Real Estate Social Media Benchmarks 2026: Engagement Rates by Platform
Written by: Tim Eisenhauer
Last updated:
What is a good social media engagement rate for real estate in 2026?
Hootsuite reports Instagram engagement at 3.70% for “Real Estate, Legal and Other Professional.” Dash Social reports Instagram engagement at 0.30% for real estate. That’s a 12x difference. Both numbers are cited across the internet as if they’re fact. Neither source tells you how many real estate companies are in their sample. The most honest answer: nobody knows what a “good” engagement rate for real estate is, because nobody has measured it enough to say.
When I was putting together our social media benchmarks post across 30 industries, the real estate numbers looked weird to me (they all looked weird to me, for some reason I picked real estate to check out). Hootsuite had Instagram at 3.70%. Dash Social had it at 0.30%. A 12x gap for the same industry on the same platform. So I went and pulled the actual Dash Social source report — the one that’s cited in every “real estate social media benchmarks” blog post on the internet — to see what’s behind the numbers.
What I found was worse than I expected. But first, some context on why nobody else seems to have noticed.
Why nobody questions these numbers
I’m relatively new to the social media industry. My background is enterprise software. My co-founders and I built and sold Axero Solutions over 14 years where we sold intranet and collaboration software. So when I started digging into social media benchmark data for Apaya, everything seemed a little crazy to me. Not the numbers themselves. The fact that nobody questions where the numbers come from.
Here’s how the hilarious incentive chain works. Companies like Hootsuite and Dash Social create benchmark reports. They gate them behind email forms. You download the PDF, they get a lead. The report doesn’t need to be rigorous. It needs to exist. Then social media managers—the ones being paid a salary to manage company accounts—grab those numbers and drop them into slide decks. “We’re beating the industry benchmark by 2x!” sounds a lot better than “I have no idea if this is working.” Their job security depends on having a number to point to. Then bloggers and agencies cite those same numbers in their own content, because a post with “data” looks more authoritative than a post without it. Nobody in this chain reads the actual source report. They copy the number from the last person who copied it.
And nobody has any incentive to ask the obvious question: how would you even measure this?
Unless you’re Meta or TikTok or YouTube, you don’t have the raw data. You don’t know how many accounts posted, how many got zero engagement, how many are bots. These companies are sampling from their own customer base—which skews heavily toward brands large enough to pay for social media management software—and calling it an “industry average.”
You can’t accurately average an industry where a luxury brokerage with 200,000 followers and a solo agent in Tucson with 80 followers are supposedly in the same dataset. The distribution is so skewed that an average is meaningless. But nobody says that, because everyone benefits from the fiction.
So when I pulled the actual Dash Social source report, the one behind all those “real estate social media benchmark” blog posts, I already suspected the data would be thin. I didn’t expect it to be this thin.
What the “Real Estate Benchmark Report” actually is
Dash Social publishes what they call a “Social Media Benchmark Report: Real Estate Industry.” It’s a 28-page PDF. If you Google “real estate social media benchmarks,” you’ll find this report cited everywhere — in blog posts, agency decks, marketing guides. It’s treated as the definitive source for real estate engagement data.
I read every page. Here’s what’s in it.
The first few pages are cross-channel trend slides illustrated with screenshots from Allrecipes, Elmo from Sesame Street, Jacquemus, and Duolingo. None of these are real estate brands. The TikTok trends section uses a Sotheby’s listing as a thumbnail, then immediately jumps to “Average TikTok Performance Across All Industries” — a table covering beauty, CPG, fashion, food and beverage, home, luxury, media, publishing, retail, travel, wellness, and real estate. Same thing for Instagram. Same thing for YouTube.
The real estate-specific data? It lives in a single row in each of those cross-industry tables, plus a handful of “top brands” slides showing three companies each.
That’s it. Out of 28 pages, maybe 4 contain real estate-specific data. The rest is filler — generic industry trends, all-industries tables, platform overview slides, and a Dash Social sales pitch.
The methodology page says they sampled companies “across TikTok (n=1,170), Instagram (n=2,978), and YouTube (n=644)” for all industries combined. How many of those are real estate companies? They don’t say. Could be 20. Could be 200. We have no idea. The entire “Real Estate Industry Benchmark Report” might be built on a handful of accounts.
And this is the report that’s plastered all over the internet as the source of truth for real estate social media benchmarks.
The numbers, for what they’re worth
I’m going to show you the data anyway — because you came here looking for it, and I’d rather you see it here with the caveats than find it somewhere else presented as gospel.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite tracks “Real Estate, Legal and Other Professional” as a single category. Your listing photos averaged in with law firm thought leadership and CPA tax tips.
| Platform | Engagement Rate |
|---|---|
| 3.70% | |
| Instagram Reels | 3.20% |
| 3.20% | |
| X/Twitter | 1.70% |
| 1.30% | |
| TikTok | 0.90% |
Hootsuite: average engagement per post. Category bundles real estate with legal and other professional services.
Dash Social
From the cross-industry comparison tables in the “Real Estate Industry” report. Each platform uses a different engagement formula, so comparing numbers across platforms is meaningless.
TikTok — engagement = (Likes+Comments+Shares) / Video Views
| Metric | Real Estate |
|---|---|
| Engagement Rate | 3.1% |
| Video Views per Post | 99,800 |
| Average Followers | 52,400 |
| Weekly Posts | 2 |
Instagram — engagement = (Likes+Comments) / Followers
| Metric | Real Estate |
|---|---|
| Engagement Rate | 0.3% |
| Average Followers | 189,200 |
| Monthly Follower Growth | 1.0% |
| Weekly Reels | 3 |
| Weekly Carousel/Image | 4 |
YouTube
| Metric | Real Estate |
|---|---|
| Video Views per Post | 33,000 |
| Subscribers | 33,000 |
| Monthly Follower Growth | 2.8% |
| Weekly Videos | 1 |
Dash Social: sample sizes per industry not disclosed. Data period July–December 2024. The report’s overview page lists real estate YouTube views at 10,100 per post. The by-industry table says 33,000. Even the same report contradicts itself.
What I noticed when I looked at this data
TikTok reach is the standout — if you trust the sample. 99,800 video views per post from an average follower base of 52,400. If that’s remotely accurate, TikTok is putting real estate content in front of roughly 2x the follower base on every post. The top performers in the report — Douglas Elliman (5.3% engagement), Sotheby’s International Realty (5.1%) — are doing property walkthroughs. Not trends, not dances. Just walking through houses with a camera.
Instagram followers are large and mostly passive. 189,200 average followers, 0.3% engagement. If you have 10,000 followers, that’s 30 interactions per post. Most of those followers are people who followed you years ago and haven’t thought about you since. But real estate has 1.0% monthly follower growth — tied for the highest in the report. New people are still finding and following real estate accounts. They’re just not engaging with the posts once they do.
LinkedIn is a blind spot. Hootsuite puts it at 3.20% — tied with Instagram Reels and ahead of TikTok, Facebook, and X. Dash Social doesn’t even include LinkedIn in their industry-specific data for real estate. Most agents I talk to through Apaya have never posted on LinkedIn. The data suggests that’s a mistake, but I’ll admit: the Hootsuite number bundles real estate with lawyers and accountants, so who knows what the real estate-specific LinkedIn number would be. Nobody’s measured it.
Nobody has measured real estate social media well. That’s the real takeaway. Hootsuite bundles it with other professions. Dash Social puts out a 28-page “Real Estate Industry” report that’s mostly about other industries. Rival IQ doesn’t track real estate as a category at all. The industry-specific data that exists comes from unknown sample sizes, measured over arbitrary time periods, using different formulas per platform. And every blog post on the internet cites these numbers like they’re scripture.
What to do when the data is this thin
Stop benchmarking against numbers nobody can verify. You can’t compare your Instagram performance to “the real estate average” when nobody agrees on what the average is, and the reports calculating it won’t tell you how many accounts are in the sample.
Track your own numbers month over month. This is what I tell every Apaya client: the only benchmark that matters is whether your content is performing better this month than last month. Your data, your trajectory, your business. That’s what Apaya’s analytics show — not some phantom industry average, but whether your numbers are going up or down.
Give LinkedIn a shot. Even with the bundled category, 3.20% engagement stands out. If you work referrals and repeat clients, LinkedIn is where your past clients see you staying active. That’s worth more than chasing a decimal point on Instagram.
Post TikTok property tours. If the Dash Social reach numbers are even directionally right, TikTok is offering real estate agents the kind of organic distribution that Instagram stopped giving out years ago. And the content is the easiest thing in the world to make. You’re already at the house. Point your phone at it.
Post consistently, especially when you’re busy. The trap every agent falls into: the weeks you’re slammed with showings and closings are the weeks you stop posting. Then the pipeline dries up. Three posts a week, every week, beats a flurry of content followed by silence. Automate the scheduling and take it off your plate.
Every number in this post came from a company that sells social media software. I run one too. The difference is I’m telling you the data is shaky instead of pretending it’s definitive.
If that level of honesty is refreshing, you might like how we do things at Apaya.
What else real estate agents ask about social media benchmarks
What is a good Instagram engagement rate for real estate agents?
Nobody can answer this honestly. Hootsuite says 3.70% per post for a category that bundles real estate with lawyers and accountants. Dash Social says 0.30% using a different formula from a report that won’t disclose how many real estate companies are in the sample. The best real estate brand in their data — Savills — hits 0.90%. If your numbers are trending up month over month, that’s the only metric worth tracking.
Should real estate agents be on TikTok?
The reach data suggests yes. Dash Social reports 99,800 average video views per real estate TikTok post, from accounts with only 52,400 average followers. The top performers are doing property tours. You don’t need trending audio or choreography. You need a phone and a house.
How does LinkedIn compare to other platforms for real estate?
Nobody has measured LinkedIn engagement for real estate specifically. Hootsuite reports 3.20% for “Real Estate, Legal and Other Professional” — higher than their TikTok, Facebook, and X numbers using the same methodology. For agents who work referrals and repeat business, it’s worth testing.
How often should real estate agents post on social media?
Dash Social’s data shows real estate brands averaging 2 TikToks, 3 Instagram Reels, 4 Instagram carousel or image posts, and 1 YouTube video per week. That’s the lowest posting frequency of any industry in their report. Consistency matters more than volume — automate the scheduling so your social media stays active during your busiest weeks.
Are these benchmarks reliable?
No. They’re directional at best. Different sources use different formulas, different samples, and different time periods. The major “Real Estate Industry” benchmark report is mostly about other industries. Use these numbers for a rough sanity check and then forget them. Track your own data. That’s the only benchmark worth trusting.
Sources
- Hootsuite — Average Engagement Rates for 12 Industries
- Dash Social — 2025 Social Media Benchmark Report, Real Estate
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