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It will come as no surprised to most agents that real estate reality TV doesn’t exactly reflect the full reality of the real estate industry and the typical agent working in it, panelists said during a session at Inman Connect Las Vegas on Thursday.
“Reality is a misnomer,” Ernie Carswell of Douglas Elliman told the audience. “This is entertainment.”
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Ernie Carswell | Douglas Elliman
Carswell is a star of the reality series Kendra Sells Hollywood. He was joined on the Inman Connect stage by Ben Belack of The Agency, who stars in Buying Beverly Hills, and moderator Katie Kossev of Side.
“How do we inform the public better on that?” Kossev asked the two reality stars.
“I think it starts with not having a pack mentality when it comes to marketing,” Belack said. He lamented the practice of agents promoting their sales figures and accolades all over social media and through print marketing, saying that he made a major shift in recent years to focus more on the consumer instead of promoting himself.
“We make our marketing collateral more consumer-centric,” Belack said. “I want it to be less about me and more about the consumer being the hero.”
Kossev admitted that because her life is already so entrenched in all things real estate, she doesn’t watch real estate reality TV shows. But she shared the suspicion that, unlike Carswell and Belack, who both seemed to be so obviously professional and serious about their business, many agents who are featured on real estate reality TV aren’t 100 percent professional.
Ben Belack | The Agency
“To be honest, I think for the agents who have been headliners on the show for a number of years, it has certainly reinforced their business,” Carswell said.
“However, the agents that it attracts have this idea that ‘This is so easy, we just have to be a fashion plate …'” Carswell continued. “That is not at all how it is in Beverly Hills. It is hard work, but we love it.”
“What other job can you have in the national marketplace where there’s no ceiling on your income?” he asked.
Unfortunately, reality shows turn the industry into something that’s all about “fast cars and high heels,” Carswell added.
“That really disappoints me because it attracts the wrong element.”
For Belack, getting on a reality TV show was something he saw as a strategy to attract more eyes to his business. When he saw top earners like Carswell and The Agency CEO Mauricio Umansky on reality shows, he figured if he did the same, it could give his business a boost as a relative unknown in a market that he didn’t grow up in.
“I would argue that people hire who they know,” Belack said. “So I made my singular focus to being known as much as I could.”
“I want people to constantly affiliate in their mind, there’s Ben Belack — real estate.”
Katie Kossev | Side
With that fame, unfortunately, celebrity agents can also attract unwanted attention as well, Carswell added.
“It is a mixed bag,” he said. “We get some real crazy people that come calling … But there are real people out there who get attracted to agents who seem to represent professionalism on the shows … But it gets edited out a lot.”
Carswell and Belack both lamented that often the most serious portions of the business don’t make it to the final episodes viewers watch on TV.
“What’s truly professional and low key — on the cutting floor,” Carswell said.
Instead, producers love to highlight the interpersonal drama, like big breakups, he added.
But agents who want to capitalize on visibility through video don’t need to land a part on a major reality show, Belack added.
“I think that the algorithms in general, where everyone is turning, everyone is discovering brands on YouTube; they really like hyper-local,” he said.
“So if you become the mayor of your beach, you’re going to be hard to beat. And it’s so cheap to push your video as an ad into someone’s feed that’s located in your net.”
It doesn’t matter if there’s already a big No. 1 agent located in your market, Carswell suggested, because people like to see fresh faces. But in closing, he echoed Belack’s sentiment that agents should turn their marketing toward the client, instead of boasting about their own achievements.
“I really like what Ben’s saying in that we should focus on the client,” Carswell said.
