Here is the story of a merchant who was selling dream homes at times. When TikTok exists in India, Mumbai-based Rafique Merchant experimented with selling dream homes just within a minute. He got thousands of inquiries for displaying inexpensive homes, though he didn’t make big sales through those TikTok videos.
He has been a realtor for a decade. Still, he didn’t get time to explore TikTok as much as he would have liked to, as the app was banned. Until then, he hadn’t shown interest in Instagram, mainly because the Facebook-owned app was highly image-focused.
Now, the story begins. When TikTok was banned in 2020, Reels has become a platform to do business differently for realtors like Merchant. The merchant says he has seen 100% business growth since the time he began selling homes on Instagram. Besides selling homes and commercial spaces, he has also been doing brand work. The merchant has associations with some popular brands like Ajmera Group, Lodha, Marathon, and many others. Brands pay anywhere between Rs 50,000 to Rs 1,00,000 to these realtors for marketing campaigns, according to multiple influencer management entities.
As per digital advertising agencies, with realtors becoming content creators, the category is getting a facelift. Prince Khanna, a co-founder of influencer marketing firm Eleve Media, calls them influencer agents. He believes they are in a way enhancing good governance practices that directly influence the brand’s capability to build investor, tenant, and community trust.
Both the Merchant and the founder of real estate Mayank Agarwal are working on projects and adding a large number of clients that came to them due to their influencing power. Merchant has played as a realtor in an upcoming web series on the international OTT giant Netflix. They are of the opinion that its high time that real estate agents get organized. They say realtors should think differently because today people are mostly looking at content that’s engaging and useful and the Like on your reel turn into a buy.