Why “good enough” content is costing agents instructions

Your agency says it’s the best in town. Then this week’s blog goes out: five minutes of work, pasted from a chatbot, grammatically fine, box ticked.

Rowan Waller spent 20 years in estate agency before he started writing content for agents, and he says that gap is the problem. No agent markets themselves as good enough. Plenty publish content that is exactly that, and it quietly costs them the one thing content is meant to win: the instruction.

Most agents know they should publish. A blog, a LinkedIn post, a market update. The pressure never lets up and time is short, so content turns into a line on a to-do list.

AI has made that easier, and not because it writes badly. It writes well enough. Ask a chatbot for a letter about your local property market and you get 600 or 700 words of correct English in seconds. What happens next is the real test. You either read it properly and check it, or you glance at it, decide it looks fine and press publish.

I think AI is easy to use badly.

Rowan Waller, founder, The Professional Pen

That glance decides whether your content builds a reputation or just fills a slot. A good enough post won’t upset anyone. It also won’t make a vendor think you’re the agent to call. This article draws on Rowan’s conversation with Kieran Witt on the Kotini Coffee Table, and looks at how to avoid the trap.

Nobody markets themselves as good enough

Listen to how agents describe themselves. They’re the best at selling your house. They’re the experts. They go above and beyond. As Rowan points out, there’s no business out there, let alone an estate agency, that claims to be good enough.

Now look at the content behind that claim. If it’s average, you’re telling people one thing and showing them another. Rowan cites a maxim, along the lines that the way you do anything is the way people think you do everything. Your content is part of how you do things, and it’s often the first part a vendor sees.

There’s a second cost, and it’s about how people see you. Consumers tend to treat estate agents as one homogenous mass that can all sell houses. That’s why a post announcing you’ve just sold a house on Acacia Avenue gets a polite “Well done for doing your job.” Rowan’s comparison is a butcher. You don’t see a butcher announcing that he has just carved a sirloin steak and asking you to look at it. It doesn’t resonate, because it’s what everyone expects him to do.

So how do you stop being part of the mass? Rowan puts it like this:

You’re another Friesian cow, till you paint yourself purple, and then you’re the purple cow.

Rowan Waller, founder, The Professional Pen

Good enough content never paints anything purple.

AI makes average content easy

Rowan isn’t anti-AI. He says it’s here to stay, and it isn’t the devil. He uses it himself to research, to check facts and as a second pair of eyes on his drafts. What he doesn’t do is use it to write.

He also thinks AI is fine for some jobs. Explainers, such as how the conveyancing process works or which survey to take when buying a property, need a clear structure and accurate answers. AI can do that well enough. You still need to read it as the expert and make sure it’s telling the truth.

That check matters more than most agents realise. Rowan recalls agents publishing content about the Renters’ Rights Act that called it the Renters’ Reform Act or the Renters’ Reform Bill, because the AI hadn’t caught up with the change in legislation. The agents looked at the copy, saw it was written in English and decided that was good enough. One wrong name is all it takes to lose credibility.

The deeper issue is what AI does by its nature. In Rowan’s view, the very nature of AI is that it’s average. It draws on everything it has read and gives you back the mean. That’s fine for an explainer. It’s a poor fit for content that’s meant to make people think you’re more than competent.

There’s a related habit he pushes back on. You’ll hear that done beats perfect. Rowan doesn’t agree. “Sometimes you’re better off not doing it at all than doing it in an average way.” He accepts that done beats perfect is really about consistency, and that you don’t need perfect English to tell a good story. What he’s against is publishing something just to have published.

Move from headline to substance

Reporting the news is the easiest content to write and the easiest to ignore. If an agent posts that interest rates have been held, that’s news. People can get that from the news. It doesn’t tell them why it matters to them, and it doesn’t tell them what the agent thinks.

Rowan’s work sits in the gap. He writes long-form content that puts the agent’s own opinion on the record, often called thought leadership. He says agents rarely do this, and he suspects they may be scared of having an opinion. An opinion doesn’t have to be controversial. Telling people something different from what they’re normally fed is a powerful way to earn attention.

The same applies to sales. Rowan points to a post by Tania Cannon of Cannon and Co in Peterborough. The headline was that the asking price had been achieved in just 2 days. The story underneath was that it took 172 days from there to exchange of contracts, as she managed a six-property sale from start to finish. Rowan didn’t write it. He saw it, and called it perfect storytelling.

This is everything you don’t see.

Rowan Waller, founder, The Professional Pen

Behind every sold board are surveys to manage, an electrical report that comes back with a C2 rating at the last minute and needs remedial work, and a mortgage offer that expires while you hold the chain together. None of that comes through in a post that says you’ve sold another one.

Getting to that story is often simple. Ask a negotiator who has just sold a house, “Was it an easy sale?” and they’ll tell you what happened. Left alone, most people give you the headline. As Rowan says, “I’m just trying to move from headline to substance.”

Make your customer the hero

Rowan also audits agency website copy, and he sees the same mistake there. Many agents cast themselves as the hero of the story, because they’re the ones who do the job. The reader feels like an outsider and stops engaging.

His fix comes from storytelling. In Little Red Riding Hood, the woodsman saves the day, but he isn’t the hero. The estate agent should be the same: the helper who turns up at the right time. Rowan’s shorthand is that the estate agent is Yoda. The customer is the hero, with a problem they recognise as theirs, and the agent is the guide who helps them solve it.

There’s a quick test. Count how many times your pages say we, I or me. Too many is a sign you’re weighting the page towards what you do and why you’re great, and not towards what the customer is looking for. When the reader can see themselves in the story, they’re more likely to read on and book the valuation.

Start with an objective

If Rowan could give agents one piece of advice, it would be this: “You should have an objective.” Before you put anything out, decide what it’s for. Then work out why this piece will achieve it.

Take the most common objective, more listings. A post saying “sold in your street, more houses required” might work. A better version asks why you need another 3-bedroom semi, who is on your books and what their story is, and how you helped people reach their goal. Understand the objective first, then choose the story.

The objective also changes by channel. A website exists to convert a lead. Long-form content on LinkedIn or a blog is a long game. Rowan says it’s about winning people over, so that when a vendor finally rings three agents, they already want you. He tells of a client who had someone walk into her office and hand over a £1.5 million instruction, saying, “I read every article you put out, and I know you are the expert.”

That is what being seen as the expert looks like. Rowan separates it from chasing valuation leads, and he notes that the first tends to produce the second. People who see you as the authority book you in without being chased.

Where to start

You don’t need to rebuild your marketing to apply this. Before your next post, write one line at the top of the draft: what do I want the reader to think or do, and why will this post get them there?

If you use AI, give it your own view first, read every word it produces and check every name, rule and date against the official source. Add something only you could know, such as a real sale, a real opinion or a detail from your patch. If the post still reads as average, think seriously about not publishing it.

After your next completion, ask your negotiator whether it was an easy sale, and write down the answer exactly as they give it. That’s your next story. Then open your homepage and count the we, I and me. If the number embarrasses you, start by rewriting the first sentence so it describes your customer’s problem.

Small changes like these add up. Each one moves you from the headline to the substance, and from the mass to the agent people remember.

Rowan’s full conversation with Kieran Witt is on the Kotini Coffee Table, and it’s worth a listen before you write your next post.