REA vs the socials: Has Australia’s property marketing war just begun?

An ACCC intervention into REA Group's agency contracts could give agents and property owners greater freedom over how homes are marketed. But the bigger story may be happening well beyond the portals, as social media, video and owned audiences change how Australians discover property in the first place.

For more than two decades, the Australian property marketing formula has been relatively predictable.

List the property. Photograph it. Put it on the major portals. Promote it. Wait for people who are actively searching for a property to find it.

That model is not disappearing.

But it is changing.

On Monday, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission announced it had accepted a court-enforceable undertaking from REA Group following concerns about restrictions contained in its contracts with real estate agencies.

The ACCC said most REA contracts had previously required agencies to list all their properties for sale or lease on realestate.com.au. Some contractual arrangements also required or incentivised agencies to use higher-fee listing features for all or part of their stock.

Under the undertaking, REA will not be able to require or incentivise agencies to list all or most of their properties on realestate.com.au and has committed to operational changes for three years.

Importantly, this does not mean agencies were prohibited from advertising properties elsewhere. The issue identified by the regulator was the requirement that properties also be listed on REA and the contractual structures around listing products and tiers.

If agents have greater freedom over where and how individual properties are marketed, what does a property campaign actually need to look like in 2026 and beyond?

REA remains enormously powerful

Any suggestion that the traditional property portals are suddenly becoming irrelevant would be difficult to support.

REA reported an average 12.7 million monthly visitors to realestate.com.au during FY26. It remains an extraordinary concentration of Australian property demand. 

The ACCC itself has previously acknowledged that strength.

During its examination of REA's proposed acquisition of Dynamic Methods, the regulator noted market feedback that realestate.com.au was regarded by many agents as a "must have" because competing platforms generally did not provide comparable audience reach.

At the time, the ACCC also questioned whether increased off-market selling could provide a meaningful competitive constraint, noting that off-market properties generally reached a smaller audience and that vendors would ordinarily want their property exposed as widely as possible.

That fundamental argument has not disappeared.

If an owner wants maximum exposure, putting a property in front of millions of people who are actively searching for real estate remains an extremely powerful proposition.

What is changing is the assumption that active search is the only audience that matters.

The rise of the passive property buyer

Real Estate Today founder Nic Fren believes one of the most significant changes in property marketing is occurring before someone has formally decided they are a buyer.

"We've spent years thinking about property buyers as people who go onto a property website and start searching," Fren said.

"But that's not the only buyer anymore.

"You've now got someone sitting on TikTok or Instagram at night who isn't looking for a house at all. They see a property, they like the kitchen, they like the location, they send it to their partner and suddenly they're talking about whether they could live there.

"They weren't searching for property five minutes earlier.

"That's passive buying, and I think we're going to see a lot more of it."

It changes the traditional marketing funnel.

A portal primarily captures intent. Someone visits because they are thinking about property.

Social media can create intent.

The distinction is significant.

Instead of waiting for a consumer to decide they want a three-bedroom house within a particular suburb and price range, an agent can put the property into the media environment where that person already spends time.

The house becomes the trigger.

Australia is already seeing properties sell this way

This is no longer purely a theory about where digital marketing might eventually head.

Australian agents are already recording transactions generated through social platforms.

Melbourne agent Luke Saville reported selling 25 apartments through TikTok and Instagram during a 12-month period, with properties frequently finding purchasers before appearing on the major property portals. 

Real Estate Today has previously reported another example involving Stockdale & Leggo Langwarrin director Bianca Burgdorf, who secured two off-market sales after marketing the properties through TikTok without traditional portal advertising or paid advertising. 

Those numbers remain small compared with Australia's total property transaction market.

But that is not really the point.

The importance is that the transaction path exists at all.

Five or ten years ago, social media in real estate was largely treated as branding.

Agents posted a sold photograph, a new listing, a market update or perhaps a video and hoped somebody remembered their name when it came time to sell.

Increasingly, the platform itself can sit much closer to the transaction.

Discovery, enquiry, conversation, inspection and eventually a sale can begin with a piece of content appearing in someone's feed.

Agents need to stop thinking in terms of one advertising channel

Fren has been working with social media and digital property marketing for more than a decade and says he has personally listed, leased and sold hundreds of properties through social channels while coaching thousands of agents on digital marketing.

He does not see social media replacing major portals.

He sees the strongest agents becoming less dependent on any single distribution channel.

"The portals aren't going anywhere and I don't think agents should suddenly stop using them," Fren said.

"What should change is the mentality that says you put a property on a portal and your marketing job is finished.

"Your buyer could come from realestate.com.au. They could come from another portal. They could be sitting in your database. They could follow you on Instagram. They could see a TikTok. They could get the property forwarded to them by someone who isn't even a buyer.

"The job is to find the buyer. The channel is just how you reach them."

That becomes particularly relevant if agencies gain more flexibility over the product and channel mix attached to individual campaigns.

Not every property has the same buyer.

Not every vendor has the same budget.

And not every campaign necessarily requires the same combination of advertising products.

REA already offers forms of flexibility within some existing products, including Campaign Flex arrangements that can allow certain Premiere+ listings to be downgraded, as well as separate options for some lower-value properties. The ACCC undertaking, however, addresses the wider issue of contractual requirements and incentives applying across agency stock.

This could make the agent more important, not less

There is another consequence that deserves attention.

Greater choice puts greater responsibility back onto the real estate agent.

When almost every property follows roughly the same distribution formula, the agent can largely recommend the established package.

When more combinations become possible, the agent has to explain why a particular strategy is appropriate.

Should this property have the highest available portal exposure?

Would a lower listing tier combined with a substantial social campaign perform better?

Does the agent already have a genuine database of prospective buyers?

Can video introduce the property to people outside the traditional property-search audience?

Does an off-market period make sense?

Should competing portals form part of the strategy?

And, most importantly, what does the vendor actually gain or risk under each option?

Those questions require judgement.

They also make an agent's own audience increasingly valuable.

An agent with 30,000 relevant local followers, a strong email database, thousands of past clients and consistently watched property videos owns something that cannot simply be purchased through a listing upgrade.

They own distribution.

But social media cannot become an excuse to under-market property

There is an important warning here.

The ability to sell property through social media does not mean every property should be marketed only through social media.

Maximum competition remains central to achieving the strongest possible outcome for many vendors.

There is a substantial difference between an agent who has developed an audience capable of creating genuine buyer competition and an agent simply telling a vendor they have followers.

The marketing recommendation still has to be made in the client's interests.

For many campaigns, that may continue to involve the widest possible exposure across portals, social media, the agency database, email, video and other channels simultaneously.

The opportunity created by greater flexibility is not to spend less at any cost.

It is to spend more intelligently.

Portals could face a different type of competition

The ACCC described its intervention as a win for competition and said the previous contract provisions had limited customer choice and hindered the ability of other listing services to compete.

The immediate beneficiaries could therefore include competing property platforms.

But competition may no longer come only from another website containing property listings.

Google, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, AI property search products, agent databases and brokerage-owned digital platforms are all competing, in different ways, for pieces of the property discovery process.

Even REA appears to recognise that search behaviour is broadening. The company has continued investing beyond conventional filtered search, including AI-powered natural-language property discovery products. 

The next battle in property technology may therefore be less about which portal has the most listings and more about where the consumer first encounters the property.

The real change is distribution

The significance of the ACCC's undertaking will become clearer as contractual changes flow through the industry.

There may be price consequences.

There may be opportunities for competing portals.

Agencies may experiment with different campaign structures.

Some vendors may decide they do not require the same level of portal exposure as others.

But the larger structural change has already started.

A property advertisement no longer has to wait for somebody to go looking for it.

It can find them.

For agents, that means the audience they build around themselves may become almost as important as the platforms they pay to access.

And for vendors, the question may gradually change from:

"Which website will my property be listed on?"

to:

"How exactly are you going to make sure the right buyers see my home?"

That is a much bigger question.

And increasingly, the best answer will probably involve more than one screen.