If You’re Still Creating Your Marketing Week to Week, Spring Is Going to Hurt

This isn't shaping up to be an ordinary spring for the real estate industry.

We've already had three interest rate rises this year, taking the cash rate to 4.35 per cent. Investors are dealing with big changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax, including changes that will limit negative gearing on established residential properties acquired after Budget night from the 2027–28 income year.

Whatever your view on those changes, they have given property owners and investors a lot to think about.

I'm hearing the impact of that uncertainty in conversations with my own real estate clients. The market feels different, and businesses are having to think carefully about what their landlords and investors need from them right now.

Which makes this a particularly bad time to be running your marketing with this question every Monday morning:

“What are we posting this week?”

If that's how your content marketing operates, you're effectively starting from zero 52 times a year.

It can limp along when things are a bit quiet in your office. But Spring isn’t usually quiet. And that will expose systems that were relying on “spare time”.

Your best content is probably already happening

One of the strange things about marketing in real estate is that businesses will sit down to “brainstorm content” while ignoring dozens of useful conversations happening inside the business every week.

Right now, those conversations are more valuable than all your brainstormed ideas.

Property managers are hearing what landlords are concerned about. BDMs know which questions keep coming up in appraisals. Principals are seeing changes in their local markets. Teams are explaining complex issues, correcting misconceptions (usually from the media) and noticing changes that someone outside the industry wouldn't necessarily see.

That's the raw material for good content.

I'm not suggesting a property manager should start giving tax advice on Instagram because a landlord asked about negative gearing. There are obvious boundaries around expertise, and some subjects are better handled with input from an accountant, financial adviser or other appropriate professional.

But the question itself is useful, isn’t it?

It tells you what your market is thinking about.

That's a much better starting point than opening a content calendar and trying to invent something interesting to say.

Most established real estate businesses  will easily come up with hundreds of ideas. But they don’t have a great system for capturing these ideas. And that’s the problem.

A landlord asks a great question on Tuesday. Your property manager gives a thoughtful answer. Everyone gets on with their day.

By the following Monday, when somebody asks what the business should post, that conversation has been forgotten.

Then someone finds a photo from an event three weeks ago and writes a caption because at least it's something to publish.

There is a better way to do it.

Stop starting from zero every week

The simplest change I'd make is to give your team one place to capture useful questions, conversations and observations as they happen.

It can be simple, and it should be on a platform your team already uses. Maybe it’s a Teams channel, a shared document, a google form or note system will do the job.

The prompts can be equally simple:

• What did a landlord ask us this week?
• What have we explained more than once?
• What are investors uncertain about?
• What are we noticing in our local market?
• What misconception keeps coming up?
• What happened this week that would be useful for our clients to understand?

The important point here is that you're not asking your property managers or BDMs to become content creators.

You're asking them to notice the expertise they're already sharing.

Someone else can turn that raw material into an article, email, video or social post.

Over time, you start building a bank of relevant and useful subjects rather than a calendar full of things you invented because Thursday's posting slot was empty.

And once you have good ideas, you need to make them work harder.

Say your team keeps hearing the same question from landlords about how current market conditions could affect their investment decisions. That might warrant an article with appropriate expert input. Part of the article could become a landlord email. One specific question might make a useful short video. A month later, you may have a new observation that gives you another angle on the same subject.

You don't need 30 completely original ideas to create 30 useful pieces of marketing.

You need a smaller number of good ideas that are actually relevant to the people you're trying to reach.

Put AI to work on what you’ve captured

AI can be useful here, but I wouldn’t ask ChatGPT or Claude to come up with your content from scratch. That tends to give you the same ideas it could give any real estate business.

Instead, give it the real questions, observations and conversations your team has captured and use it to help you find the content opportunities inside them.

For example, at the end of each fortnight you could paste your team’s notes into ChatGPT or Claude with this prompt:

I run a real estate/property management business based in [INSERT LOCATION]. Below are questions, observations and conversations our team has captured from real landlords, prospective clients and our day-to-day work over the past 2 weeks.

Review them and identify the strongest content opportunities for our key platforms which are [LIST YOUR SOCIAL PLATFORMS, WEBSITE IF YOU’RE PUBLISHING BLOGS, EMAIL CRM IF YOU CAN SEND NEWSLETTERS, ETC]. Prioritise topics that are useful to landlords and property investors, demonstrate our team's expertise, or address questions and misconceptions that are coming up repeatedly.

For each opportunity, give me:

1. The central topic or question
2. Why it would matter to a landlord or property investor
3. The expertise or information we still need to capture from our team before creating the content
4. 2–3 suitable ways we could use it, such as a social post, short video, landlord email or article

Don't invent facts, client stories, market data or opinions we haven't supplied. Don't write the finished content yet. Your job is to help us identify and organise the best ideas from our own expertise.

Here are our notes:
[PASTE ALL YOUR TEAM NOTES HERE]

Plan ahead without trying to predict the future

With so much changing in the market, I wouldn't recommend writing every piece of content between now and Christmas.

That's not the point of planning ahead.

Instead, look at the next 8 to 12 weeks and decide what your business is likely to need to talk about.

• What are landlords thinking about now?
• What questions are becoming more common?
• What's happening in your local market?
• What seasonal conversations are coming?
• What expertise does your team have that isn't currently visible in your marketing?
• And what do you want a prospective landlord to understand about your business after they've spent ten minutes looking you up online?

Choose the important themes and build a bank of ideas around them, but leave room for what's actually happening.

The goal isn't to predict December in September. You don’t have a crystal ball.

It's to make sure you’re not asking “what are we posting this week?” every Monday.

When spring gets busy, your system gets tested

Of course, having ideas doesn't solve everything.

Someone still has to make sure the content gets created and published.

This is where you discover your next problem.

If a property manager is responsible for social media on top of managing a portfolio, what happens when the portfolio gets busy?

Property management wins. As it should.

If your BDM has a full pipeline of opportunities to follow up, what takes priority: chasing an appraisal or making Wednesday's Reel?

The appraisal. As it should.

And if everything eventually lands on the principal's desk to be written, rewritten or approved, you've simply moved the bottleneck.

Somebody needs to own the marketing process, whether that's someone internally or externally. It might be someone on your team, it might be a content marketing agency or it might be a virtual assistant. But it needs to be someone who can own it, and has the capacity to focus on it.

That doesn't mean they personally need to come up with every idea, write every caption, film every video and design every graphic.

Ownership means knowing what's coming up, what needs to be created, what information is missing, what's waiting for approval and what needs to go live.

If everybody is “vaguely responsible” for marketing, there's a reasonable chance nobody really is.

Before you try to “be more consistent”, find the bottleneck

This is the exercise I'd suggest every real estate business do before the end of the year.

Pick a handful of pieces of content you've published recently and trace what actually happened.

Start with the idea.

Where did it come from?

How long did it take before somebody did something with it?

Who created the content?

What information did they need?

Who had to approve it?

How long did it sit waiting?

Who was responsible for publishing it?

Then look for the point where things repeatedly slowed down or stopped.

You may discover that you don't actually have a content creation problem.

Perhaps good ideas disappear because nobody captures them.

Perhaps your team creates plenty, but everything sits with the principal for days waiting for approval.

Perhaps one person technically “does the socials”, but it's number 28 on their priority list.

Perhaps every piece starts from scratch, even though you've already produced plenty of useful material that could be revisited.

Whatever it is, fix that issue first.

Adding more content ideas to a broken process generally gives you a bigger pile of unfinished content.

Let spring show you what needs fixing

There is plenty happening in property right now.

Interest rates have risen. The tax treatment of property investment is changing. Investors are making decisions in a different environment, and the industry will continue to debate what all of that means for prices, supply, rents and investor behaviour.

Right now, you want to pay attention to what your clients are asking, what your team is explaining and where your business has something genuinely useful to contribute.

That's what good content should come from.

And while you're doing that, pay attention to the process behind it.

Where does your marketing keep getting stuck?

What still relies on someone remembering?

What disappears as soon as the business gets busy?

If your marketing has felt harder than it should this year, welcome to the club! My advice to you is this: Don't make “post more consistently” your New Year's resolution for 2027.

Fix the system that made consistency difficult in the first place.

Because the market will keep changing. Your world will get busier. Emergencies will happen. And the content machine keeps turning.

Your marketing shouldn't need to be rebuilt from scratch every week.