A case worth studying: five months and $1,450 on Instagram for two buildings, zero applications

Run the number the other way and it gets clearer. $1,450 over four turnovers is $362 a unit of marketing spend. At your rents, what is a day of vacancy worth, $40, $45? So the spend had to save you eight or nine days per turnover to break even, and that is only true if the days it saved were days you would otherwise have eaten. It never had a chance to do that, because the feed was never what prospects were looking at. The DM log in week three would have told you that. What the $1,450 actually bought was five months of not checking.

Dumb question, when you say you never wrote down what the money was supposed to do, what would that even look like? Like a number in an email to her?

@megan_doyle15 one line is enough. "This spend is here to fill vacancies. Success is applications from social, tracked by asking every caller where they found us." If the person you hire can't say how their work does that, you learn it in the first call instead of month five. Cairn, a smaller version of this plays out constantly. Take a six unit owner who spends three months and $600 and has no way to tell where anything came from because nobody ever asked applicants. Same shape as yours. The one thing to push back on in your post is calling the four leases a control. You leased them fine. You have no idea whether the social presence made the listing site inquiries convert faster because you didn't have a before number.

In a working class market the local buy sell trade group on Facebook usually outperforms any polished feed. It is free and it is ugly. The phone rings anyway. A landlord at lower price points can reasonably expect two of three turnovers to fill from a post with four phone photos in it. The caveat is that this depends on the market. At price points half of yours the tenant pool lives in those groups, and nobody there is scrolling a landlord's grid.

Did you ever ask her whether she had leased an apartment before? That is a genuine question rather than a dig. Content people usually come out of brand work, and brand work runs on a totally different clock from filling a unit that goes vacant on the 30th.

Where this kind of content actually pays is with owners. Rehab operators who post before and afters do it because contractors and sellers look at them, and it shortens the conversation about whether the operator can do the work. That is a different buyer for the content than a renter. Cairn, if you ever go looking for off market small multifamily, a grid full of clean building shots is worth something in that conversation. It was never going to fill your one bedrooms.

What was in the scope document? You listed three posts a week plus stories, which is a volume spec. Volume specs are easy to satisfy and impossible to fail. I'd want to see whether she agreed to anything about outcomes, because if she didn't, the $1,450 bought exactly what it said and the miss is in the paperwork you signed.

On the capital side, the people who get real mileage out of a public presence are the ones raising money. If you are going to ask strangers for capital someday, five months of visible, competent posting is something they look at. That is a slow asset with a slow payoff. You were trying to use it as a leasing channel with a 30 day clock, and those two jobs do not share a timeline.

Honestly the part that would bother me most is that you were managing a vendor every week for something that produced nothing. That is the second job most small owners are trying hard to avoid.

How would you test this cheap next time? I keep looking at content services and I can't tell what a $200 experiment even looks like.

@jordan_ellis2 one unit, one paid deliverable, and a question on every inbound call about where they saw it. That's the test.

My side of the fence is different. Land buyers are actively searching, and photos and a decent boundary overlay do move inquiries because there's nothing else to look at. An apartment renter already has 40 listings in a feed with photos. Cairn's content was competing with a search engine, not with other Instagram accounts.

So the follower count was worth essentially nothing here? Worth pressing on that, because most owners assume the number means something on its own.

@raj_mehta14 the number meant she did the job she was hired for. It just wasn't connected to money.

Cairn, I'm writing my first deal budget right now and I had a $300 a month marketing line in it because it seemed like the responsible thing to include. Taking it out and replacing it with a per turnover number. Thanks for the arithmetic.

This is the same disease as scope creep, only inverted. Normally you agree to an outcome and the work grows past it. Here you agreed to work with no outcome attached, so nothing could ever grow past anything. Five months is a long time to keep paying for a deliverable nobody had to defend.

Who owns the account and the files? If she set up the profile under her email and shot on her equipment, you may be renting your own history back. Read whatever you signed, and if there is nothing about ownership of the images, that is the clause to add on the next one. That part is contract language, so someone licensed should look at your actual terms rather than a general read of them.

Scale matters here and nobody has said it plainly. At 20 units, tenant flow comes from the listing sites and your sign. Around 40 units and a few years of visible operating, an owner typically starts getting referrals through the account, from brokers and contractors mostly, and now and then a tenant's cousin who wants a unit. That is deal and relationship flow rather than leasing, and it tends to take two years to show up. If Cairn had priced it as a two year expense with no leasing claim attached, $250 a month is a defensible spend. Priced as a leasing channel it failed.

Coming from zero, the thing I'm taking from this is that a vendor doing good work and a vendor doing useful work are two separate checks. She did good work. Nobody had defined useful.