Scroll through the Instagram profiles of most real estate agencies on the North Coast and you'll see the same pattern: a property tour video, then another property tour video, then another. No captions that say anything meaningful. No person on camera. No sense of who the agency is, who they work with, or why a buyer from Canada or Germany should trust them with a $400,000 decision.
The agencies doing this aren't lazy. They're putting real effort into the content — good footage, clean editing, properties that look their best. The problem isn't the quality of the content. It's the strategy behind it. They're using Instagram to sell, and Instagram doesn't sell anything.
What Instagram Actually Does
Instagram is not a sales platform. It's a trust platform. The distinction matters more in real estate than in almost any other industry.
A buyer considering a $300,000 property in Cabarete is not going to see a Reel of a beachfront condo and immediately send a deposit. What they will do is see that Reel, find it interesting, visit the profile, scroll through the last 12 posts, look at who's behind the account, read a caption or two, and then decide whether this agency feels real and trustworthy enough to contact.
That decision — trustworthy or not — is made in about 90 seconds. And it's made almost entirely on signals that have nothing to do with the properties being shown. It's made on tone, on consistency, on whether there's a human being visible anywhere in the content, on whether the captions say something or just describe what's already visible in the video.
The agencies that understand this use Instagram to answer one question before the buyer even asks it: who are these people and can I trust them? The agencies that don't understand it keep uploading property tours and wondering why their DMs are empty.
The Property Tour Trap
Property tour videos have their place. A well-shot walkthrough of a beachfront villa, with good drone footage establishing the location and interior clips showing the space — that content works. It should be on Instagram. It should also be on the listing page, on YouTube, and sent directly to interested buyers via WhatsApp.
The problem is when property tours are the only thing on the profile. When every post is a different property, with no context about the agency, no voice, no human presence — the profile starts to look less like a real estate agency and more like a listing portal. And listing portals already exist. Buyers who want to scroll through properties go to dedicated platforms. They don't follow Instagram accounts for that.
What they follow Instagram accounts for is the thing that listing portals can't provide: the sense of being connected to a real person or team that knows this market, lives here, and can actually help them navigate a purchase in a country they've never bought property in before.
What Nobody on Camera Actually Communicates
One of the most consistent patterns I see in North Coast real estate content is the absence of people. The properties are filmed beautifully. The locations are shown clearly. The amenities are listed in the text overlay. And there is not a single moment where a human being speaks directly to the viewer.
This is a missed opportunity at a fundamental level. Real estate is a relationship business. The moment a person appears on camera — an agent talking about a neighborhood, a developer explaining why they built something the way they did, a team member walking through what the buying process looks like for a foreign investor — the content stops being a commercial and starts being a conversation.
Conversations build trust. Commercials build resistance.
The objection I hear most often is: "Our clients don't want to see us, they want to see the properties." This is almost always wrong. What clients don't want is forced, awkward on-camera content that feels like an infomercial. What they respond to is genuine, direct communication — someone who clearly knows what they're talking about, filmed without overthinking it, saying something useful in under 60 seconds.
The Content That Actually Works for Real Estate on the North Coast
The social media content that generates real engagement and real inquiries for North Coast real estate agencies is not complicated. It follows a simple ratio: roughly one third property-focused content, one third market and area content, one third human and behind-the-scenes content.
Property content — done right — is not just a tour. It's a tour with context. This property is 200 meters from Kite Beach. The building was completed in 2023. There are currently three expat families living here. The HOA fee covers water and maintenance. That's the difference between content that informs and content that just shows.
Market and area content answers the questions buyers are researching before they contact anyone. What's the difference between buying in Cabarete vs Sosúa? What does the buying process look like for a Canadian citizen? Are property values on the North Coast appreciating? This content positions the agency as an authority, not just a seller — and it ranks in Google searches, which is a secondary benefit that most agencies completely ignore.
Human content is the hardest for most agencies to do because it requires someone to be on camera or at least present in the content. But it's the most effective. A 45-second video of an agent walking through a neighborhood they've worked in for ten years, pointing out things a buyer wouldn't know from a listing — that content builds more trust than twenty property tours.
The Real Role of Social Media in a Property Sale
Understanding the role social media plays in a real estate sale changes how you measure it and how you use it.
Social media almost never closes a deal directly. What it does is create the conditions for a deal to close. A buyer finds a property through Google, a portal, or a referral. They visit the agency's Instagram to verify that the agency is real, active, and professional. The Instagram either confirms their interest or kills it. Then they reach out — or they don't.
In that sequence, social media's job is to not lose the buyer who was already interested. That's a different objective than generating leads from scratch, and it requires different content. It requires a profile that looks like a real, active, trustworthy operation — not a feed of listings that could have been posted by a bot.
If a buyer lands on your profile and the last post was three weeks ago, there are no captions that say anything, and there's no human presence anywhere — you've lost them. Not because your properties weren't right for them. Because your profile didn't pass the 90-second trust test.
If you want to understand what your current social media presence is communicating to buyers who find you — and what it would take to turn it into a genuine trust-building tool — I work with real estate agencies on the North Coast to build content strategies that do exactly that.