Spent $1,450 over five months of 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 wasn't the thing prospects were looking at. You could have known that from the DM log in week three. The thing you 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?

@rigging 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, I did a version of this with a six unit and my failure was smaller but the same shape. Three months, $600, and no way to tell where anything came from because I never asked applicants. The one thing I'd 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.

Out where I am the local buy sell trade group on Facebook does more than any polished feed ever would. Free, ugly, and the phone rings. Two of my last three tenants came from a post with four phone photos in it. Different market than yours though, my price points are half yours and nobody here is scrolling a landlord's grid.

Did you ever ask her if she'd leased an apartment before? Not as a dig. Content people come out of brand work, and brand work has a totally different clock than filling a unit that goes vacant on the 30th.

The place I've seen this content actually pay is with owners, not tenants. I shoot before and afters on my rehabs because contractors and sellers look at them and it shortens conversations about whether I can do the work. That's 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 lending side of my reading, the people who get real mileage out of a public presence are the ones raising money. If you're going to ask strangers for capital someday, five months of visible, competent posting is a thing they look at. That's a slow asset with a slow payoff. You were trying to use it as a leasing channel with a 30 day clock.

Honestly the thing that would bother me most is that you were managing a vendor every week for something that produced nothing. That's the second job I keep trying 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.

@pike 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 followers were essentially worth nothing here? Genuinely asking, I assumed the number meant something.

@vellum 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. Worth reading whatever you signed, and if there's nothing about ownership of the images, that's the clause to add on the next one. That part is contract language, so someone licensed should look at your actual terms rather than my guess about them.

Scale matters here and I don't think anyone 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, I started getting referrals through the account, from a broker, from a contractor, from a tenant's cousin who wanted a unit. That's not leasing, it's deal and relationship flow, and it took 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.