Real Estate Agent Social Media: Stop Comparing, Start Tracking

The agent posting wins online is not your competition

There is a particular kind of bad afternoon in this job.

You have had a quiet fortnight. Nothing has closed, the phone has been slow, and you open Instagram to find three agents you vaguely know posting deals, keys, and a handshake outside a building you were pitching for last month.

And a thought arrives that has ended more careers in this industry than any market downturn. Everyone else has worked it out and I haven’t.

What you are actually comparing

You are comparing your Tuesday afternoon to somebody else’s highlight reel. Those are not the same category of thing.

The deal that went up on Tuesday probably took eleven weeks. The one before it collapsed at the last minute and never got posted at all. The month where they did not cover their costs did not make the grid either, and neither did the Sunday spent driving a buyer around who was never going to buy.

Nobody posts the eleven weeks. There is no photograph of a follow up going unanswered for the fourth time.

So you end up measuring a complete picture of your own working life, including every doubt in it, against a curated two percent of someone else’s. You would never accept that comparison in any other context, and yet it is the one almost every agent runs on themselves weekly.

The part you cannot see

Here is something that took me a long time to learn, and I only learned it from managing people rather than from competing with them.

The agents who look effortless are very often being propped up by something invisible from the outside.

Sometimes it is inherited stock from an agent who left. Sometimes it is a lead source they did not build and do not control. Sometimes there is a partner covering the rent, which changes what a quiet month feels like. Sometimes it is simply that they have been at the same desk for eight years and their database is doing work nobody can see happening.

None of that makes them frauds. Most of them have worked hard. But it does mean the gap between you and them is frequently not the gap you think it is, and it is almost never the gap in ability you have quietly decided it is.

Why this actually costs you money

If this were only a confidence problem it would be worth mentioning and moving on. It is not.

Comparison changes behaviour, and it changes it in the most expensive direction available.

It makes people chase. You see someone winning listings in a tower you have never worked, so you spend a fortnight learning that tower instead of calling the owners you already know. You see someone doing well on video, so you rebuild your content instead of following up the eleven leads sitting untouched in your phone.

Every one of those decisions feels like initiative. Most of them are just a reaction to a photograph.

Consistency is what makes months repeat, and nothing destroys consistency faster than changing your plan every time you see evidence that somebody else’s plan is working.

The fix, which is boring

Pick one number that is yours, and compete with last week’s version of it.

Not deals, because deals are lagging and largely outside your control this week. Pick something entirely within your hands. Conversations had. Follow ups completed. Valuations booked. One number, measured honestly, written down at the end of each day.

Then the only comparison that matters is you against you last Tuesday, and that is a comparison you can actually do something about.

You will notice something else as well. Once you have your own number in front of you, other people’s posts become significantly less interesting. Not because you stopped caring, but because you now have information about your own performance, and information beats speculation every single time.

One more thing worth saying

If you manage a team, the same logic applies to your leaderboard.

A leaderboard motivates the top three people on it. For everybody else it is a weekly notification that they are losing, which is not the same as a weekly reminder to improve. Most managers have never asked whether theirs does more harm than good, and it is worth an honest look.

The most consistent agents I have worked with were rarely the most competitive ones. They were the ones who knew their own numbers well enough that nobody else’s could rattle them.

That is the whole thing. Know your numbers, and other people’s stop being a threat.

One number, written down

The scorecard I use is one page. Four numbers, filled in at the end of the day, two minutes. It turns “I think I had a decent week” into something you can actually look at.

If your months keep swinging and you want a second opinion on why, book a free 30 minute call and we will go through your numbers together.

Ashley J Hawthorne is the founder of Your Real Estate COO and Managing Director of a Dubai brokerage, with 23 years in real estate across the UK and Dubai and nine industry awards. More about Ashley.