Showcase
Chiorando Homes – Building Trust, One Backyard at a Time
Mike Chiorando builds carriage homes in Nanaimo, BC. For him, it’s not about flashy content or viral moments. It’s about education and awareness. Most homeowners don’t realize they’re sitting on potential — that their backyard might be eligible for a carriage home that adds serious value to their property and even creates rental income. Mike believes in gentle densification, a simple but powerful idea in a country where everyone’s talking about the housing crisis. The message is straightforward: you might not need to move to get more out of where you live.
Strategy: Make It Personal
With high-ticket services like home building, one sale pays for the entire year of social media. So the strategy was clear — build trust. In construction, trust is everything. And Mike gets that. There are a lot of contractors out there with sketchy reputations. So instead of hiding behind logos and graphics, we leaned into showing who Mike really is. No studio shoots. No rented sets. Just Mike, on-site, walking through the builds, talking about the process, and showing what it’s like to work with him.
We’re also building out YouTube content to win on SEO — helpful videos answering questions about how carriage homes work, who qualifies, and what the process looks like. It’s niche. Not a lot of people search for this. But the ones who do? They’re high-intent. If one of them books a build, the payoff is clear.
Results
Aside from growing awareness, the content gave us something unexpected — community momentum. Every time we posted, we tagged the local subcontractors Mike works with: framers, drywallers, plumbers, and more. That turned his feed into more than just a marketing channel. It became a grassroots network. Now when a plumber is at a homeowner’s place and hears them ask about carriage homes, Mike already has a foot in the door. The result isn’t just more eyeballs. It’s more word-of-mouth, more trust, and more chances to build — literally and figuratively — in the community.
Kenneth Lai
Founder Upsmash Media
