How a real estate agency can get two or more deals per month from social media. The RED Experts playbook

Article by Evgeniy Kazimirskiy — co-founder RED x RED Experts.

Most real estate agencies use social media as a showcase: they post beautiful renders, write about properties and wait for enquiries. Naturally, that system produces no results, and agency owners conclude that social media does not work. We knew from the start that this approach does not work and began building our own system, which consistently delivers two or more deals per month from Instagram. Here is what worked, what did not, and why.

Instagram: a system that runs like a machine

Our entire Instagram strategy rests on three levels: attracting a new audience, nurturing it and working with leads.

Level 1 — Attracting a new audience

We used two instruments: reels and paid traffic for followers.

Reels: reach ≠ leads. The first hypothesis we tested was reels on broad topics. Tourism, landmarks, lifestyle, entertainment content. Some of them hit 100,000+ views. Sounds good, but that traffic produced almost no leads and no deals.

We changed the approach and started making reels directly about real estate: cases, market insights, property breakdowns, value for buyers. Reach dropped to 10,000 per video, but the followers became relevant — they converted into enquiries and deals.

An important nuance: within real estate reels, the entertainment format performed best on reach. Not dry breakdowns, but lively content with humour, provocative openings or unexpected angles. Those videos gave the balance between reach and relevance.

How to build reels production

Posting reels chaotically will not work. You need a systematic pipeline — and the cheapest one possible.

The first thing to understand: a professional videographer is not what you need. One reel with professional production costs $50–100. With our strategy we published around 20 reels a month plus video stories. That adds up to $1,000–2,000 on production alone — unaffordable, and it guarantees nothing. A beautiful picture does not make a reel take off.

We managed to get down to $800–1,000 a month for the entire production thanks to two things.

A local creator instead of a videographer. Someone who lives in the location, understands the market and can shoot on a phone. Significantly cheaper than a film crew — and it delivers lively, authentic content that performs better than staged video.
AI avatars for part of the content. Some reels we produce using AI avatars — virtual presenters who voice ready-made scripts. This removes the dependency on the shooting process and substantially lowers production costs.

The production process itself consists of five steps repeated every month:

Step 1 — Choosing ideas. Client questions in DMs, broker objections, market insights, topics that took off for competitors. Everything goes into a single idea bank.
Step 2 — Writing scripts. Every reel starts with a script: hook, core message, call to action. Without a script, production is chaotic and the result unpredictable.
Step 3 — Production. Part is shot by the local creator, part is produced with AI avatars. This keeps the pace without an inflated budget.
Step 4 — Analytics. After each reel goes live we record reach, watch-through rate, new followers, enquiries. Not likes, but what actually affects the result.
Step 5 — Generating new ideas from the data. Ideas that took off become the basis for the next wave. We look for what exactly worked: the angle, the topic, the format, the hook — and build variations. In parallel we test new hypotheses.

This cycle repeats every month. Over time the bank of working ideas grows, and production becomes faster and more predictable.

Paid traffic for followers

Alongside reels we ran targeted ads for follows. Budget — $200–300 a month. That is not big money, but combined with systematic nurturing it gave a steady inflow of new people into the account.

The key here is not to chase a cheap follower. We needed someone considering buying property abroad, not just someone interested in the topic.

Level 2 — Nurturing

Nurturing is the only part of the system you build once and it then runs automatically. Unlike reels, which require constantly creating new content.

Our nurturing consisted of three formats:

Stories went out every other day — roughly 15 series a month. Each series is not a set of separate stories but a connected narrative with logic: problem → development → conclusion → call to action. We tested different hypotheses: cases, educational content, behind the scenes, personal stories. We tracked reactions and gradually kept what generated the strongest response.
Posts worked as trust anchors. When a new follower opened the profile, they saw structured content confirming our expertise. Cases with numbers, market breakdowns, answers to frequent questions.
Reels at this level served a double function: they attracted new people and nurtured those already following.

Level 3 — Working with leads

This is the most underestimated level. Most agencies collect followers and wait for them to reach out. We built an active system for working with the audience.

Moving people into a Telegram bot. We moved the entire Instagram audience into a Telegram bot. That gave two advantages: first, we got the contact (phone or Telegram) directly and stopped depending on Instagram algorithms. Second, inside the bot you can build deeper nurturing through personalised message sequences.

The exchange was honest: the person received useful material (a guide, a checklist, a market breakdown) in exchange for a phone number.

Sequences inside the bot. The bot had different message branches for different audience segments: those considering an investment, those thinking about relocation, those simply studying the market. Every branch led to one goal — a live conversation with a broker.

It was exactly this three-level system that brought us to a steady two deals a month from Instagram for property purchases in Phuket. Without this system — with only reels or only ads — the result was unpredictable.

What did not work and why

Telegram as the main acquisition channel

We tried driving paid traffic straight into a Telegram channel. As a nurturing instrument the channel works well, but as a channel for acquiring a cold audience it turned out to be considerably more expensive and slower than Instagram.

The main problem: a Telegram audience requires very long nurturing. From first touch to deal took about five months. On top of that, the cost of acquiring a follower in Telegram is higher and they are harder to attract than through a reel. There is almost no free growth — followers mostly have to be bought through placements in other channels and TG Ads.

Conclusion: Telegram is effective as the second level of the funnel — for people who already know you through Instagram or other channels. As a standalone acquisition channel it is economically unviable for an agency with a limited marketing budget.

YouTube

YouTube did not work in our format. We tried, but quickly realised that YouTube requires a fundamentally different approach.

Broad topics do not work there, nor does clickbait, nor corporate content about properties. YouTube works in the real estate niche if you make strongly authored videos, find interesting angles and shape it into a personal blog, where a specific person with their own point of view, stories and personality runs a channel about the industry from the inside. That is a different scale of investment and a different time horizon for results.

Conclusion: YouTube only makes sense if the founder or a key broker is ready to run a personal video blog systematically. As a corporate agency channel it does not pay off within a reasonable timeframe.

The main conclusion

When you start working with social media in real estate, the first temptation is to chase reach. Big numbers create the feeling that everything is going right, but reach does not equal target clients.

In real estate, social media works not only for the brand and client trust, but also as a lead generation channel you can measure. When the system works, the result is visible almost immediately in the form of activity — relevant DMs and leads.

Yes, those leads may need a long time to warm up, but it matters to get a result immediately and to be able to measure it.

A person does not buy a villa because they saw a beautiful reel. They buy because for several months they watched people they trust, received useful information from them, recognised themselves in their content — and at the right moment wrote to them rather than to competitors.

The result may come slower than you would like, but once the system is built it runs without constant manual control. And that is when social media stops being a cost line and becomes an asset.