← Your Daily Real Estate Podcast with Tristan Ahumada
Your Daily Real Estate Podcast with Tristan Ahumada
Episode 881: The Ugly Truth: Why Most Agents Stay Invisible Despite Posting Daily
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Visibility is cheap. Presence compounds. Most agents are spending money chasing the wrong one. I've been doing this for 22 years. I've watched a lot of trends come and go. Cold calling, then door knocking, then Facebook ads, then video, maybe even Google Ads in there. Now. AI Every era has its tactic of the moment. And every era era has agents who think they finally found the thing that's going to put them on top. How do I know? I did it. And I thought for a second, this may be the one. But here's what I learned from watching agents win and lose at this for two decades. The ones who actually dominate their market, let's say for 5, 10, 20 years, aren't the ones who picked the right tactic at the right time. They're the ones who understood the difference between visibility and. And presence. And those aren't the same thing, by the way. Here's where most agents make the mistake of confusing them. They think because they posted today they have presence. Surprise. They don't. You don't. They have visibility. Visibility is what you get from a post, an ad, a flyer, a logo on a banner for the youth soccer game or the baseball game. You've seen them, we paid for them. And the moment you stop producing it or paying for it, it's gone. Visibility decays. I'm not saying it's bad. Just know that it has a half life of 48 hours or however long it's supposed to last for as long as you're paying for it, then it's gone. You have to make more of it to keep it alive or you have to pay for it. And I call that a treadmill or kind of like a rat race right now. Most agents never get off it. And that hurts because I've been in that position because I used to be the largest purchaser of realtor.com leads for a long time. And guess what? The moment I stopped, they stopped coming because I wasn't paying for them. The difference is presence is something that works differently. And I like to say both are important because this is part one of a seven part series. Over the next seven days, including today, I'm going to be talking to you about the things you need to put in place for your business for you to be able to grow. And presence. Presence is what happens when you've shown up so consistently in a community, in a geography, in someone's feed and in someone's life that you become part of the fabric of it. You're not on people's screens, you're in their heads. And there's no ad spend that buys that. There's no algorithm hack. The only path is consistency, deliberately showing up over a long period of time. And this is the part that we talk about, but I don't see a lot of agents actually doing it. Invisibility lives on your screen. We see that presence lives in other people's relationships with you. How do they see you? What do they think of when they see you? That's the asset. Think about it this way. When the local boutique owner thinks of an agent, when the wealth advisor recommends someone to a client, when the probate attorney sends a lead our way, or when the country club committee chair needs someone reliable for a committee presence, it's really what makes your name come up. You don't control that recall, you earn it. You earn it through repetition, through contribution, through showing up year after year in the same place. I've watched agents spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I was one of them. And we spent it on marketing, on leads and all this stuff. And it doesn't always get you the amount of listings you would hope in that area or zip code. And I've watched agents spend almost nothing, money wise, on marketing in a different way. And quietly dominating a town because everyone in it knows them by name. The difference is presence. Every single time. Now here's, here's the move for you. The strategy that actually wins in any market is two layers. And these two layers are going to be running at the same time. The first layer is broad community presence. Block parties, school sponsorships, Instagram content, the local business ecosystem, the things most agents talk about. That layer matters. It builds your name into the area you're working in or the area you want to work in. It feeds your sphere and your long tail business. But by itself it's isolation. It doesn't move inventory. The second layer is curated relationship presence. And it's different. Six person dinners, board committees, the directory of local operators you vetted personally. What I call my local legends directory quarterly check ins with your wealth advisor partners is invisible to the public eye. It doesn't show up in your Instagram analytics, but it's where the real business gets transacted, especially at the top of the market. So stay with me here because here's where, where the leverage is. A lot of agents only run one of these layers. They do all the broad community stuff and wonder why their average sales price isn't going up. Or they're wondering why they just don't have more transactions this year. How they're not penetrating and they're not growing these relationships. Or they go all in on a high end relationship game and wonder why their pipeline is thin. The answer isn't pick one. The answer is pick both. Different cadence, different metrics, different goals, same person executing daily. The agents who do this for five years build something no one, no one can take from them. The agents who do it for 10 years think about that same geography showing up consistently. Now expand this to 20 years. That's what I've watched happen in my own market and across thousands of different places because of lab coat agents. And it's not just agents in my market. Like these are agents I look up to that are doing it well. So here's your action today. One thing. Pick one local business in your geography. One that matters to your ideal client. It could be coffee shop like it would be for me. Could be a wine shop, could be a Pilates studio, bookstore, journal store. I don't care. Doesn't matter. Go to their Instagram. Like their last three posts leave a real comment that adds something valuable, not just a heart emoji or a fire emoji like I do. And if they post anything in the next 48 hours, do it again. It's not marketing. That's not even a strategy yet. That's one rep. But if you do that every weekday for the next 90 days with a list of 2020 local businesses, then you've got something that can build. You'll have something most agents in their market will never build. You'll start having a presence. You'll have what they're calling. And I'm watching people write about this. You'll have a moat. The rest of this series is going to break down exactly how to build it. Channel by channel, layer by layer, starting tomorrow. With the way most agents are using Instagram completely wrong and the three plays you should be running on it instead of. I'm Tristan Elmada. This is your daily real estate. Share this with somebody you think may need this and tune in tomorrow because this is going to go on for a few days.