Spent $3,100 on listing content for a fourplex that sat 94 days and rented for $150 under ask anyway

The $3,100 almost certainly did not cause the outcome, but it also probably did not help in the way you were sold on it, because premium listing content compresses days on market when demand is present and price is competitive. It does not create demand or compensate for a price that sits above where the market cleared.

The number doing the most work in your post is $155 monthly, which is how far $1,450 was from $1,295. At a 5% vacancy cost on a $1,295 rent, every 30 days vacant costs roughly $2,160 in lost gross income. If better pricing at $1,350 from day one had cut vacancy from 94 to 45 days, the recovered income would have been around $3,240, which exceeds your content spend and still gets you closer to ask. The content budget may have been the wrong lever, but the pricing assumption was the more expensive one.

What was the market absorption rate for comparable two- or three-bedroom units in San Marcos that same quarter, and did you adjust ask at all during the 94 days or hold the line at $1,450 throughout?

The $3,100 is not the variable doing the most work here. The assumption carrying the most weight in your post is that professional content should have compressed days-on-market or held your price against a soft Q4 market in San Marcos. Content does not do either of those things reliably. What content does is reduce friction at the decision point for a qualified prospect who is already in range on price. If demand was thin in that submarket in Q3/Q4, you had fewer prospects to convert, and better photography does not manufacture demand that isn't there.

The $150 under ask after 94 days points toward a pricing problem, a demand problem, or both. Either you were priced above where the market cleared in that period, or the prospect pool was shallow enough that you ran out of time and took what came. A soft Q4 in a secondary Texas market is a credible explanation for both. You would need to look at comparable vacancy rates and achieved rents for similar fourplex units in San Marcos during that window to separate the market problem from a pricing error.

The risk you did not mention is that $3,100 for a content package on a two-unit vacancy is a meaningful cost relative to what you lost. At $1,295 per unit, two units vacant for 94 days is roughly $8,100 in lost gross rent. The content spend was about 38% of that loss. That ratio matters when you are deciding whether to run the same playbook on the next vacancy or reallocate toward a pricing adjustment or a different leasing channel.

The real diagnostic question is what the comparable achieved rents were for similar units in that submarket during the same period. That number would tell you whether $1,295 was a market outcome or a concession you could have avoided with different pricing earlier.

What was your pricing strategy going in, and did you adjust before day 94 or hold the ask the whole time?

San Marcos Q4 is genuinely soft, I've watched that market stall on solid product before, so I don't think the content shop is where your money went. But $3,100 on a fourplex at $1,450 a door is a rough ratio and I'd want to know what your carry cost was on those 94 days, because that number probably dwarfs the content spend and that's where the real lesson is. I dropped money into a bridge fund a couple years back and did not read the fee page carefully enough, cost me about $2,800 in ways I didn't see coming, and what I took from it was that the line item I was staring at was never the actual problem. The pricing question is what you're sort of skating past here. You were at $1,450 in Q4 in that market, were you pricing off Q2 comps?