Video-sharing app TikTok is enormously popular among young people—to the point that many real estate agents use it to find clients and/or build their brand—but is its time ending?
In April 2024, President Joe Biden signed a bill mandating TikTok parent company ByteDance divest from the app or else it will be functionally banned in the U.S. on January 19, 2025.
What does the ban look like? While there is little precedent for a government ban of a major social media platform, expectations are that companies who control app stores, such as Google and Apple, will remove TikTok from their platforms so that new users cannot download it onto their devices. TikTok would most likely not be removed from existing users’ devices, but they would not be able to update it anymore, so the app could eventually become unusable.
ByteDance is based in China, and the pervasiveness of TikTok has produced international controversy, with claims (including from a former employee) that the Chinese government is able to spy on TikTok users’ data. TikTok has denied any such links to the Chinese government; in a March 2023 congressional hearing, the company’s CEO Shou Zi Chew (a Singaporean citizen) maintained that U.S. TikTok users’ data is well-secured.
Opponents of the ban, including TikTok itself, have argued that it is an overreach that infringes on freedom of speech. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit disagreed with this assessment in a ruling permitting the ban back in December 2024.
The mix of uncertainty and an encroaching deadline leaves TikTok’s real estate agent community in a tough place.
RISMedia spoke with real estate professionals who reach a wide audience on TikTok about how they’re preparing for the platform—and what they’ve built on it—to potentially disappear.
Reactions to the TikTok ban from the app’s real estate stars
Mari Juliette, a broker/owner who runs her eponymous Florida-based brokerage Mari Juliette Real Estate, has more than 496,000 followers on her TikTok account, where she shares lifestyle and business advice. She started the account in 2020 while working from home, and though she was getting a “steady flow of business” from door-knocking, TikTok exploded her reach and lead generation.
“Sometimes it would be like 20 people a day, as far as leads are concerned, sometimes it would be a hundred people a day,” Juliette says. “I’ve never paid for leads or paid Zillow or Realtor.com® or anything like that. So it was all completely organic and completely free. I would post five or six videos a day, and I would go live a lot. And by 2022, 68% of the deals that my entire brokerage closed were from TikTok. Not even Instagram, TikTok alone.”
As such, Juliette extends much credit for her current success to her TikTok account and the clients who found her there.
“I don’t think I would have a real estate brokerage if it weren’t for TikTok,” says Juliette, who feels the ban is “unfortunate,” mostly because it could hamper entrepreneurs who are just starting out who are in need of a free platform to reach a wide audience.
“I think it has started so many businesses,” says Juliette. “I think a lot of people who want to be entrepreneurs, maybe they assume that they need to have a nest egg or investors to start a business, but TikTok makes it where you can literally just put your time in, and it’s free. TikTok made something that would probably take 10 years, take two years, so it’s a shame for people who haven’t been able to take advantage of that and maybe aren’t going to find a platform that’s going to create that much overnight growth.”
Madison Sutton is a New York City real estate agent who works with SERHANT; before that, she was a “real estate influencer” with Highline Residential and Brown Harris Stevens. She currently runs the TikTok account @TheNYCAgent, which maintains over 99,000 followers.
Sutton tells RISMedia she doesn’t expect the ban will go through in the end, and notes that due to the idea having been long-gestating (e.g., Montana attempted a statewide TikTok ban in 2023), it’s “hard to tie emotion to (the upcoming ban).”
“I’m 28 years old, but a lot of people my age and younger get their news from social media. So even if it’s accurate or even if it’s not, we’ve been hearing about this impending ban for probably what—two and a half years now,” Sutton explains.
Sutton does believe, though, that real estate practitioners could be negatively impacted or “lose credibility” were the ban to go through.
“We said (TikTok) is the next new thing. It’s not like Threads, obviously Threads came after, but I do think it’ll affect a lot of people,” she says. “I think it’s going to really hurt the agent’s organic reach and the ability to go viral or to be seen simply, so it would impact a lot of agents’ business and not just that, their credibility and overall motivation. You put so much work and time into curating these things and you get excited, you get hopeful.”
However, despite reservations about the ban, agents who use TikTok aren’t necessarily concerned that the loss of the platform will put a huge dent in their businesses. Nancy Almodovar, a Houston REALTOR® and CEO of Nan & Co. Properties, has almost 29,000 TikTok followers and advises that other agents—even if they don’t believe the ban will go through—to act like it will “because it takes years to build an audience, right?”
However, when asked if she thinks losing TikTok would impede her ability to reach that audience, Almodovar firmly said: “Not at all.”
Randy Baruh is an associate broker with Compass based in New York City, who has built a follower count of over 300,000 on his TikTok. Baruh’s content includes videos showing off luxury New York listings, debunking common myths about real estate, short comedy sketches and more.
Asked about how concerned he is whether the ban will impact his business on a scale of one to 10, answered “maybe a five.”
“If I was getting a lot of appointments from TikTok and that was a huge lead generator for us, it might be different,” Baruh explains. “We don’t really use TikTok as the lead generation tool. We use it as a marketing tool.”
How using TikTok can build an agent’s brand, according to the experts
Though Baruh acknowledges TikTok as a useful tool for reaching younger buyers, it is just a tool, not a foundation, he says.
“Our business has built on strong real estate fundamentals like relationships and my expertise as a real estate professional here in New York City, and the ability to adapt when things change,” says Baruh. TikTok allows Baruh to inform people—including those far beyond Manhattan—about that brand and business foundation.
“I’ve been all over the world and people have recognized my channel,” says Baruh. “I was in London about a year ago at a big family dinner—my wife’s English—and we were at a friend of hers’ house and went for this dinner party, and this 18 year old was sitting next to me and they were asking what I do, and I told them, ‘I’m a real estate agent in New York, but I’m very active on social media.’ And it turned out that she and her brother had been following me for about a year.”
As a brand-builder, TikTok has disrupted some old assumptions about advertising. Juliette notes that one way for agents to build TikTok followings, and a brand identity as someone to listen to, is to be an educator.
“People didn’t really understand why I was giving so much advice to agents, advice to buyers, things like that. Because even my broker at the time was like, ‘You’re going to create competition for yourself. Why are you sharing everything?’ And it really just makes you look more credible and (like) the expert,” said Juliette.
That education can focus not just on professional advice, but also on educating buyers about the market you live in. Asked about what stands out about the leads she finds on TikTok compared to other platforms, Almodovar said she finds many of them are buyers researching for a planned move to Texas.
“So the quickest and easiest way is looking up ‘houses for sale in Texas’ or Houston or the Woodlands or just different parts in Texas (on TikTok),” Almodovar says. “And I’ve had a lot of clients find me on TikTok.”
Sutton, who started using TikTok for her business during the pandemic to show off the rental listings she was working on at the time, says that the app opened her mind to the power of video advertising.
“Up until that time, there were certain agencies that wouldn’t even post photos of bathrooms unless they were luxury,” Sutton says. “The whole idea was don’t overshow them what they are going to walk into or else they may say no. So that was kind of the risk. I feel like a lot of the industry’s view of videos was ‘Why would they come see it (in person)?’ You have a better chance of selling it if they see it in person versus if they say no.”
Instead, Sutton recalls, her TikTok videos only bolstered interest in apartment listings—to the point that some viewers would be ready to put down a deposit after only a FaceTime tour.
“(That) is something that I would never traditionally advise any of my followers (to do), but I built up that brand trust at that point,” explains Sutton. “I think if you’re not doing video, it’s a disservice to your client.”
But as real estate professionals have taken note of marketing advantages that TikTok offers, has the platform become too oversaturated to leave an impact or find a niche?
“I will say that my engagement has not been as strong in the last few years as it was before. It was really, really strong, always going viral, and then it kind of dipped down a lot,” Juliette says, “so it hasn’t been my primary source of income like it was before. I’ve definitely diversified where I’m getting clients and kind of gone back to the drawing board with that.”
Baruh, who first went viral on TikTok in 2021 with a video showcasing a luxury apartment and built his following from there, also says that “(back then) it was a bit easier to be distinctive in TikTok in the real estate space. Now there’s so many people doing it, it’s really hard, much harder.”
Sutton agrees that the newness shine of TikTok has worn off at this point, but disagrees that this devalues it as a marketing or lead reach platform for both new agents and TikTok’s existing real estate stars.
“I think a lot of the creators who are saying that—we got in at a great time, we were early adopters in that space, and of course it was easier to grow. So I think whenever anything gets increasingly more difficult, it does become a bit more discouraging, but you’re going to also just have a different view of it,” explains Sutton. “Where I think newer agents, I still would a million percent recommend that they push TikTok.”
How agents can and should be casting a wide social media net
All of the real estate professionals RISMedia spoke to agreed that agents should embrace a multi-platform approach to social media. Baruh, for instance, points to Instagram Reels as a social media/video strategy his team has been focusing on recently.
“A lot of the content that we’re creating on TikTok can fairly easily be repurposed to other platforms in order to maintain the audience engagement,” he explains, “and we keep this in mind when we’re creating new content for TikTok.”
Almodovar also advocates that agents spread themselves across multiple platforms—and that there’s no shame in reusing content, because sometimes a video can blow up on one platform after sinking on another.
“Some videos that go viral on my TikTok won’t go viral on my other platforms, but yet some videos that will go viral on YouTube get like 500 views on TikTok,” she says.
To maintain client outreach across many channels, Almodovar says that agents shouldn’t just use social media apps (she tells RISMedia she’s recently been using Lemon8, also owned by ByteDance and promoted as a TikTok alternative), but also newsletters—so that you can directly connect with your audience on a platform you control, instead of relying on one that could be disabled.
“We have our own platform within our company internally, so I use that for my personal newsletter,” says Almodovar. “I have a business newsletter that I send out that has my listings, all things real estate, but then I also have a personal newsletter that I share where I talk about luxury things, traveling (and being a) working mom. I do add some real estate in there, but it’s not as much. It’s more of a get to know me and my brand.”
How do you drive your followers to those other platforms? For Almodovar, the answer is asking your followers directly to stay in touch, whether it’s asking them to follow you on other social media or by encouraging them to sign up for an email newsletter.
Sutton similarly suggests being upfront, comparing how trying to make a customer “subconsciously” want a product isn’t a good way to gain trust. That TikTok might soon be disabled actually creates an opening for you to divert your followers to your other platform, provided you’re upfront about it.
“I think having an honest conversation, being like—and I’m probably going to be putting out this video quite soon—‘Hey guys, things are changing. Things might change. We’re unsure what’s going to happen. I would love to keep supporting you. I would love to keep educating you and keep you in my life, and if that has to be on another platform, it does.’ So I would like to encourage my followers to follow me on other platforms if this is a journey they’d like to hold a seat with,” said Sutton.
As yet another way to maintain your TikTok sphere of influence, Baruh says that he has “also been able to convert a lot of the TikTok followers into subscribers for my email list and nurture them through our CRM system.”
While TikTok is not the only video-sharing social media app out there, does it come with specific advantages over other platforms that could be lost?
For Juliette, one answer is that the app encourages users to produce a high “volume” of content, which made it easy for her to build a brand from quickly taking videos of herself on the job.
“The No. 1 thing for me is that I could just take a quick video in between showings or in between listing appointments and post it, whereas maybe other platforms, it would take editing and really coming up with an idea,” she says. “My most successful content with the most views is when I do it in one take, and I’m in between work. If I was just a creator and wasn’t actually doing the job, it wouldn’t work. I think people like the authenticity and seeing the real day-to-day from somebody who’s working in the field.”
This adds to a feeling of authenticity that other apps don’t necessarily have, Juliette explains: “(TikTok is) just more of a casual platform. It’s more conversational. You can talk to your audience more than I think you can with Instagram or YouTube, where it’s more curated.”
Sutton concurs: “TikTok is a bit stronger than other social media such as Instagram, but of course more so than LinkedIn because it tends to be more raw. It’s not as perfected and curated. It’s more you.”
While some of these advantages may vanish without TikTok’s specific user interface encouraging people to scroll through bite-sized video after bite-sized video, Juliette’s advice for aspiring TikTok real estate influencers—build a broad audience but be singularly you—is one that can fit for many other social media platforms.
“I tried to mix lifestyle with educational content, and going live definitely helped because then I was able to just talk and talk and talk about my knowledge on real estate,” says Juliette. “I not only built a community of buyers and sellers, but also real estate agents, so when I post about houses and things, I know that it’s going to the right people who can share those properties.”
Should TikTok disappear, U.S. real estate agents can still learn from the experiences of those who excelled on it—and apply those same experiences to the next platform that comes along.
“I always find a way to find (people),” Almodovar says. “I mean, I’m a salesperson, it’s my job.”
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