Should an estate agency focus on growing its company Instagram account, or should the individual agents within the business be building their own personal brands?
We think the answer is both.
There has been a big shift towards personal branding in property over the last few years, and it makes sense. Estate agency is a people business. Sellers aren’t just choosing a logo or a shopfront. They’re choosing the person they trust to market their home, negotiate on their behalf and guide them through what can be a pretty stressful process.
But that doesn’t mean the company page suddenly becomes irrelevant. In fact, we think the strongest agencies on Instagram are the ones that understand what each account is there to do.
The personal page builds familiarity, trust and personality. The company page gives that person legitimacy and backs up what they’re saying with properties, results, reviews and evidence.
People build trust. Companies build proof.
And when the two work together properly, they make each other stronger.
People care who their estate agent is
The reasons sellers choose one agent over another tell us quite a lot about why personal branding matters.
The Property Academy’s Home Moving Trends Survey, analysed by Dataloft, asked almost 30,000 home movers what they looked for when choosing an estate agent. 43% said they wanted to feel confident the agent could market their property, 41% said liking and trusting the agent was important, while reputation and good market knowledge were both cited by 36%.
Source: Dataloft, How do we choose our estate agent?
Those are all things an agency can communicate through its brand, but they’re also things that are much easier to demonstrate when you can actually see and hear the person you’re considering instructing.
An agent talking confidently about what is happening in their local market tells you far more than a generic house price graphic. A video explaining why one property sold in a week while another has been sitting around for three months gives you a feel for how that person thinks. Even seeing how they speak to camera, how they present a home or how they answer a common seller question starts to tell you what they might be like to work with.
Instagram gives estate agents an opportunity to build that familiarity before somebody ever books a valuation.
Your next client might follow you for a year before they need you
This is probably the biggest opportunity with personal branding.
Imagine someone owns a house in Fulham. They’re not planning to move at the moment, but they come across a local agent on Instagram and start following them.
Over the next year, they see that agent talking about properties that have sold locally, explaining what buyers are looking for, answering questions from sellers and giving their view on the market. They see them walking around properties, going to valuations and occasionally talking about things outside work too.
By the time that homeowner eventually decides to sell, that agent doesn’t really feel like a stranger anymore.
They know their face. They know what area they cover. They’ve heard them talk about the market dozens of times and, assuming the content has been good, they probably already have a sense that this person knows what they’re doing.
That is a very different starting point from turning up cold to a valuation alongside two other agents they’ve never heard of.
The important thing here is that most people don’t need an estate agent most of the time. If your Instagram account is only useful when somebody is actively looking for a property, you have a very small window in which to get their attention.
A good personal brand gives people a reason to follow long before they need you.
Personal pages also have more freedom to be interesting
This is another reason we think individual agents should be encouraged to build their own profiles.
A company page naturally has some limitations. It represents the whole business, so the content tends to stay fairly close to property, company news, listings and the team.
A personal account can go much wider.
An agent can talk about property and the market, but they can also talk about their career, things they’ve learnt, their local area, opinions about the industry, things happening behind the scenes and, within reason, parts of their life outside work.
That doesn’t mean every estate agent needs to become an influencer or start filming their breakfast. It just means people generally have more dimensions than businesses do, and that gives them more ways to make interesting content.
Someone might originally follow an agent because they like their property tours, then stay because they like their opinions, local recommendations or personality. When that person eventually needs an estate agent, the relationship has already started.
So why not just focus on personal brands?
Because there is an obvious problem.
The personal account belongs to the person.
If an agency puts all of its energy into building one agent’s profile and that person eventually leaves, their audience goes with them. The business doesn’t suddenly inherit their followers, reputation or relationships.
We don’t think that is a reason to discourage personal branding. Good agents are going to build reputations and relationships throughout their careers anyway, whether that happens through Instagram, referrals, networking or simply being good at their job.
If anything, agencies should want ambitious people within the business to become more visible. It can help them generate enquiries, build their network and become better known in their patch. That benefits the individual, but while they’re representing the agency it can benefit the business enormously too.
The important thing is making sure the two brands remain connected.
You want people to think of “James at ABC Estates”, rather than “James, who happens to work at ABC Estates.”
That is where the company account becomes important.
The company page gives the personal brand something to stand on
Let’s go back to the homeowner who has spent the last year following James.
They eventually decide to sell and think James seems like someone worth speaking to. What are they likely to do next?
They’re probably going to look at the company behind him.
They’ll want to see what sort of properties the agency sells, how those properties are marketed, what the photography and video looks like, what clients say about them and whether the wider business actually looks credible.
This is where a strong company Instagram page is incredibly valuable.
James can tell someone that he is good at marketing property. The agency page can show them dozens of examples.
He can say his clients get a great service. The company can show testimonials, successful sales and case studies.
He can demonstrate his own market knowledge. The company can show the depth of expertise across the wider team.
In other words, the personal account gets someone interested in the person. The business account gives them confidence in the company they’re actually going to instruct.
Neither really replaces the other.
The mistake is making the company page too corporate
There is still a problem with a lot of estate agency company accounts though: there isn’t much reason to follow them.
New instruction. Just sold. Another new instruction. Meet the team. Award nomination. Another property.
There is obviously a place for listings and company updates, but if that’s all you post, the account quickly turns into a noticeboard.
Your Instagram account shouldn’t just be Rightmove with your logo on it.
A good company page should show the best of the business. That means great properties, strong photography and video, testimonials, successful campaigns, interesting market content, the people behind the company and evidence of how you actually market homes.
It should make someone who lands on the account think: these people are good at what they do.
That’s a slightly different job from the personal page, and that’s exactly why both are useful.
So what should the individual agent actually post?
This is where agencies often make things more complicated than they need to.
Estate agents already have plenty to talk about. They spend every day speaking to sellers, buyers, landlords and developers. They’re going on valuations, negotiating deals and watching their local market change in real time.
The content is already there.
Instead of simply reposting the company’s latest listing, an agent could explain what they personally like about the property or what they think will make it sell.
Instead of sharing a generic graphic about house prices, they could explain what they’re actually seeing in their patch.
Instead of trying to come up with a completely new content idea, they could answer one of the questions they were asked on a valuation that morning.
Things like:
Should I renovate before I sell?
When is it actually worth reducing the asking price?
Why do some properties sell immediately while others sit on the market?
Is spring really the best time to sell?
What are buyers asking for at the moment?
What’s happening to prices in this particular area?
The best personal content often comes from simply taking the conversations agents are already having offline and bringing them online.
It doesn’t all need to be educational either. Behind-the-scenes content, career stories, local recommendations, opinions and occasional personal posts can all help people get to know the person behind the job.
The company account should play a different role
The company Instagram should focus much more heavily on the agency as a whole.
This is where your best property marketing should live. Your strongest listings, testimonials, case studies, market reports, major sales, development launches, team content and anything else that demonstrates what the business is capable of.
There will naturally be overlap between the two accounts, but that doesn’t mean the content has to be identical.
Imagine you’ve just launched a great new instruction.
The agency might post a polished property film that showcases the home.
The agent could then post a Reel explaining the three features they think buyers will love most.
Same property. Completely different piece of content.
That is a much better approach than simply giving every employee the same Reel and asking them all to repost it.
Instagram Collabs make this even easier
Instagram’s Collab feature is probably one of the best tools agencies have for joining the two strategies together.
When a Collab is accepted, Meta says the post or Reel can appear on both profiles and be distributed to the audiences of both collaborators.
Source: Meta, Instagram Collabs
For estate agents, that makes a lot of sense.
If James is presenting the agency’s latest instruction, you don’t necessarily need to decide whether the Reel belongs on the company page or his personal page. It can be a collaboration between both.
The company gets the benefit of having a recognisable person fronting its content. James gets high-quality property content on his own profile and exposure through the agency. Both accounts benefit.
We wouldn’t make everything a Collab, because then you eventually end up with two almost identical feeds. But for property tours, area guides, market updates, major instructions and other content that genuinely belongs to both brands, it is a very useful way of tying them together.
Agencies need to make personal branding easier for their agents
One thing we definitely wouldn’t recommend is sending an email around the office saying everyone needs to start posting on Instagram.
Most estate agents aren’t content creators, and they shouldn’t need to be.
A branch manager might have 15 years of experience, an incredible understanding of their local market and hundreds of useful stories, but that doesn’t mean they know how to turn any of it into a Reel.
That’s where the agency or marketing team can help.
Sit down with them and ask what happened this week. What are sellers asking? What’s selling? What isn’t? What’s surprised them? What do they disagree with other agents about? What happened on an interesting valuation? What do homeowners consistently misunderstand?
A half-hour conversation can uncover a huge amount of useful content.
The important part is that the knowledge and opinions still come from the agent. Marketing should help package that expertise, not replace their voice with generic captions that could have been written for anyone.
If ten people in the same company all start posting the same script, you’ve completely missed the point of personal branding.
Building your agents’ brands should benefit both sides
There will always be some agency owners who worry about investing time and money into an employee’s profile when that person could eventually leave.
That’s understandable, but we think the upside is much bigger than the downside when it’s done properly.
An agent who becomes well known in their local market can bring more visibility, more relationships and potentially more instructions into the agency. At the same time, they are building something valuable for their own career.
That should be a good thing.
If an agency can become somewhere ambitious agents know they will be supported in building their profile and reputation, there is potentially a recruitment and retention benefit too.
The important part is not choosing one brand over the other.
Build the person’s reputation while making sure the agency is consistently part of that story. Feature your agents on the company page. Use Collabs. Give them high-quality content. Encourage them to talk about the work they’re doing. And at the same time, keep investing in the agency’s own Instagram presence.
People build trust. Companies build proof.
We don’t think estate agencies should choose between building the company Instagram and building the personal brands of their agents.
They do different things.
A personal account gives potential clients a chance to get to know the person behind the business long before they’re ready to instruct an agent. It lets that agent demonstrate their knowledge, personality and experience in a way a corporate account often can’t.
The company page then provides the proof behind it. It shows the quality of the marketing, the properties, the results, the clients and the wider team.
For the agent, building a personal brand can create a reputation and audience that benefits their career.
For the agency, having recognised and trusted people within the business can make the company considerably more human and give potential clients far more reasons to engage with it.
The best estate agencies on Instagram aren’t hiding their people behind the company logo, and they aren’t abandoning the company brand to build individual influencers either.
They’re building both.
