Why does posting on Instagram for Estate Agents feel so difficult?
You have beautiful homes to showcase. You work in interesting neighbourhoods. Your team spends every day answering questions about property. And, unlike businesses in many industries, you actually have people out in the real world generating potential content every day.
Yet scroll through the Instagram accounts of estate agents across the UK and you’ll see the same mistakes again and again.
Property listing. Property listing. “SOLD”. Generic market update. Another property listing.
The problem isn’t that estate agents aren’t posting enough. It’s that many aren’t giving people much reason to follow them.
If you’re investing time and money into Instagram for your estate agency, here are 10 of the biggest mistakes to avoid.
1. Treating Instagram like a property portal
This is probably the most common mistake we see.
A new property comes onto the market, so it gets posted to Instagram. Then another. Then another.
There’s nothing wrong with showcasing your properties. They’re an important part of your content. But if almost everything you post is a property listing, your Instagram account effectively becomes a worse version of Rightmove.
People already have property portals when they want to search for homes.
Your Instagram needs to give them something different.
That could be advice about buying and selling, interesting properties, local recommendations, market insight, opinions from your agents, behind-the-scenes content or simply something entertaining.
The question we often come back to is simple:
Would someone want to follow your account if they weren’t planning to move house right now?
If the answer is no, your content mix probably needs some work.
2. Making everything about your agency
“We’re delighted to announce…”
“We’re thrilled to have won…”
“Another fantastic property sold by our team…”
It’s natural to want to talk about your business. But your audience probably isn’t as interested in your agency as you are.
Before posting something, ask what the person seeing it gets from it.
Does it teach them something? Entertain them? Tell them something interesting about their local area? Give them useful property advice? Start a conversation?
Your agency can still be at the centre of your content without being the subject of every post.
Good social media is audience-first.
3. Posting without a strategy
Posting three times a week isn’t a social media strategy.
Neither is having someone in the office post whenever they get a spare half an hour.
Before deciding what to post, you need to understand what you actually want your social media to achieve.
Who are you trying to reach?
What do you want your agency to be known for?
What kind of content will make those people want to follow you?
What do you want someone to think about your business after following you for six months?
From there, you can build clear content pillars and decide what role different types of content play.
Without that strategy, Instagram quickly becomes a content treadmill where the objective is simply to get the next post out.
4. Being afraid to put people on camera
Estate agency is a people business, but you’d never know it from some estate agency Instagram accounts.
There are plenty of photographs of houses. Plenty of branded graphics. Plenty of company logos.
But barely any people.
That’s a missed opportunity.
Your agents spend every day speaking to buyers, sellers, landlords and tenants. They know the questions people ask. They know the local market. They have opinions and expertise.
Put them on camera.
It doesn’t need to be a perfectly scripted, professionally presented piece every time. In fact, being too polished can work against you.
An agent answering a useful question clearly and naturally can make much more compelling content than another beautifully designed graphic.
5. Not creating content specifically for Instagram
Your property photography might be brilliant. Your market report might contain genuinely useful information. Your latest company video might look fantastic on your website.
That doesn’t automatically make any of them good Instagram content.
People aren’t opening Instagram to read your PDF market report.
Content needs to be created for the platform and the way people actually consume it.
For video, that means thinking about what happens in the opening seconds, filming vertically, keeping the edit moving and giving people a reason to continue watching.
For carousels, it means turning a complicated subject into something people can quickly understand and swipe through.
Don’t just ask: “What content do we have?”
Ask: “How can we turn this into something people would actually want to consume on Instagram?”
6. Ignoring the local area
Estate agents have an advantage that many brands would love to have: a genuine reason to talk about a specific local community.
Use it.
Restaurants. Coffee shops. New openings. Parks. Schools. Streets. Architecture. Local events. Area guides. Businesses. Things only locals know.
If you’re an estate agent in Islington, you shouldn’t only be trying to become an Instagram account about property.
You have an opportunity to become an Instagram account about Islington.
That’s valuable because your potential vendors don’t suddenly appear when they decide to sell their home. They’ve been living in your market for years.
Creating genuinely interesting local content gives you a reason to build a relationship with them long before they need an estate agent.
7. Copying trends that don’t fit your brand
You don’t need to recreate every trending Reel your marketing team sends into the WhatsApp group.
Trends can work extremely well. They can make an estate agency feel current, human and entertaining.
But there needs to be a reason for doing them.
If you can take a trend and give it a clever property or local angle, great.
If you’re forcing your negotiators to perform a dance because another estate agent got 100,000 views doing it, perhaps reconsider.
Trends are a format, not a strategy.
8. Focusing on followers instead of the right followers
Would you rather have 20,000 followers around the world or 3,000 people who actually live in your market?
For most estate agents, the answer should be obvious.
Follower count is an easy number to obsess over because it’s public and easy to understand. But growth for the sake of growth isn’t particularly useful.
If you’re an independent estate agent operating in South West London, going viral in California isn’t going to transform your instruction book.
Think about who your content is attracting, not just how many people it’s attracting.
A smaller, relevant local audience can be far more valuable to an estate agency than a huge but disconnected one.
9. Giving people no reason to engage
Take a look at your last ten posts.
How many actually invite some kind of response?
Not necessarily through the dreaded “Let us know in the comments!”, but because the content itself is interesting enough to have an opinion about, send to someone or save for later.
Social media shouldn’t just be broadcasting.
Talk about something people disagree on. Answer questions. Give your agents’ opinions. Ask locals what they think about a new development. Rank the best streets in your area. Explain something complicated. Share something useful enough to save.
Create content that starts conversations rather than simply filling the feed.
10. Expecting every post to generate leads
This is perhaps the biggest misunderstanding about organic social media.
Someone probably isn’t going to watch a Reel about the best coffee shops in Clapham and immediately book a valuation.
That doesn’t mean the Reel has failed.
Social media can help your agency build familiarity, demonstrate expertise, show personality and stay visible to people within your market.
Someone might follow you for two years before they need an estate agent.
When that moment arrives, you’re not an agency they’ve never heard of. You’re the agency whose videos they’ve been watching, whose agents they recognise and whose content has repeatedly demonstrated that you understand their area.
That’s why judging organic social media purely by the number of leads attributed directly to individual posts gives you an incomplete picture.
Of course social media should ultimately contribute to the growth of the business. But not every post needs to end with someone booking a valuation.
So, what should estate agents be doing on Instagram?
The answer isn’t simply “post more”.
A strong Instagram strategy for an estate agent should combine property with people, expertise, entertainment and the local area.
Show the homes you’re selling, but give people other reasons to follow you.
Share your expertise, but don’t make everything a sales pitch.
Put your agents in front of the camera.
Become genuinely useful to people who live in your market.
And above all, remember that you’re competing for attention with everything else someone sees when they open Instagram, not just with the estate agent down the road.
At Crimson Social, we specialise in social media for property businesses. We develop the strategy, create the content and manage social media for estate agents that want to build an audience and a brand people actually remember.
If you’d like to improve your estate agency’s social media, get in touch with Crimson.
