Social media can be a very powerful tool, but simply chasing likes or trying to go “viral” won’t do anything to help a real estate professional’s career, panelists warned during a discussion on the business of digital marketing during The Real Deal Miami Forum on Thursday.
Michael Ruiz, president and CEO of Legendary Productions, a company in Miami and Austin that promotes luxury homes, said being obnoxious or shocking might please “someone in another country who is sitting in their underwear liking a video,” but it won’t do anything to help close a deal.
“If I were a real estate agent… [I’d look] at the top five, top 10 people who are actually selling and making money. They’re not dancing on tables or doing those skits like whatever-her-name-is does in Tampa,” said Ruiz, who has at least 500,000 followers on Legendary’s Instagram, a highly viewed home tour YouTube channel. “They’re presenting their properties in a professional manner and presenting themselves in a way that separates them from… the masses. So, the reality is, these people who are selling are going to continue to sell, and the people that are doing all this trendy stuff are going to fall out eventually.”
The person from Tampa that Ruiz referred to was Breanna Banaciski, also known as Tampa Bre, a real estate agent in the Tampa metro area affiliated with Realty One Group Advantage who makes sarcastic humorous videos of properties on Instagram and Tiktok that have attracted hundreds of thousands of followers.
“She got a big write-up in the New York Times a few weeks ago,” said TRD reporter Kate Hinsche, the panel’s moderator. “You might know her tagline. ‘This house has more bush than my mom in the ‘80s.’”
But Glennda Baker, president and CEO of Atlanta-based Glennda Baker & Associates, said she didn’t find Banaciski’s video shorts amusing.
“Yeah, she makes my head spin around and snot fly out of my nose,” Baker said. “We sell homes that are usually people’s single largest asset. We sell homes where people live their lives and bring their families and bring their friends and create milestones. And the mere fact that someone would be so disrespectful to that home, to that property, makes me violent. I’m sorry, I probably shouldn’t have said that. But it just, it really angers me. It is such a poor reflection of our industry. We are professionals. We get paid a lot of money to be professional. The worst agents are highly overpaid, and the best agents are highly undervalued, and when someone like that gets a following or gets spotlighted that scares the hell out of me.”
The content “everyone in this room” should be focused on is “creating content that is valuable to the consumer,” added Baker, who has 875,000 followers on TikTok and 327,000 followers on Instagram.
Baker, who has worked in real estate for more than 30 years, said she started creating content on social media in 2016. But it wasn’t until 2020, after she hired a videographer, that her standing in social media grew. She now spends about four hours each month shooting 30 to 50 unscripted evergreen videos for days she is unable to post live, or at all.
“The ideas come to me throughout the month. I have Google Forms on the homepage of my phone, and when I get an idea, I open up my phone, I put the idea in there. Then, when I sit with my videographer, I open my laptop and we go down the list,” Baker said. “[It’s] really very structured because I post a video every day.”
Those clips can be stories about what it took to close a house, giving advice on real estate, or “the good, the bad, and the ugly” stories, such as chasing a rat out of an attic and “cleaning up the shit pellets” or venting about a bad inspection.
“I do say bad words, and that may not be professional, but I’m weeding out the riffraff by doing that…cause if you’re going to do business with me, and you think you’re going to get somebody who’s all buttoned up, you probably are looking in the wrong spot,” she said, adding that she sold 27 houses on Tinder.
Alyssa Morgan, founder and senior agent of Miami Beach-based The Inside Network, said she uses social media to not only showcase her properties, but also to show pieces of her life, such as dinner with her husband, doing Pilates or going to a Mommy and Me class. “My goal with my [Instagram] page is to make you feel like you know me before you even know me, so I really am posting throughout my day, and it’s just like what I’m doing.”
Morgan, who has 22,000 followers on Instagram, does this so people “feel comfortable enough to reach out to me” about properties.
It’s also important to “tag” places and people whenever possible when posting on Instagram, added Ruiz, who has collaborated with Morgan.
“Tag, tag, tag everything you do…. because then she reposts, I repost, she reposts, everybody starts seeing it. It’s the easiest thing in the world,” Ruiz said.
“A little trick that I used to do when I first started is I would get a listing, let’s say at the Carillon, then I would go through the geotag and reach out to everyone that tagged themselves and send them my listing,” Morgan later added. “That’s kind of like how I built my Miami followers.”
Morgan said she’s managed to get listings, find buyer leads and close deals from her Instagram audience and followers.
And that’s the whole purpose of social media, to help create your own brand and bring value and visibility for your clients’ homes, Baker said.
“It’s not about virality and vanity,” she said. “I’m not over here being a comedian who is trying to sell real estate to create content, I’m creating content to sell real estate.”
