’t grateful enough. Her point is that “we get to pick what our perspective is,” in a crisis and in business.

In practice, that looked like two habits:

A red notebook. Bunny carried it everywhere to write down good moments and new contacts, like the Dallas visitor she met while eating a Frito pie on the plaza. At the end of each day she wrote her top three good things. “If you’re looking for it, they show up,” she says. “You don’t just get three, you get 12.”
Bold intentions. At a Keller Williams team meeting, before she had sold a single house, she announced she would give $10,000 that year to a cancer organization she cared about. Colleagues later admitted they thought she was crazy. “I’m going to tell you it worked.”

She also pushes back on the jaded talk that can spread through an office. When colleagues complained about being asked to call 10 people a day, her response was: “What’s hard about that?” Her view was to do the work and be glad you’re walking upright.

How does 85% of her business come from digital marketing?

Bunny started blogging years ago as a personal outlet. A friend suggested blogging “so that our kids will know us better when we’re not here.” When she arrived in Santa Fe, which felt like a closed market full of agents who had been in the business since high school (one colleague, Paul Duran, is marking 50 years), she knew she couldn’t compete for the same referral relationships. “I’ve got to do this in a way that nobody else is doing it,” she decided.

So she built a digital presence around the city itself: her I Love New Mexico blog, a Facebook page, and eventually Instagram and YouTube. Without many listings of her own, she asked other agents whether she could promote their listings on her Facebook page, which helped her build a following. During COVID she started making videos herself, even though it was hard at 60 to put her face on camera “and act like I was an expert.” What she knew from studying marketing was that people mainly want to know “that they can trust you and that you’re competent.”

Bunny shared her numbers openly:

Year	Sales volume
2023	$12.5 million (solo, moved to REAL Broker in June)
2024	$18.5 million
2025	Just over $30 million
2026	Tracking toward ~$45 million

In 2023 she hired a full-time marketing director so she could focus on what she does best. Her team is still small: two other brokers and a transaction coordinator. The result, she says: “I’m getting a call every single day from somebody who says, you know, I’ve been following you on Instagram or I saw your YouTube videos.”

What content actually works in a second-home luxury market?

“Nobody really has to move to Santa Fe,” Bunny points out. Apart from people working at nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory, her buyers are mostly second-home and future-retirement luxury clients. Most are 55 and older, though some are 30-something influencers. They visit about three times, fall in love with the city, and follow agents online for a long time before they reach out. That makes her content a long-term nurture system.

The rule that guides her team’s content: “We’re not talking about how we do real estate. We’re talking about how you live in our city.” Here’s what that looks like:

YouTube with an unlikely star. Craig, a 67-year-old on her team, told her two years ago he didn’t want anyone to see his face. Bunny told him he had “the most trustable face in the world.” He now posts four or five YouTube videos a week (the best golf course to try, favorite restaurants for a first visit) and gets a call a day from them.
A weekend events email people keep reading. Her daughter, the team’s marketing director, who has an MBA and a social work background, sends a Thursday email to the full database with three things happening Friday, three Saturday, and three Sunday, plus links, the weather, and a reminder to bring a jacket. Bunny notes that they use Claude to help create it. Nobody has unsubscribed in the last three months.
Instagram without a huge following. With only about 5,700 followers, a recent video about why Santa Fe is a unique place to live reached roughly 38,000 views in two days. The B-roll came from a local kid who films downtown and does drone work.

“There’s nothing magical about it,” Bunny says. “It’s just consistency.” Mattias agrees and points to his own years of blogging two or three times a week: even when individual posts didn’t take off, his sphere always knew he was serious about real estate.

What are Bunny Terry’s golden nuggets for agents?

Bunny recorded this episode three months after her husband, Toby, passed away. Even through his illness, her team had its best financial year yet. She credits her community for that, and her advice comes from both experiences:

Find your tribe. “Find your people and take good care of them and let them take good care of you.” She also says to be clear about who your community isn’t.
Keep a daily habit that anchors you. For Bunny that means the red notebook and a morning thank-you “for the perfect clients that I get to meet and help every single day.” By her count, 98% of her clients are perfect. A habit like this “gives you roots” through a hard loss, a hard market, or a hard buyer or seller.
Ask better questions. After losing Toby, she kept asking herself how she would survive. She realized her brain kept working on the wrong problem.

“So the question is not how am I going to survive, but what am I going to create?” — Bunny Terry

She also rejects the idea that starting again means starting from nothing. “I am an expert at starting over,” she says, but “starting over suggests that you erase what you knew before.” Starting again means building on everything you’ve learned. She quotes a line she attributes to Seth Godin: it’s not failure if you don’t quit.

Bunny is 65 and turns 66 in December. Her message to agents in her age group who think there’s no place for them in digital marketing is to keep moving and to know that you can start again every day.

Bunny calls You² by Price Pritchett life-changing. It’s a 34-page book about training your brain to make huge leaps instead of the small steps we tend to limit ourselves to. She liked it so much that she found Pritchett and worked with him. During that work she wrote down an aiming point of $30,000 a month and remembers thinking, “Who do I think I am?” She has since gone well beyond it.

“It’s not accidental,” she says. “We have to be purposeful about who we spend our time with and what we spend our time on.” She also shares that she nearly quit real estate three years ago. What kept her in was moving to a brokerage culture built on “collaboration more than competition,” where kindness felt like the most purposeful thing she could do.

Listen to the full episode

Bunny Terry’s story shows that you don’t need a huge following, a big-city market, or a head start to build a relationship-driven business. You need community, consistency, and the right questions. Watch or listen to the full conversation to hear her tell it in her own words, and find Bunny on Instagram at @therealbunnyterrysantafe or pick up Lifesaving Gratitude on Amazon.

If you’re ready to apply these ideas to your own business, including your content strategy, your database, and the habits that keep you showing up, try REI Agent Advisor. It’s a practical way to turn episodes like this into your next steps.

New episodes of The REI Agent come out every week. Subscribe wherever you listen, and visit reiagent.com for more.

Full transcript: read the complete episode transcript on the episode page.