Alyssa Stalker, Head of Education & Strategy for Coffee & Contracts, recently joined The Broke Agent to dish on what’s working on Instagram for real estate agents.
She also shared some tips on what to avoid, or be careful with, in 2026 (and beyond).
If you know about Coffee & Contracts, you know they don’t waste time on what doesn’t work.
Alyssa described eight key moves every agent should know and apply this year to break out of the “500-view jail” and connect with more people who want to work with them (and vice-versa).
The sooner you implement these, the more fun content creation gets, and the faster you’ll attract more clients.
Get Your Strategy Right Before You Post More Content
The first four moves are foundational to your content strategy in 2026. So, before you start creating new content, get familiar with these and make them your own.
Audit Your Outlier Content First
Before you create something new, look back at the last six months of posts and identify the ones that took off. Instagram took that outlier content and fed it to a specific group of people who decided it was worth a moment of their time to engage with it.
Your job is to figure out what made those posts different from everything else. Use that as the starting point: your clue to what your audience values.
No one deserves to be stuck on a content hamster wheel, and if you’ve got outlier content, your viewers are showing you the way off.
In Alyssa’s words:
“A lot of times, people stay stuck with low views, low engagement, because they keep repeating the same things and they’re not learning from what they’re posting…. So, I would take a step back, zoom out a little bit from what you’ve been doing, try to see if there’s anything that you can look at to potentially determine if there’s an outlier in your content.”
Niche Down to a Specific Person, Not a Demographic
Instead of using broad targeting terms like “upsizer,” “downsizer” or “millennial,” think in terms of lifestyle and identity. For example:
- New parents looking for a move-in-ready starter home
- Dog and/or cat lovers searching for pet-friendly homes
- People relocating for a job
Maybe you’re speaking to downsizers who want one-level living in a supportive community. Or maybe your ideal audience for a post is new parents who have a dog and are looking for a good starter home with 2+ bedrooms and a fenced yard.
Instagram now serves content based on specific signals, so a specific post reaches the right people faster than a post casting a wider net.
Let Your Personality Show Up in Your Content
Real estate content doesn’t have to be all business. Most people on IG aren’t scrolling in search of real estate advice from someone they know nothing about.
Yes, educational content still has a place, but it shouldn’t look or sound like something literally anyone (or AI) could have posted. No one else is like you, and your audience should be able to say the same about your content.
People connect with the person behind an account as much as, if not more than, the information in it. So, give them a reason to feel like they know you (as a fellow human being) before they ever talk to you. And they’re far more likely to want to talk to you.
As Alyssa explains:
“It’s not just about knowing your interests or putting out interests you think that they have the same ones. It’s just sharing enough of yourself to where people feel like they get to know you. And if they feel like they know things about you, they feel automatically connected and like they trust you.”
Follow the Local, Listing, and Authority Content Mix
Coffee & Contracts recommends breaking your content strategy into three buckets:
- Local and community content, the biggest share and the fastest way to grow followers
- Listing content, which shows what you sell and helps convert leads
- Authority content, like awards and rankings (the smallest share of the three)
Here’s how Alyssa put it:
“Our content strategy is built around mostly local content, listing content, because you got to show what it is that you sell. And then a little bit of authority-building content, and that’s the smallest percentage. And what that is is talking about case studies, positioning yourself as a real estate agent, what makes you stand out.”
Each bucket does a different job, so don’t judge them by the same standard. A local post might go viral. An authority post might get almost no engagement and still build trust over time.
Your authority as a real estate professional is part of what builds trust in your competence, and it can help you stand out. But it’s not enough to make people think, “This person really cares about the people in this community,” or “This person’s take on [city] is something I can’t wait to share.”
People want to work with real people they can talk to. People who feel familiar and who have interests and values in common with them.
And given a choice, people want to work with someone as invested in their local community as they are.
Change How You Execute Every Post
Once the strategy’s set, these four moves are about how each post gets made.
Test Lo-Fi Formats Over Polished Video
Three years ago, real estate content leaned toward polished, produced video, the kind that needed a paid editor and custom captions. Not so much anymore.
What’s working instead right now:
- Carousels
- Single image posts
- Plain, text-only posts, like an all-black background with one line of text
None of these require expensive production tools. All of them give you an opportunity to share some of your real self with your audience.
And, as Alyssa pointed out, people will pick real over polished all day.
“People want real, which is why I think this kind of low effort, low-fi content is performing so well because it’s so easy. It’s like it’s not even done by AI. It’s obvious like someone took a picture in their camera roll and slapped some text on it.”
Write Hooks That Are Almost Uncomfortably Specific
A hook like “three things to do this weekend in your city” sounds inclusive enough to reach everyone. But right now, hooks that broad reach fewer people, because Instagram can’t match them to anyone specific.
Add one detail, like the audience you’re picturing, and the hook gets more reach.
Something like “three things to do this weekend in your city, if you’re a mom with kids under five” tells the algorithm who should see it.
Here’s how Alyssa describes making a hook this specific:
“So most of the time, people lead with three things to do this weekend in [city name], and that’s very broad. So, when we talk about like niching down, (it’s) ‘three things to do this weekend in [city name] that you’ve probably never heard of, especially if you’re a mom of two.’ You’ve added additional context and framing of who this is for.”
The same hook, with one added detail, reaches a smaller group of people who care about it. Which is way better than being ignored by… everyone.
Build Comfort Content That Makes People Feel Seen
This is one of my favorite takeaways from Alyssa’s conversation with The Broke Agent. Because this is the kind of content that draws me in, too.
What Alyssa calls “comfort content” is built around making the audience feel seen and understood instead of pitched to. The Broke Agent highlighted Ricky Carruth as an example of this, whose short text-only statements against a black background make his audience of real estate agents feel seen and appreciated.
View this post on Instagram
The post above has 17K likes and over 570 comments. It’s the kind of content agents are likely to debate, because not everyone agrees with his statement. The ones who agree, however, are likely to share it because they want their clients to know how they operate. Its low-effort format also makes it an easy content play to steal.
These posts don’t sell a single listing. They work because agents want to share something that makes them look good to their own clients, and clients feel comforted reading it.
Hence the name, as Alyssa explains:
“There’s actually a term for it. It’s called being a comfort creator. And I’ve kind of taken that angle for myself for a long time, and it’s for about like the past year and it’s worked really well for me.”
If you’re not posting for an audience of agents, take a look at Carruth’s page for ideas and see how you might create something similar for the people you want to connect with.
Turn Testimonials Into Stories Instead of Screenshots
Most people not already hiring an agent will scroll right past a screenshot of a five-star review. Alyssa suggests turning that same review into content people stop for.
Could be a short video at closing while the client is still excited about getting the keys. Or maybe a short unscripted yap-style video with a story about a huge win you scored for your client and why you can’t stop smiling about it.
Here’s an idea Alyssa shared when it comes to client reviews:
“There’s some fun ways you can turn (reviews) into content. You can take one line out of the review… make that the hook of a post, and then break down the story of the transaction and why they said that about you.”
If you’re filming a client (with their permission, of course), get the timing right for the video. Ask for it the moment a deal closes, not weeks later when the excitement has faded.
What to Avoid and Be Careful With in 2026
Alongside what’s working, Alyssa flagged a few habits agents should drop or handle with care.
Stop Posting Self-Promotional “Billboard” Content
Just sold and just listed posts, with no story or point of view attached, are still everywhere. Here’s how Alyssa described the effect of an entire feed built this way:
“You basically have an entire billboard about yourself when someone comes to your grid. I still see it all the time, though. I do profile audits every single week. I do tons of them and I see it all the time.”
Every post doesn’t need to be about a transaction. Give it a reason to exist beyond the sale:
- Your take on the local market
- A story about the client or the deal
- A lens that says something about who you are
Be Careful With AI-Generated Content
Alyssa is not a fan of AI-written captions or posts an AI wrote from start to finish, and she explained why:
“I don’t like AI-written content. I don’t like AI-generated content. I just saw a post today that Claude is now watermarking content. We’re seeing a lot of AI-generated tags start to come out. So I think there’s going to be a crackdown on that, and people are tired of it. They don’t want to consume it.”
People are tuning out AI content, or anything that reads or sounds like it, for a few reasons:
- It sounds generic and often carries the same phrasing and word choice (hello “quietly”)
- People are fed up with robo-content and want evidence of a real person behind the post
- Content that is pure AI tells the viewer you care more about quantity than quality
If you use AI at all, use it to sharpen a hook or reframe an idea in your own voice, not to write the whole post from scratch.
Don’t Try Every Tactic at Once
With this many ideas on the table, it’s tempting to change everything about your content at the same time. Resist. Think “slow and steady,” with attention to results.
In Alyssa’s words, here’s the balance agents need to strike:
“There’s a lot of free resources out there to learn and get good at content. The only thing to keep in mind is just be careful of spreading yourself too thin, trying too many different ideas.
“Try to narrow down something to try for a while, get data from it, learn from it, and either pivot, try something else, or double down on it if it’s working.”
Once you’ve done your outlier audit and you have a sense of where you want to begin, pick one play (or two) and give it a real window, a few weeks at least, before deciding if it’s working.
Track your views, engagement, and follower growth before adding the next tactic on top. Before long, you’ll get a sense of which posts get the most shares, which tend to rack up the likes and comments, and which get maybe a few likes but no interaction.
If something works, keep it running. If it doesn’t, drop it and move to the next idea on the list.
That said, if you’re reading this and thinking, “When am I going to do any of this?” check out Coffee & Contracts with a free 7-day trial here.
