Rented Land: Why Agents Should Not Build on Social
You tell clients that owning beats renting. The same is true for your marketing. Instagram organic reach is down to 3.2%. Build on land you own.
By Brett Godfrey
You spend your days telling home buyer clients that owning beats renting. Build equity instead of covering someone else’s mortgage. Put down roots you control. It is the heart of the advice you give, and you believe it.
Here is the part most agents miss. The same logic applies to your own business, and to the digital ground you build it on.
I was introduced to the idea of “rented land” by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose on their podcast, This Old Marketing. Rented land is any platform where you build an audience but do not own the connection to them. Owned land is the opposite: an email list, a client database, a website. Channels where you can reach people directly, on your terms, without asking anyone’s permission.
Most social media is rented land. You can build a following of thousands on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, and none of it is truly yours.
You cannot export your followers. You cannot reach them if the feed decides your posts no longer deserve attention. You are a tenant, and the landlord sets the rules.
And the landlord changes the rules. A new platform’s only job is to acquire users and build a network effect, so early on it rewards you for showing up. A mature platform has to make money off that network, so the free reach you once had gets metered, throttled, and sold back to you as ads. The ground shifts under you, and you do not get a vote.
If you want proof of how fast it can move, think back to how easy it used to be for your real estate business to reach its followers on Meta platforms. In 2019, the average organic reach for Instagram was 12%. Right now, in 2026, Instagram’s reach rate is 3.2% and Facebook’s is just 1.25%.
None of this means abandon social media. These platforms are where enormous numbers of buyers and sellers spend their attention, and the reach is real. Use them. Post the listing videos, share the neighborhood guides, show up where people are already looking.
Just do not build your house on them.
Use rented land to do one thing above all else: move people onto land you own. Turn a TikTok viewer into an email subscriber. Turn an Instagram follower into a name in your CRM. Turn a one-time open house visitor into someone you can reach directly for the next ten years. The follower count is the rental. The email address is the future commission check.
You already know how to explain this, because you do it every time you sit across from a client weighing whether to keep renting or finally buy. Owning beats renting, and that holds for your marketing every bit as much as it does for their next home. So look hard at where your audience actually lives today, and ask the question you would ask any client: are you building equity, or just paying rent?