Death by a thousand cuts

Mar 6, 2025

We Just Wrapped a Real Estate Project and I Was Genuinely Shocked.

Words by Alex Livermore

Not by the work By how much money was wasted.

It was a textbook example of how broken this industry really is.

Property developers are expected to engage five different agencies—all working in silos: A branding firm, a PR agency, a digital team, a media buyer, a sales agent—each with their own language, process, and monthly invoice.

None of them talk to each other.
None of them understand the full picture.
And all of them, ultimately, are just selling noise.

Meanwhile, the developer is sitting at the centre, bleeding cash, wondering why nothing’s moving.

Here’s what I saw:

  • A brand identity with no commercial strategy.

  • Paid ads leading to a broken funnel.

  • PR efforts chasing media hits that no buyer reads.

  • Social media content designed for awards, not conversions.

  • And agents? Still charging the same commission structure as 2010, while refusing to call leads from the past 48 hours.

Everyone is executing but no one is aligned.
It’s an expensive game of pretend.

Marketing cannot be treated like a checklist of disconnected services.

It has to be an operating system.

A real estate project lives or dies by how well it integrates branding, digital, content, and sales. Not in theory—in practice. That means one core strategy. One architecture. One story. Built and delivered from a single source of truth.

And that’s not what most developers are getting.

Instead, they’re caught in a model that looks like momentum but delivers confusion.

So here’s what I believe:

We don’t need more marketing in this space.
We need smarter, tighter, more intentional marketing.
Strategy-first. Execution-led. Results-obsessed.

The projects that work the ones that actually sell are the ones that treat marketing and sales as a unified system. Where positioning is clear, the funnel is clean, the creative is sharp, and the buyer journey is mapped from end to end.

That’s not radical. That’s just how modern businesses operate.

But real estate is still playing catch-up.

Tech made execution easier. But that’s the trap.
Because when everything is accessible, everything starts to look the same.
Mass production. Templated strategies. Over-designed campaigns with zero meaning.

So you end up with a bunch of agencies delivering ‘content’—but nobody building infrastructure. No one tracking ROI. No one accountable for what happens after the launch.

We’ve seen this firsthand. We’ve rebuilt the engine mid-flight. And now we don’t take projects unless the alignment is real.

Because we’re not here to chase attention. We’re here to build value.

If you’re a developer reading this: stop paying 5x retainers for fragmented thinking. Get someone on your team who gets it. That understands market timing, commercial strategy, brand nuance, and digital execution all in one breath.

That’s not a flex. It’s a minimum requirement for making real estate marketing work in 2025.

Because resonance beats reach and systems beat noise.

Every single time.

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