How Social Media Is Changing the Way Luxury Property Is Sold

Five years ago, the idea that a buyer would spend five million pounds on a property they first discovered through an Instagram Reel would have seemed absurd to most developers and agents. Today, it happens regularly. Our own platform, Million Pound Homes, has directly influenced over fifty million pounds in property sales, with buyers consistently telling us they found their development through social media content rather than traditional portals or agent referrals.

This is not a trend at the margins. Social media has fundamentally altered the luxury property discovery process, and the developers and agents who understand this are outselling those who do not. Here is what has changed, and what it means for buyers, sellers, and the industry.

Discovery Has Moved From Portals to Feeds

The traditional luxury property journey started with a conversation with an agent, a search on Rightmove or Knight Frank's website, or a visit to a marketing suite after seeing a hoarding. The agent controlled the information. The buyer had to actively seek it out.

Social media has inverted this. Buyers now encounter properties passively, through content that appears in their feed based on their interests and behaviour. A Nigerian investor scrolling Instagram at midnight sees a walkthrough of a London penthouse. A Dubai-based entrepreneur watches a Reel comparing rental yields across London boroughs. A family in Kuwait saves a carousel post showing a gated development near a top school. None of them were searching for property at that moment. But the content planted a seed, and weeks or months later, they enquire.

This shift from active search to passive discovery is the single biggest change in luxury property marketing in a generation. It means that the developments with the best social media presence reach buyers that portals and agents never would.

Video Has Replaced the Brochure

The glossy PDF brochure is not dead, but it is no longer the primary tool for generating interest. Short-form video — Reels, TikToks, YouTube Shorts — now does what brochures used to do, but better and at scale. A 15-second walkthrough video showing the view from a 30th floor balcony communicates more about a property than ten pages of CGIs and floor plans.

The content that performs best is not the highly polished, cinematic production — though that has its place. It is authentic, first-person walkthrough content that makes the viewer feel like they are there. User-generated style videos, shot on a phone, with natural lighting and honest commentary, consistently outperform corporate advertisements in terms of engagement, saves, and conversion to enquiry.

This has significant implications for developers. Content creation is no longer a nice-to-have added to the end of a marketing budget. It is the core mechanism through which buyers discover, evaluate, and emotionally commit to a purchase before they ever speak to a sales team.

The International Buyer Advantage

Social media's impact is most pronounced for developments targeting international buyers. A developer in London who relies solely on Rightmove and local agents will reach UK-based searchers who are already actively looking. That is a valuable audience, but it is a small one.

The same developer, working with a social media platform that has 250,000 followers across the UK, Middle East, and Africa, can reach potential buyers who are not yet searching but have the means, the interest, and the intent. Through targeted paid campaigns layered on top of organic content, that reach becomes precision. You can show investment-focused messaging to a finance-interested audience in the Gulf, family-focused messaging to parents in London, and lifestyle content to high-net-worth individuals across West Africa — all from the same development, with different creative and copy tailored to each audience.

This is why the most successful new-build campaigns now generate 40 to 60 per cent of their qualified leads from international sources. Social media erases geography as a barrier to discovery.

Trust and Authority Have Shifted

In the traditional model, trust sat with the estate agent. Their personal reputation, local knowledge, and relationship with the buyer were the foundation of the sales process. That model still works, but it has been supplemented — and in some cases overtaken — by platform trust.

When a buyer sees a property featured by a platform they have followed for months, whose content they trust and whose taste aligns with theirs, that platform carries significant authority. The endorsement is implicit: if Million Pound Homes is featuring this development, it has been vetted and is worth attention. This is the same dynamic that made magazine advertising so powerful for luxury brands, but operating at digital speed and scale.

For developers, partnering with established property media brands rather than generic marketing agencies means accessing pre-built trust. The audience already believes in the platform, which shortens the journey from discovery to enquiry.

Data Changes Everything

Perhaps the most underappreciated aspect of social media in property is the data it generates. Every engagement — every like, save, share, comment, and click — tells you something about buyer intent. When 500 people save a carousel post about a development's payment plan, that is a signal. When a Reel about rental yields in a specific area gets shared 200 times, that is market intelligence.

At scale, this data becomes extraordinarily valuable. It tells developers which messaging resonates with which audience, which unit types generate the most interest, which price points attract attention, and which geographic markets are most responsive. This is intelligence that no estate agent, however experienced, can provide — because it is based on the behaviour of thousands of potential buyers, not the anecdotal experience of a handful of transactions.

The next evolution of this — AI-powered lead scoring and buyer intelligence platforms — will take these signals even further, automatically identifying which enquiries are most likely to convert and which buyers need additional nurturing. The developers who adopt these tools early will have a measurable competitive advantage.

What This Means for the Industry

Social media has not replaced agents, portals, or marketing suites. But it has become the layer that sits above all of them — the discovery engine that drives buyers into the funnel in the first place. Developers who invest in content, build or partner with established audiences, and treat social media as a core sales channel rather than a branding afterthought are consistently outselling those who do not.

For buyers, the shift is empowering. You now have access to more property content, more market data, and more independent perspectives than at any point in history. The best buying decisions are informed ones, and social media — when consumed critically and used as a research tool rather than a substitute for due diligence — makes the entire market more transparent.

The way luxury property is sold has changed permanently. The platforms, developers, and agents who recognise this are already winning. The rest will catch up, but the early-mover advantage is real and compounding.