Do I hire a person for social or just learn to do it badly myself?

Before you pick, read what the $600 includes when you cancel. Ask in writing who owns the account, who owns the drafts, and whether they hand back the content calendar. I've read two of these agreements for other people and in both the provider kept the templates. That's not sinister, it's normal, but it changes what you own at month thirteen.

The choice depends on one assumption, which is how many properties you expect to market in the next 24 months. Content services price against volume. At one unit, a $600 monthly retainer is $7,200 a year against a single asset, and there's no second listing to spread it over. The $250 teaching option is a fixed cost that gets cheaper every time you reuse the workflow.

The honest constraint on the self serve path is completion rate, which @juniper already named. Most people who buy a workflow don't run it past week six. If you want to test that cheaply, run four weeks of posts yourself before you pay anyone anything. If you finish four weeks, the $250 is probably the better buy. If you don't finish two, the $600 is buying execution, and that's a legitimate thing to pay for.

On the wait for it to get cheaper argument, generative tools have already pushed down the cost of producing a post, and providers who priced purely on volume of output are feeling that. What has not gotten cheaper is deciding what to say, knowing what a listing needs in your particular submarket, and building something recognizable over months. If a provider's pitch is only post count, price pressure is coming. If the pitch is strategy and quality, less so.

At one unit with a spring move in, the thing that actually moves your outcome is the listing itself, the photos and the description, not a social feed. That's a one time spend, not a retainer.

@rena-expert put the number I'd use in front of it. $7,200 a year against one unit. If that unit grosses $18,000 you've spent 40 percent of gross rent on marketing a thing that will be rented in two weeks. The math only works if the retainer is building something that outlives the vacancy.

The ownership question @fathom raised is the one I'd get answered before either option. Account ownership on a business page and who holds the login is a genuinely annoying thing to fix after a relationship ends.

I'm on land, longer holds, and I went the teach me route for $300ish. I did run it, but only because my selling window is measured in quarters and there was nothing else to do in the meantime. If I'd had one apartment to fill in six weeks I'd never have opened the doc again.

Small portfolio here. What broke for me at scale wasn't content quality, it was consistency. One unit you can wing. At eleven you need a system, and I wish I'd bought the system when I had one property and the time to learn it.

@thicket that's the argument for the $250 and I hadn't thought of it that way. Learning while the stakes are one unit is cheap tuition.

Nobody's said the obvious thing, which is that a spring rental in most markets rents off the listing platform and the photos. Social does approximately nothing for filling a single apartment. Spend $300 on photos and a written description and keep the other $5,700.

@harrow depends on the market. In one small college town I looked at, the local rental scene really does run through a couple of neighborhood groups and the listing sites are an afterthought. Worth @juniper checking where tenants in her actual submarket look first.

First rental coming for me too, so I'll say what I did. I paid nothing, wrote the listing myself, took photos on an overcast afternoon because someone here told me to avoid harsh sun, and it rented. What I'd pay for next time is someone to tell me the description was too long, because it was.

Every unit teaches something and the thing this one will teach you is whether you're a person who does the posts. You can't buy that answer, you have to find out. Run @rena-expert's four week test.

Buy neither this year. One unit, one listing, spring. You have a marketing problem for about eleven days. Solve it for $300 and revisit when you have three doors.

@quarry that's roughly where I landed for myself, though I'll admit the appeal of the retainer is that it's income without a second job, and running my own social is a second job.