Real Estate’s New Social Media Age Means Going Beyond Real Estate Entirely

OMG you need to check the Group Chat!

The Group Chat is a wildly popular TikTok series from creator Sydney Robinson, who goes by Sydney Jo on social media, in which a clowder of friends — all played by Robinson — keep up with one another’s lives and the drama happening within their circle. 

Robinson added a new character to the fifth season of the Group Chat: Ryan SERHANT, commercial real estate darling and star of the Netflix reality show “Owning Manhattan.” During Season Five, which premiered in January — can you imagine what Commercial Observer’s group chat looked like when Serhant popped up? — Serhant played himself, a broker, helping one of the characters find and move into a new apartment. A role he was born to play. 

The pair had collaborated previously when Robinson did some promotional videos for the new season of “Owning Manhattan” — which she fully admits to having never seen prior to working with Serhant, much to the chagrin of the friends in her real-life group chat, who couldn’t believe she didn’t know who he was.  

But that initial collaboration had been so well received that Robinson — now a full-time content creator with 1.7 million followers on TikTok and whose videos often hit over 1 million views, with the Group Chat’s very first installment amassing 36.9 million views as of publication — knew she had to include Serhant in a season of her own series. 

“When I was writing this season of the Group Chat, I was moving in real life, so I thought I would make it a plot of the season that the girls were moving,” Robinson told CO. “I thought it would be funny if Ryan was the girl’s realtor. And he said ‘Wait, I love this.’ ” 

For both Robinson and Serhant, the collaboration was a chance to bring their respective presences and products to new audiences and buyers. 

“In real estate, your individual audience only goes so far, your reach is only so far,” Serhant told CO. “Sydney Jo’s reach is very different from our reach — really, any realtor’s reach — and it’s a totally different taste circle. She skews younger, female, which is a different audience for me. And, so, how do you increase audience size? You do that through collaborations that are edu-taining.” 

Some 93 percent of Serhant’s TikTok views over the month of January came from non-followers. That’s a massive pool of potential new clients. 

As for Robinson, she credits Serhant with expanding her viewership. 

“It is just really funny to see someone who is famous for business show up in a girlies miniseries,” she said. “I’m sure that there are people who discovered him through the video. But, really, I feel like I have gotten attention from having him in there, from people, especially men, who maybe didn’t know about the series but followed Ryan. He’s given me a bit more visibility.”

Collaborating with Robinson was a boon for Serhant, too. When the 12-year-old daughter of a client was scrolling through TikTok and saw Serhant on the Group Chat, she immediately sent the video to her parents, telling them they needed to work together. 

“She said, ‘You should work with that company, they are so fun, they get it,’ ” Serhant said of the girl’s message to her parents. “The parents then reached out to an agent at our company and signed up. It was a $15 million listing.”

Serhant himself and his agency as a whole have a big reach in their own right, and both reach a younger audience through different means, including outside of social media. But a collaboration with a popular social media influencer, or even becoming a social media influencer, particularly on video-heavy Instagram and TikTok, has the potential to broaden that reach exponentially. 

Just ask Emma Davis, a 29-year-old residential broker with Platinum Properties, who said she has received about 60 percent of her current clientele thanks to her TikTok posts. Though she hasn’t done any Group Chat-style collaborations yet, her approach to engaging with clients via social media is working. 

“A few months before I started in real estate, I started producing my own personal content and building my personal brand, and I got so much practice through that,” she said. “So, when it was time to make a TikTok for my business, I knew exactly what to do.”

By the time she launched her real estate-focused TikTok, she had become a pro at knowing the right way to speak to the camera, how to start a video with the best hook, and what it takes to be a content creator in real estate.

“I do a lot of on-the-go content,” Davis said. “That’s how I started before pivoting into a few other lanes. And at the start I was really focused on lead generation — posting content to have people inquire and get business — to build my audience.” 

She started doing rentals, and has now pivoted to sales. Her approach on social media, no matter the type of housing, is to take the viewer through the unit, highlighting different aspects it has to offer, all while being warm and friendly, speaking how she would with friends over brunch rather than reading from a sales script. 

In many of her videos, some of which have over 100,000 views on TikTok, Davis is on the go, showcasing not just the units she has available, but the surrounding neighborhoods, and also her own kind and friendly personality, not to mention her killer outfits. 

“It’s very relatable and authentic,” Davis said. “A big part of this is showcasing who I am and who I am in this city, my network. And, then, also, my crazy outfits I think are really fun. I’m really into visual aesthetics. I love bright colors. I think that really helps draw people in.”

Another tactic she takes in her social media approach is to highlight units that haven’t yet hit the market. During the walk-throughs, Davis creates a sense of urgency that makes the viewer want to check out the apartment right away, before everyone else gets to see it on Zillow or another platform. 

“I really built my follower base by advertising units as off-market,” she said. “I’ve never heard of anybody else doing that. That’s my hook — that it’s off-market — and that is gold in the rental market.”

Still, building a brand on social media as a broker needs to be about more than showing apartments and condos. It’s about showing potential buyers and renters who they’ll be getting involved with, and crafting an identity that will keep clients coming back. So Davis created different content — still with a real estate focus — to go along with her unit walk-throughs. 

“I started a series, and people have been loving this series where I tour friends’ apartments,” she said. “It’s a sneak peek into something that you would never see otherwise. You don’t get to see into other people’s New York City homes.” 

The videos are popular, with some amassing over 40,000 views and dozens of comments about how much people love the apartments. 

The idea of using social media to enhance your business has been around as long as social media has existed. But leveraging the evolving ways people interact with social media means going beyond sales pitches, and honing the skills necessary to get the most out of what people are consuming. That includes dipping into the popularity of vertical series like the Group Chat, even if it has nothing to do with your product. 

“The average real estate agent in the United States is 56, which is awesome, but that’s not truly indicative of who the future buyer and seller is going to be,” Serhant said. “We’ve created a marketplace for real estate that is reaching people in the palm of their hands.” 

Amanda Schiavo can be reached at aschiavo@commercialobserver.com.