What to post as a new Dubai broker

Every piece of content advice for brokers assumes you already have something — listings worth filming, deals to talk about, clients who would say something nice. In month one you have none of it, which is why most new brokers end up posting a drone video of a building they have never been inside.

The trap

It is very easy to pull photographs off the portal, put them under music, and have an account that looks like a junior version of every agency in the city. It does not get views and it does not get enquiries, and it cannot: it says nothing a buyer could not get elsewhere, and it says it less well.

Worse, nobody can tell from it whether you know anything. So nobody has a reason to message you rather than the other forty accounts doing the same thing.

What you actually have

You are learning the city, in detail, right now. That is the most interesting position anybody in this business is ever in, and it expires in about six months.

A broker of ten years has stopped noticing what is strange about Dubai property. You still notice. You are asking the exact questions a buyer is asking, at the same time they are asking them, and you can show the answers as you find them. Nobody more experienced can do that, because they already know.

Six things you can post this week with no listings

• The building you walked today and the one thing that surprised you. Not the marble. The lift wait, the parking, the road noise, which way the bedroom faces.
• A question a client asked that you could not answer, and what you went and found out. This is the single best format available to you, and experienced brokers cannot use it because they will not admit to not knowing.
• A commute you actually timed, at the hour it actually matters. Almost nobody does this and every buyer wants it.
• What one number buys in three different places. AED 1.5M here, here and here, and what you give up each time.
• Something you got wrong. It costs nothing and it is the fastest trust you will ever buy.
• One real page of a real document, explained in plain language — a service charge statement, a commission line, a rent cheque structure.

Pick one community and own it

The instinct is to be a Dubai broker, because the market is the whole city. It is also the reason nobody can refer you. He does Dubai property is not a sentence anyone passes on.

Pick one community, or one cluster of towers, and go unreasonably deep for three months. The layouts, the service charges, the bad floors, the landlords who move quickly and the ones who do not. You will end up knowing more about it than brokers five years in, because they are spread across nine communities and you are on one.

And the sentence changes. She knows that building properly is a referral. That is worth more to you than reach.

How much to post, and in what shape

Three reels a week to be found, Stories most days to be trusted. It is the same split that works for any small account and it does not change because you are new.

Set your Highlights up in week one, before you have anything to put in them, and fill them as you go: who you are, the community you have chosen, what is available, what you have learnt. A cold buyer reads the bio and then taps the Highlights, and most new brokers leave that part empty for a year.

When the first listings arrive

Do not switch to listing content and abandon all of this. The account that earned you the enquiry is the one that proves you know things. A grid of listings proves you have access, and every broker in the city has access. There is a guide on what to do with the first ten.

And when the first DM turns up saying nothing but price, there is a right way to answer it, and it is not the number.