Wednesday, September 10, 2025
He’s known as the Realtor who bicycles around Georgetown, sporting a bow tie and Panama hat, but lately Jamie Peva has acquired a more unlikely identity: social media influencer.? ?
Since last November, his eponymous Instagram account has been filled with pithy stories of Georgetown houses, their history and the people associated with them. The star of the show is Peva himself, who stands in front of each structure and rattles off facts and figures like an avuncular tour guide.?
Yet he credits the account’s popularity — it currently boasts almost 27,000 followers — to his daughter Violet, a social media strategist in New York who, when Peva asked her to help him post his listings, swooped in, put him on camera and started regularly posting 90-second reels.?
“She’s in charge of it,” Peva said. “I don’t know what she actually does. It’s her baby in a lot of ways.”?
“I don’t always fully understand what he’s talking about,” Violet Peva said, adding that she has loved learning about the historic neighborhood she grew up in.?“He does all the research and creates the story, then I transform it into the story for Instagram. He rambles and I just kind of clean it up and keep him in line in the editing process.”?
Peva, a history buff, said 33 years of working in Georgetown has yielded a lot of “raw material” about the area. He likes to post unexpected or unusual items, often gleaning tidbits from old newspapers.?
“That’s probably my best source for finding random stuff. Most of the time it’s tangential. I’ll be thinking, ‘Oh, there’s a house, I’ll search the address,’” he said. “Then I read about other things in the newspaper.”?
He features his own listings, but not exclusively. For instance, in one reel he included the former home of Dean Acheson, President Truman’s secretary of state. It was listed for sale, but through another agent, who he named in the post.?
“I try to share the wealth,” Peva said. “It can’t be a self-serving thing. I am a real estate agent and do put mine up, but if there’s an interesting house that’s not my listing, I do it.”
Not surprisingly, he has highlighted Georgetown’s more well-known residents, like former White House counsel C. Boyden Gray, in a post that garnered 350,000 views. A recent “star walk” included the homes of Julia Child, Jackie Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger and Elizabeth Taylor. He interviewed journalist Sally Quinn about her new book, but only after offering a quick primer on her N Street home’s notable past residents.??
Peva has also covered businesses, including Stachowski’s Market, formerly the Griffin Market, at 28th and P Streets, and Tilley’s, the O Street pet shop.
“During the Camelot period, it was a cool little boutique with these ladies and their handbags,” Peva said of Tilley’s. “All these places take on the essence of whatever time period they went through.”?
In one post, he even extolled the virtues of Potomac bluestone, the material originally used for Georgetown’s curbs and sidewalks, ending with a brightly delivered: “How neat!”?
This evident enthusiasm — he sprinkles “cool” throughout many posts as well — may be one aspect of his wide appeal. Each reel typically garners at least 10,000 views, according to Peva, no small feat for the bespectacled “guy with the bow tie.” Also unique is having a high concentration of followers from the same area.?
“My followers are really engaged,” he said. “I think people are really geared up about Georgetown, about the neighborhood. That’s what it’s really about.”?
Longtime Georgetown resident Jane Matz, whose home Peva featured, said she eagerly awaits the latest post and that most people on her block follow the account “religiously.”?
“I love it because I learn so much about Georgetown,” she said. Besides admiring his quirky take on history and great delivery, she said, “he always looks very dapper.”?
According to Violet Peva, it took a little time to develop the posts’ tone and discern how best to bring out her father’s almost encyclopedic knowledge and singular charm.?
“He loves history and storytelling, and I wanted to tap into that,” she said. “He has the history that he’s thinking about in his head as he moves through the modern world. He’s the most curious person I’ve ever met.”?
Peva often gets shout-outs from people on the street — “no one ever noticed me before,” he said — as well as requests from residents to research their own houses. Cleo Gewirz, after moving to O Street, became curious about her home’s history.??
“I follow him on Instagram and he started doing these little pieces and I would wait for them,” Gewirz said. “I specifically contacted him because I wanted to know when the streets were raised and lowered in Georgetown, because my street was lowered, I believe.”?
Peva discovered that one former resident was a bohemian sort who hosted the writer Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas.?
“She was this wild chick from the ’20s and ’30s who was obviously a lesbian,” Peva said, “and influenced Gertrude Stein, Hemingway and others.”?
Each post contains elements of history, local business or real estate. “Sometimes it’s a little mixture of all, or bait and switch: ‘What do you know, this house is for sale!’” he said with a chuckle.?
While his newly found Insta-fame has increased his own sales volume by as much as 20 percent, he said, the most meaningful part of the project is getting to work with his daughter, who drops in monthly to record the reels. The feeling is mutual.?
“It’s my favorite job I’ve ever had,” Violet Peva said. “It’s so rewarding to be able to show everyone else my father, who I love so much. He’s just an extra special guy and has a unique way of relating to the world. He has a special vibe to him.”?