Instagram Estate Agents: The New Face of UK Property Sales

She and her husband met and liked Baker, and decided to list their house with her. It was seen 1.6 million times on Instagram and was under offer for the asking price — £800,000 — after 18 days. (The purchase completed in January 2024.) The buyer found the property on Instagram; not through the portals. Social media is changing the way we buy and sell homes in the UK. For example, 43 per cent of buyers said they were more likely to contact an estate agent if they liked their social media content, in a survey by the National Association of Estate Agents in 2023. And 79 per cent of agents rely on it for marketing properties (there are even reports of an agency selling a house for £61m after the buyer contacted them through social media). It is fuelling a start-up culture and a more American-style approach in which estate agents, buoyed by their Instagram following, leave the big corporates to set up shop on their own, using their social media accounts as their shopfront and to advertise their “personal brand”. Companies House data shows that 1,624 estate agent businesses opened in the final three months of 2025, a 48 per cent increase on the same period in 2017. Baker, 33, worked at Hamptons for more than two years before striking out on her own in 2021, covering southeast London. She has 141,000 followers on Instagram and is known for her calming video tours of homes, set to soothing music. “My videos are relaxing — a nice sort of comforting watch, rather than a fast-paced loud watch. People say they like listening to my voice; I talk as if I’m having a conversation with a friend.” • The housemates who became DIY stars on Instagram Sceptics say that Instagram sellers are style over substance, but Baker is successful enough to employ four people. “You might get 4,000 or so impressions for a property on the portals, but with Instagram it could be hundreds of thousands, or millions,” she says. ‘The algorithms are scarily clever’ Last February, Tanya Baker posted on Instagram a video of a house in Ladywell with an asking price of £1.5 million. It sold for £1.6 million after attracting 2.7 million views. “We sold it to a lady from north London who wasn’t even looking in the area, but she found it on Instagram. We had something like 28 inquiries. Eighteen of those came through Instagram and ten through Rightmove; we received eight offers and seven of those came through Instagram.” Baker often trials a property on Instagram, to test the price and gauge the reaction, before launching it on Rightmove, where a badly priced property can languish for months, leaving the dreaded “digital footprint”. Some properties sell before they reach the portals. Agents also favour Instagram because it widens the net: posts attract buyers who weren’t considering that location but love the house. Most people search first by location on portals, says Baker, then algorithms will pick up their search and serve them social media videos of properties in and around that area. “The algorithms are scarily clever.” Much of her business comes from friends sharing posts. “If you had a friend who said, I’m looking to move home, you wouldn’t scroll through Rightmove for them. But if you were on Instagram and you saw a nice house, you say, that’s nice, Sarah was looking to move, I’ll send it to Sarah.” Baker films tours of all her listings, a process that can take up to eight hours. She’s used the same videographer and photographer for five years. It costs £1,000-£2,000 to list each property and she asks clients to pay about half that — from £500 to £750 — as a deposit, which is taken off the fee upon completion: 1.75 per cent for freehold and 2 per cent for leasehold. “I retain my clients as friends most of the time, which is lovely.” • The rise of the millennial landlord ‘Seventy per cent of properties I sold last year were through social media’ That echoes the American way, where personalities reign supreme and estate agents befriend clients. Grant Bates was inspired by the American mould. He spent 13 years at Hamptons and has 410,000 followers on Instagram. Last year he opened his own brokerage. “I’ve literally got a wife, three kids and a mortgage and I left a very well-paid corporate job to start my own business off the back of a personal brand. So it 100 per cent works,” he says. “If I put a property on Instagram, within 10-15 minutes we’ve got 15 or 20 emails from people that want more details. Seventy per cent of the properties I sold last year were from posts on social media … I noticed they were doing it in the States and I thought, it’s crazy, why aren’t we doing that here?” That’s changing fast. “You’re seeing the emergence of a lot more brokerages because one, they earn a higher commission, and two, they have far more autonomy. It’s an entrepreneur’s revolution, but it also services the client so much better.” Bates’s notable sales from social media include East Villa in Hackney, northeast London, which received ten million views on his channels and sold for £9.1 million; a house in Notting Hill that went for £17.95 million after 30 million views; and Granville House in Blackheath, southeast London, which sold for £10.6 million off the back of a YouTube video. ‘You post videos about the market, but also about how your day goes’ Mark Breffit, who has 34,000 followers on Instagram, also left Hamptons last year to set up his own brokerage, KnokKnok Real Estate. The website describes it as “my rebellion against beige brochures, stiff suits and outdated sales scripts”. “I haven’t taken the Hamptons database with me,” Breffit says. “All of the instructions, the 11 properties we’ve brought to market in our first seven months, have come through social media.” He likes doing satirical videos and peppers his property tours with jokes. “Welcome to Cadogan Lane,” he says in one, “where even the pigeons have net worth and the reception room is large enough for a family argument where no one has to make eye contact.” He feels his fun, down-to-earth approach builds trust. “You post videos about the market, but also about how your day goes. I posted a video about how I renovated my bathroom recently, and I’ve got two valuations off the back of that. People want to see the human side — they want to see me doing the school run or talking about deals falling through, not standing beside Lamborghinis.” Recently he listed a house in Clapham, southwest London, for £900,000. “Over half the viewings this week have come from social media. So social does drive real liquidity, it’s not just about likes. I sold a property in Fulham for just under £6 million to a Saudi buyer after he’d seen a satirical video I’d done for another property in Knightsbridge. It works.” • I’ve spent £51,110 on rent — but I don’t want to buy a home yet ‘I’m able to build trust by putting my face out there’ Toby Corban, founder of the the estate agency the Corban Group, agrees. He says 70 per cent of his transactions come through social media. In 2025 he won letting of the year at the LonRes Property Awards for closing a deal on a five-bedroom penthouse at Chelsea Creek in Fulham, which rented for more than £47,600 a month. The tenant’s friends sent him Corban’s videos, and he instructed Corban. Corban, 32, who has 261,000 followers on Instagram, says social media has helped him to fast-track his career. He started off training at a high-street agency but wanted to emulate the more entrepreneurial American style, so in 2020 went solo. “I essentially kept posting consent. My goal was to build my brand. People started reaching out to me, looking to rent, buy or sell. I was able to shorten the timeline that it would typically take to get these leads. In the traditional market, reputation is built deal by deal. With social media I’m able to build trust by putting my face out there — they get a sense of who I am, how I think, the decisions that I make. They can decide, is this someone I want to work with?” Corban doesn’t like to call himself an influencer, but he also owns a digital media marketing agency and makes videos for luxury brands. One business feeds the other. He’s changing the sullied image of the estate agent in the UK to an aspirational career, closer to the way it’s viewed in the US. “People do stop me on the street and say, you inspired me to go into real estate, to try and work harder so I could get one of your penthouses.” In this brave new world it can be unclear who is a proper estate agent and who is an influencer. Are they any good at selling? Do your due diligence: ask to see a proven track record of sales and referrals from clients, check their record on Companies House. Be wary of rental scams. Quality can be better than quantity. “There are agents that have four times the following I have but that are getting way less engagement,” Baker says. “Some of my views are bigger than my following. One we recently sold had only 234,000 views, but it was shared 1,554 times. That’s the kind of engagement that really boosts sales.”