In the space of a single year, targeted social media advertising has helped South Africa’s real estate industry notch up hundreds of millions of Rands in residential sales – with numbers set to increase tenfold in the next few years. This spike in utilisation of social ads by the real estate industry has changed the way agents find leads and conclude deals, while creating an entirely new sales channel.

A year ago, the property industry faced a real threat of being left behind in the digital world, thanks to its reliance on billboard, street pole and dustbin advertising. Agents also grappled with the challenge of translating the human relationships on which they rely to inspire trust in their clients, into the online space. Now, 10 million of South Africa’s 26 million Facebook users have seen ads on their news feeds for properties that meet their needs and match their budgets. At the heart of this connection between agents, properties and customers, is South African proptech company Flow.

Flow has been helping agents and agencies build that capability in the social media space with an automated advertising solution that leverages Facebook Ads’ focussed targeting tools, without the need to master the complex interface. Flow’s platform builds, posts and targets listings helping agents find clients and brand exposure ads build their hard-won reputations for area expertise and trust, in the online space – and helps them and their clients close deals as quickly as possible.

“Our platform helps agents bridge the social media marketing divide, making it simple for them to take their brand, reputation and inventory online – right to where their potential customers are,” says Flow Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Gil Sperling, “Flow’s proptech solutions have a direct positive impact on the livelihood of agents and agencies – while also making it simpler and more convenient for customers to find the perfect home”.

The next step in the proptech revolution is to give agents even more control over their social media advertising management, which Flow has introduced with its ‘Self-Serve’ innovation. ‘Self-Serve’ gives agents and agencies the ability to customise their ads with a set of best-practise templates in terms of layout, Corporate Identity incorporation and targeting that offers benefits beyond further simplifying the process.

“The feature set’s simplicity of implementation belies the tremendous technical innovation that underpins it,” says Flow Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Daniel Levy. “’Self-Serve’ puts the power of social media marketing in the hands of individual agents, democratising the industry by allowing agents to enable their own business. Agents need to speak to as many of the right people as possible, as quickly and cost-effectively as possible – and proptech is their entry point to doing that properly in the social media world”.