How to Have the Best Estate Agent Content in the Business

I’ve been writing estate agent content since 2012.

And our Estate Agent Content Club has been serving more than 120 non-competing agents per month since 2019.

During that time, we’ve become the number one ranked content for estate agents provider in the UK – according to 146 five-star Google reviews and 102 five-star Kerfuffle reviews.

I don’t say this as a boast (mah, maybe a little), but to give you context about what I’m about to share.

If you don’t outsource your content, you could do a lot worse than follow a few of our techniques on how we research, write and share content.

When I say ‘we’, it’s to do with our team of three experienced (proper) journalists, a former agency manager turned tone of voice expert, an eagle-eyed proofreader and a man our members call the King of Canva.

We use an 11-step process we’ve dubbed The Content Code.

1. News and Idea Gathering – We only have journalists writing our content. Between myself, SA and BB, we have more than 60 years of journalistic experience. This helps massively, as having a nose for news is all-important when it comes to content creation. We use a mixture of Google News Alerts, asking/consulting clients for ideas, scanning industry and consumer websites, event and awareness days calendars and reviewing social media to come up with at least 50 ideas for sales, lettings and community content articles for the following month. We seek ideas that are helpful, interesting and topical.
2. News Meeting – This is run along the lines of what happens in a professional media newsroom. We all put forward our ideas for articles during a Zoom meeting, and based on the general consensus and client feedback, during the meeting we whittle the 50 down to 12 or 13 articles for the following month. These are allocated to the writers to do. We also have an experienced former lettings manager, design expert and a legal eagle involved in our news meetings.
3. Writing – I think the difference you get when you use trained and qualified journalists to write your content is they can get to the point in a quicker, more interesting way. Our team takes time to research the subject and speak to agents who are members of our Club before they begin the writing process. Because we’re journalists, we always fact-check and quote sources where necessary. The most crucial part of a piece of content is its headline, and that’s where all those years of journalistic experience come into play. If the headline is lame, you won’t get the reader’s attention, and your content will get ignored.
4. Reviewing – Once the journalists have created the content, it gets sent to me and AB, our former agent turned content Swiss Army knife (she can do a bit of everything really well) to review. At this stage, we’re looking at how helpful the article is and whether the tone is right (tone is very important during tougher times). If any questions are raised by the reviewing team at this point, the article gets sent back to the writer to answer/edit.
5. Proofing – The importance of proofing your content can’t be understated. I’ve seen content from agencies containing typos in headlines, shocking grammatical mistakes and a generally shoddy approach. It’s worth remembering that people often see how you do one thing as how you do everything. With this in mind, JB, our proofreader, goes through all the articles and corrects anything that needs to be fixed. In every news outlet I have ever worked for, there’s always something called AME – which stands for Acceptable Margin of Error – ours at the Content Club is VERY small – but no one’s prefect.
6. IG Articles and Video Copy – Once the 400 to 500-word articles are proofed, we edit the sales and lettings pieces down so that they can be posted on Instagram and used as short, snappy scripts for social media videos. Again, the edited-down versions are sent to JB for proofing.
7. Cometh the Canva King – When all the copy is proofed and prepared, our Canva King BF comes into play. He creates videos and images to accompany the written content using the design platform Canva. It’s relatively easy software to use and makes rebranding easy.
8. Proof It Again – Once BF does his thing, his videos and images are all double-checked by JB, AB and sometimes me. We’re a little obsessed with the proofing process, and that’s why I urge all agents to have a freelance, independent proofreader as part of their team.
9. Bundle!!! – Once we’re happy with everything, we sign it off and prepare the weekly packs, which are sent to our members every Monday without fail.
10. Back to the Beginning – Like all news and good content outlets, we have an organised cycle of work – once the nine steps above are done, we start all over again, seeking out ideas, researching new content pieces and seeing what’s on people’s minds.
11. STOP, THIEF! –Copyright theft is an issue sometimes. Cheap agents choose to copy and paste other people’s articles and pass them off as their own work. We’ve a system in place that catches these thieves (you’re stealing if you do this). It’s easy to do as this level of tea leaf isn’t exactly Lex Luther. By constantly checking that our work isn’t being plagiarised, we protect the reputation and integrity of our members.

We now turn away more members than we take on due to our non-competing agency model.

To see if your postcodes are currently available, email me the areas your agency serves.

Other content creators we recommend are Chris Watkin, Dataloft and Property Video Solutions.

Thanks for reading,

Jerry