Hop on a trend early enough, and you’ll probably get plenty of likes. But a page full of trending content won’t necessarily get clients lining up to work with you.
Legions of people could “like” your post, while not a single one turns into a lead.
As The Broke Agent put it in his conversation with RealScout CEO Andrew Flachner, “likes do not equal trust.” That’s the catalyst, and too many agents are trading that for the convenience of letting AI take the wheel with their content.
AI as a content assistant can be a game-changer. AI as your content creator and editor wrapped into one is why AI slop is everywhere.
When The Broke Agent joined Flachner on the Playmakers Podcast, the two agreed AI has made agents’ feeds harder to tell apart.
So what kind of content earns trust?
Here are seven ideas from The Broke Agent, grouped by where the content comes from, plus his advice for getting started.
Content About Who You Are
The first three ideas give people a chance to get to know the person behind the account. The more they see someone they can relate to, the more likely they are to want to work with you.
1. An Intro Video Packed With Specific Personal Details
For The Broke Agent, trust starts with specifics. General market talk and trend posts don’t give viewers much to relate to, so he works small details about his own life into his content, like these:
- He’s a Yankees fan
- He went to USC
- He worked at the Laugh Factory comedy club
- He’s a new dad to a four-month-old daughter
Case in point:
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A video from agent Marie Lee as another great example. In the reel, Marie stands on camera and points to captions that run through her story, including:
- Born in Germany
- Grew up in Alabama
- Flipped a coin and moved to Nashville
- Bachelors & Masters in Education
- Burnt-out teacher turned dropshipper
- Forced to close my business in 2020
- Got my real estate license with $1000 in my bank account
- Now, I’ve helped over 135 families make moves around Nashville
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Every one of those details gives viewers another way to connect with her. Former teachers filled her comments, and some of them were potential clients.
The Broke Agent would like to see her build on the idea:
“What I would like to see her do too, which she does in her content, is create videos around each one of those aspects. So this is just one post, but you could pepper this sort of stuff into your content throughout your entire content journey.”
Byron Lazine, who co-founded BAM with The Broke Agent, got the same kind of response from a personal post. On 4/20 (at 4:20 pm, no less), Byron opened up about quitting cannabis the day his second daughter was born.
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People filled the comments with their own stories, and one person brought the video up with him at a real estate conference.
2. An Occasional Post About a Failure
The Broke Agent built his whole brand on failure, so he knows how much people connect with it. He told Flachner an occasional failure post can earn trust for any agent:
“Another thing that builds trust is talking about your failures. Not to the extent of creating a brand called The Broke Agent where everything’s a failure. Do not recommend doing that. But every now and then, if you break up with your feed with like, ‘Hey, here’s a goal that I didn’t reach this year,’ or ‘Here’s something in a real estate transaction that didn’t work out,’ or ‘Here’s a house I didn’t sell,’ not necessarily due to the incompetence of you as a real estate agent, but because of some factor that you were not in control of. Anytime you could bring up a failure, that equals trust because people relate with failure more than they relate with success.”
3. Local Market Updates Built Around Your Hobbies
When The Broke Agent looks at an agent’s content, he wants to see what he calls “faces and places”:
- Your face, since video builds trust
- The place you sell, so viewers can feel what it’s like to live there
He put the idea to work during a Content Audit with a Tucson agent in BAMx, BAM’s sales and marketing training community. She told him she wasn’t getting any engagement, and when he looked at her feed, it was all just solds and just listeds.
So he asked what she likes to do around Tucson. Her answer was hiking and yoga, and The Broke Agent saw plenty of content in both, including:
- Giving housing market updates while she’s hiking
- Talking about where she eats before a hike
- Talking about the shoes she wears on a hike
- Talking about the yoga studio, along with the surrounding neighborhoods and the average price per square foot around that area
Look for intersections between what you enjoy and what your audience wants to see more of. Hyperlocal content makes it easy to weave your personality and personal history into content your audience cares about.
Content From Your Business
The next two ideas come from the everyday work of helping people buy and sell homes.
4. Stories From Real Client Conversations
AI makes it easy to churn out content, and too many agents are posting that content as-is instead of making it their own.
Here’s how The Broke Agent described the problem:
“I think AI has given the ability for everyone to mass produce content at scale. So it’s completely increased the quantity of content, but almost decreased the quality.
“Every agent with a double-digit IQ could type in some prompt about how mortgage rates rising affects their conversations with buyers and sellers and then spit out some generic slop script. Or they follow some carousel trend. Or they do the Netflix documentary trend.”
But your real, human stories can’t be copied with an AI script. Partly because truth really is stranger than fiction. But mostly because it’s YOU. A fallible human being who’s made mistakes and learned from them. Who’s made friends and probably lost some. Who’s built things and also seen things they built fall apart.
Stories from real client conversations give agents something a generic AI script can’t. The Broke Agent used a buyer worried about mortgage rates to show what he means:
“If you get out of a showing and you say, ‘Hey, I just showed this beautiful house in Beverly Hills and my buyer’s really concerned with the fact that rates just jumped up to 7.5%. Here’s what I told him…’ that breeds trust because it’s a specific story that happened to you. It’s a question that you’re fielding from your client.”
He’d take the same approach with educational content. In his view, plain definitions and lectures don’t hold anyone’s attention, so he’d wrap the lesson in a client’s story.
Here’s how The Broke Agent would handle a classic rent-versus-buy post:
“Instead of ‘Here’s why buying’s better than renting, it’s ‘Here’s what I did for this client that was renting for years and bought and now has equity in this house. And now look at what’s happened to their life.’”
5. Videos Filmed Right After the Moment
Where you film plays a part in building trust, and The Broke Agent explained why:
“The setting breeds trust too. If you film a video at the house or you film a video in your car after the showing itself, that gives more trust because it’s like, ‘Hey, I just did that.’ It’s more spontaneous.”
His favorite place to film is the car, for a handful of reasons:
- You control the lighting
- You control the temperature
- The audio sounds good
- You’re comfortable
- There’s no camera in your face
- There’s no teleprompter to read from
For those videos where a teleprompter is a big help, he recommended the one built into the Instagram Edits app.
Speaking from the perspective of a real estate agent, here’s how The Broke Agent described the process behind these in-the-car talking head reels:
“So, I just closed on a house, I’m in my car, the second I pull up to my driveway, I want to capture that feeling. Or I want to capture some angry thing that just happened to me. I want to capture content while I am emoting, actually.”
When you’re in the moment, and in the middle of those feelings, that’s when your audience also feels them most. They radiate off you and take hold, more so than when you wait to produce something more polished.
But as The Broke Agent pointed out, after-the-moment reels can work, too, if you capture the feeling in a script that sounds like you and brings back the same feeling that inspired the content in the first place.
Why are these simple, unpolished videos outperforming polished posts? The Broke Agent’s take is that AI has made slick design easy for everyone, so viewers are hungry for something raw:
Content That Starts a Conversation
The last two ideas give viewers a reason to jump in and respond.
6. A Green Screen Reaction to Local News With Your Opinion
Between AI tools and around-the-clock news coverage, anyone can find information in seconds. The Broke Agent says what viewers want from an agent is a perspective on it:
“Your perspective is everything. If you are a real estate agent and you’re sharing something about your housing market and it’s an update and you’re talking about inventory levels or price reductions have increased in your market by 20%, now give me an opinion about what that means for the market moving forward.”
His favorite way to share that perspective is a green screen video. You don’t need a physical green screen for it. It’s a filter in the major short-form video apps (including Instagram) that puts an article behind you while you talk, and the headline at the top of the screen grabs attention.
Here’s how The Broke Agent pitched it:
“The easiest format is the green screen. If there’s any content recommendation I could give on this podcast of packaging, it’s green screen content. It’s putting the article behind you in the video… That text up top works as a visual hook or a text-based hook, and then you just talk about the article and then what it means for your local market, and then of course give your opinion.”
One of his favorite examples comes from Courtney Strzelczyk, an agent in Phoenix. She reacted to a New York Times list of the happiest places to live, which included four cities in the Phoenix area, and shared her theory that neighborhoods with greenery and shade will see more appreciation than areas with desert landscaping.
He liked a lot about her video:
- She moved around the frame, which kept his attention
- She circled the cities on screen as a visual hook
- She used a trending article from a reputable source
- She gave her own real estate take on the news
His one note was about the ending. She wrapped up with “What are your thoughts?” and he’d have liked a more specific question, like whether viewers are seeing more appreciation in neighborhoods with greenery.
7. Instagram Story Polls That Lead to DMs
The Broke Agent treats Instagram Stories as the place for raw, behind-the-scenes posts and interactive features like polls and quizzes. For him, the whole point is to start conversations in the DMs, and a “guess the price” poll is one of his favorite ways to do it:
“What’s really effective for a real estate audience would be ‘Guess the price of this house,’ and then you’re giving four options. Someone guesses the price of the house and then you could message them and say, ‘Hey, you were pretty accurate. It’s actually 500,000. Do you want more information on this property?’ Now you’re having a conversation.”
Another poll he likes asks followers how long they’ve lived in their home, with answers ranging from five years to 15 years. Whatever someone picks, the agent has a natural way to start a conversation with them.
When Flachner asked whether he’d rather have 100,000 views on a post or 10 DMs, The Broke Agent wanted to know who the DMs were from. Once Flachner said potential clients, he picked the DMs.
Views could be from anywhere in the funnel. DMs indicate real interest in taking a step closer to buying or selling.
Start With Something You Did This Week
To wrap up the episode, Flachner asked what one change agents should make tomorrow. The Broke Agent boiled his answer down to three words, “Action creates content,” and explained what he meant:
“Create content around the experiences that you’re actually having because it makes the experience of creating content so much more fun. My best pieces of content come from stuff that I had just done.”
He’s not a fan of posting to hit a number:
“Don’t create content just to create content because you have to meet some sort of arbitrary quota. Create it based off your experiences.”
Each of the seven ideas fits a different kind of week, so it helps to start with whatever you’ve got going on:
- A showing or closing fits content from your business
- A local news story fits content that starts a conversation
- A weekend hike or a new restaurant fits content about who you are
Finding the time is a common hurdle. The Broke Agent’s fix is to book content time the way you’d book anything else on your calendar:
“You schedule it in your calendar like you would anything else. If you’re a real estate agent, you schedule it like your appointment booking time or the times that you would normally check your CRM or make calls. You have a 30-minute window or an hour-long window to make content.”
Once you start, keep going. He says long breaks hurt your reach because the algorithm loses track of who to show your content to. Here’s the weekly schedule he suggests for agents:
- Three to five feed posts on Instagram and Facebook
- One long-form YouTube video
- One blog
- One email
A tough showing or a Saturday hike can turn into your next trust-building post. Share it while it’s fresh. Watch the full Playmakers Podcast for more.
