The pandemic feels like a lifetime ago, but its cultural aftershocks are still cracking foundations. People moved. Jobs changed. The culture of work had its script flipped (and some are trying their hardest to flip it back). For a brief, chaotic moment, everyone bought houses. Now, in cities like Austin, those high-dollar pandemic purchases are back on the market, but the buyers aren’t there. Rent is still sky-high in some places, cratering in others, and no one wants to pay over $300,000 just to hang their hat.
For the people who make their living selling homes, the volatility isn’t theoretical. Markets rise and fall based on remote-work policies, tech layoffs, interest rates, and vibes. One quarter you’re flooded with buyers; the next you’re staring at listings no one wants. As the national conversation churns over affordable housing, realtors are left with a more straightforward, urgent question: how do you survive when the thing you sell becomes unaffordable, unwanted, or both?
In 2025, existing U.S. home sales remained stuck near a 30-year low of about 4.06 million units, far below the long-term average, even as median prices rose. A recent analysis found that over 75% of U.S. homes on the market were unaffordable to the typical household due to high prices, elevated mortgage rates, and limited supply — forcing both buyers and sellers into an unstable, unpredictable market.
After enough sessions, the pattern became impossible to ignore. Different cities. Different markets. The same questions, over and over: How do I stand out? How do I build a personal brand? How do I stay visible long enough to matter? Realtors kept showing up, dozens of them — from Austin to Atlanta, Phoenix to Portland, all circling the same fear.
This isn’t a marketing story. It’s a labor story.
What Realtors Are Actually Asking For (And What That Reveals)
In the real estate world, especially online, many agents aren’t just selling houses anymore; they’re selling cities. Neighborhood guides. Restaurant recommendations. Migration-era content about what it’s really like to live somewhere. The pitch isn’t about the linen closet. It’s about belonging to the story of the place.
That shift makes sense. People don’t buy houses. They buy the life they imagine having in them. Realtors have become unofficial civic marketers, selling the coffee shop with late hours, the park where singles walk their dogs. Cities become content feeds. Homes become lifestyle accessories. The house itself is almost beside the point.
Underneath all that content, another question keeps surfacing: How do I stand out? The market is oversaturated. Do you have any observations?
This is the saturation panic. Too many agents chasing too few buyers. Everyone builds a personal brand because that’s the only leverage left when the market turns against you. The oversupply of real estate agents mirrors the oversupply of creators — everyone competing for the same shrinking pool of attention, trying to be memorable enough that when someone finally decides to buy, they think of you instead of the hundred other people doing the same dance.
When a profession starts asking influencer questions (automation, anyone?), old models clearly aren’t working anymore.
The other question that keeps surfacing isn’t really about what it claims to be:
- How do I reach first-time buyers?
- What’s the best way to convert leads?
- Should I be using DM flows?
On the surface, these sound like strategy questions. Tactical. Practical. But listen closely: what’s actually being asked is how to create certainty in a market you can’t control.
This is fear of volatility dressed as funnel optimization. When you can’t control whether people are buying houses, you try to control whether they’re paying attention to you. Attention becomes the only asset you can manage. People build entire marketing infrastructures out of hope and algorithms, trying to manufacture predictability in a labor market that stopped being predictable the moment the pandemic housing boom collapsed.
Why Realtors, Specifically, Are Everywhere Right Now
There are more than 1.5 million Realtors in the United States, with some estimates putting the total number of licensed agents closer to two million — creating a surplus relative to home sales and intense competition for fewer deals.
Take Breanna Banaciski, a 30-year-old agent working the Tampa market who was profiled in the New York Times last fall for turning real estate listings into comedy routines. The attention makes sense when you look at the numbers:
- Tampa prices are down 13%
- New listings are hitting the MLS at 4x the historical rate
- Insurance costs are soaring
- And interest rates are killing deals
Banaciski nearly quit before finding her angle — profane, sarcastic listing videos that treat luxury homes like exhausting punchlines. She’ll collapse on the floor after describing a $3.5 million property, or call a closet “where they store their tax write-offs.”
Banaciski grew up in a blue-collar Florida suburb where the electricity got shut off, and condiments were sometimes the only thing in the fridge. When she walks through these homes, the disbelief isn’t entirely performance. Now she has hundreds of thousands of followers, and so many leads she hands them off to colleagues. Sellers seek her out specifically because her videos multiply virtual visitors at scale. The Times covered her because she’s news now, a realtor who became internet-famous.
After all, the traditional playbook stopped working.
Others have found their niches too: agents speed-running listings for laughs, or tailoring their personas to specific subcultures. They’re different styles, same impulse.
Selling the Dream
Real estate sits at the center of the last American promise anyone still half-believes. Homeownership is supposed to be the thing that saves you — the asset that builds wealth, the proof you made it, the stability that survives everything else going sideways. It’s aspirational labor in its purest form. You’re not just selling houses. You’re selling the idea of security in a country that stopped providing it through wages, pensions, or any other reliable means.
In a flooded market, social media works not despite oversaturation but because of it. Traditional real estate advertising assumes scarcity. But when thousands of new listings hit every week and hundreds of agents sell the same inventory, that math collapses. You can’t outspend the competition. You can’t offer anything unique. So the game shifts from visibility to familiarity.
Social media lets agents build parasocial relationships at scale. People watch. They feel like they know the personality. When they’re finally ready to buy, they call the person they’ve been watching for months instead of the stranger on a bench ad. The algorithm doesn’t care about credentials. It cares about engagement. And in a profession where trust is the only real product, being entertaining becomes a viable substitute for being established.
Banaciski told the Times that buyers reach out because her “unvarnished style implies a kind of radical honesty.” That’s the play: manufacture authenticity at scale, turn personality into infrastructure, perform relatability until it generates commissions. The parasocial relationship becomes the product. You’re not selling houses anymore. You’re selling access to the person who sells houses.
It’s Precarity Turtles All the Way Down
This isn’t innovation. It’s what happens when an entire profession gets pushed off the cliff of economic security and has to grab whatever’s on the way down. Realtors are just the most visible example because housing sits at the center of the last promise anyone believes.
The template is everywhere now: turn yourself into content, optimize for attention, build a personal brand because employment doesn’t mean what it used to.
The grim joke is that it works. Banaciski is thriving. Others are closing deals. They’ve figured out how to survive conditions that should have killed their careers. Which means everyone else has to follow or disappear.
What we’re really watching is skilled professionals learning to perform their own precarity for an algorithm that doesn’t care if they eat. They’re funny about it. They’re good at it. But every viral video is still saying the same thing: I’m here. Don’t forget me.
