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The social media age has allowed real estate agents to build huge personal brands and turn content into business, without the aid of a reality television show.
But there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to getting your content noticed and leveraging it into a genuine brand, according to some of the biggest real estate content gurus out there.
Sean McPeak of SERHANT., marketing coach Giselle Ugarte and Atlanta area realtor and TikTok star Glennda Baker spoke at Inman Connect Las Vegas on Wednesday about their strategies for building an online following, getting more eyeballs on listings through social media and leveraging a personal brand.
Baker, who currently counts over 811,000 followers on TikTok, doesn’t post what could necessarily be called generic real estate content. None of her videos contain images of her listings but instead consist of her speaking directly into the camera telling often humorous stories, observations and tips gleaned from her years of selling houses in Georgia.
In a video posted July 8, she advises viewers to never let a homebuyer follow a home inspector into the attic. Why? Because there’s a good chance the buyer could fall through the ceiling.
Baker told Connect attendees the key to growing her following was staying as authentic as possible and presenting her true self to her followers, even when she had doubts.
“The foundation of my videos are what I would tell my best friend, what I would tell my best client, and sometimes what I would tell my therapist,” she said.
Another key factor is knowing her audience and knowing what they want. she said.
“I’m not selling $40 million penthouses, I’m selling houses in Atlanta, Georgia,” she said. “My passion are the average buyers.”
Knowing his audience is equally important for McPeak, who is in fact selling multi-million dollar penthouses and using a team of influencers to help his team make some of the most unique real estate content on social media.
Collaboration has been key for McPeak getting his listings maximum attention.
“We expect to go viral on every listing,” he said on Wednesday. “Whether we can get a bakery involved, a pet store, or whatever it may be, we like to take whatever is actually hot on social media and combine it with our real estate.”
McPeak, whose team includes agents, such as Madison Sutton, also known as “TheNYCAgent” on TikTok, employs trending topics on social media as a strategy to drum up attention for his listings. He has also explored taking those social media strategies into the real world, such as when his office threw a Crypto/NFT open house for a Manhattan townhouse they were selling.
“It was an $8.8 million townhouse on the Upper East Side, we sold it in 46 days, I credit that NFT Party to that because it exploded,” he said. “We took the online hot topic and made it physical and made a sale.”
