I am a broker-owner in St. Petersburg, Florida, and I have a confession that makes portal reps twitchy.
We listed a house recently. In three days on Zillow, it picked up 707 views. I posted the same house in a local Facebook group I run, and in three hours it reached 3,200 people.
That’s 4.5x the eyeballs in 1/24th of the time. Roughly 109 times the hourly rate, if you want to be a nerd about it.
Before the comments section sharpens its knives: Yes, social posts front-load and portals trickle, so that 109x is a burst, not a promise. And no, Facebook reach and a Zillow view are not the same animal. Fine. But 4.5x the people still saw my seller’s house in an afternoon, and I did not pay a nickel.
The group has about 44,000 local members. Nobody can raise my rate, throttle my reach or park a competitor’s headshot next to my listing.
I am not telling you this so you will go start a Facebook group. I am telling you because the most expensive thing any of us buys is attention, and most of us are renting our own neighbors back from the companies that got to them first.
7 takeaways from this listing experience
Seven things it has taught me.
1. A few of the right eyeballs beat a lot of the wrong ones
Portal traffic is a big impressive number made mostly of people who will never buy your house. Browsers. Zestimate-checkers. A guy in Sacramento who is bored at work.
My group is people who live here, moved here, want to move here or are just nosy about what the neighbors did to that kitchen. One of them telling her sister in Ohio that this is the one beats a thousand strangers scrolling past.
Big numbers feel good. Local numbers sell houses.
2. Be the local newsroom, not the local billboard
The fastest way to kill a group is to treat it like a mailing list.
People are in mine for road closures, restaurant openings, hurricane prep and lost dogs. They are also in it for the real estate education nobody else bothers to give them.
Every month we post the market stats and then translate them, because “months of inventory rose to 5.8” means absolutely nothing to a woman trying to decide whether to list her house in the fall. So we tell her what it means for her neighborhood and her price point this year. We break down insurance changes, flood maps, tax bills, the condo assessment mess and whatever just came out of Tallahassee that is about to land on somebody’s closing.
That is what earns the room. Our listings get to sit in that feed only because everything around them is worth reading.
3. Let them be mean. Seriously
This is the part that makes agents clutch their pearls.
Somebody comments, “Way overpriced.” Somebody else says, “Who on earth painted that kitchen?” My instinct is not to delete it. It is to say, “Thank you very much.”
Engagement is engagement. A good fight in the comment section shoves that post into more feeds, and a listing 40 people bickered about gets seen by thousands who never would have scrolled that far. The algorithm cannot tell love from outrage. It just sees people sticking around.
4. The meanness is what makes the rest of it believable
If every post under your listings is a tidy wall of fire emojis from your own team, buyers know exactly what they are looking at.
When a skeptic says, “too expensive,” and three neighbors pile on to tell her she is wrong, that is worth more than any caption I could write. A comment section where people are allowed to be critical is one people actually believe.
Let them talk. Defend the house on its merits. Get out of the way.
5. The group is sponsored, and everybody knows it
Here is the part where I lose some of you.
The group is sponsored by my brokerage, and it says so. That sponsorship comes with exactly one rule that benefits us: Our agents are the only agents allowed to post listings. Everyone else, and there are a lot of everyone else’s in this market, can read, comment, argue and lurk. They cannot advertise. And believe me, they still try!
Self-serving? Obviously. But it is disclosed, which is more than I can say for most of the ways attention gets bought and sold in this business. Zillow is not handing out eyeballs for free either. It just charges you and calls it a service.
What I did not plan for was recruiting. Agents here know what the group does for a listing, and “you can post in it the day you join us” turns out to be more persuasive than any split I could put on a page. That is not a perk. That is a moat.
6. It is the best market research money cannot buy
Data tells you what already happened. A group tells you what is about to happen.
I know which condo buildings have quietly become unsellable because owners vent about assessments in real time. I know what buyers are scared of, in their own words, long before they sit across from me.
You cannot buy that. You can only show up for it.
7. It ends the listing appointment early
Every agent says the same things. Professional photos, video, social media, syndication. Sellers have heard that speech 40 times, and their eyes glaze over on schedule.
Then I say the thing nobody else walking through that door can say. I can put your house in front of tens of thousands of your actual neighbors, and no other brokerage in this market is allowed to do it.
Not “we do it better.” Cannot do it at all.
Then I slide the screenshots across the table. 3,200 neighbors in three hours is not a talking point. It is a receipt.
And before anyone tells me my Zillow listing must have been a dud: 707 views in three days is 236 a day. Zillow’s own research says 250 views a day is the benchmark for a home going pending inside a week. Mine came close on Zillow alone. My Facebook group did in three hours what took Zillow three days. And the house went pending in three days, by the way, and later closed at full asking price.
Our listings typically land somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 views before the dust settles, and I have never paid for a single one of them.
That is usually when we stop talking about commission.
The point
You do not need 44,000 people or a Facebook group. You need to stop paying portals to introduce you to your own neighbors.
Start small. Post one useful thing a week on social media. A market update. A photo tour of a listing before it’s public. An answer to a question you got five times that month. Nobody wants your listing announcements. They want to know if now is a good time to sell their condo.
Be useful before you’re selling. Answer questions in the comments instead of DMing people your card. Let non-clients ask you things.
Let people say what they think, even when it stings. Someone will post that the market’s crashing. Someone will disagree with your pricing take. Don’t delete it. Respond to it. That’s the moment people decide whether you’re a real person or a lead funnel.
Do that for a couple of years, and you will not have to buy your audience back one lead at a time. You will already have one.
Liane Jamason is the broker-owner and listing agent with Corcoran Dwellings Real Estate in St. Petersburg, Tampa and Clearwater, Florida. Get connected on Instagram or Facebook.
