Personal brand or circle of influence: where a real estate agent should invest in 2026
Personal brand or circle of influence: why the real dilemma is not analog versus digital, but noise versus organized persistence
In the fifth instalment of our podcast Real People, Eduard proposed a head-to-head to Olga Sala and me: an agent with five years of experience, fifty sales under their belt and 10,000 euros to invest in 2026. The seemingly simple question: should I bet on establish your personal brand on social media the by widen and consolidate their circle of influence?
I had to defend the latter. And although in the podcast We exaggerated the positions so that sparks would fly—neither Olga is the anti-network Taliban I portrayed, nor am I the cartouging monk she drew—but the debate resulted in a conclusion that I think is worth pausing here for anyone who has to decide where to spend their time and money next year: personal brand or circle of influence.
There are more than 120,000 registered agents operating in Spain debating personal branding or circles of influence, and the dominant narrative leads us to believe that the ones who succeed are those handful of names who make it on Instagram, LinkedIn, or TikTok. I have another thesis, and I defend it without hesitation: the true heroes and heroines of this trade are those who, anonymously and without making a fuss, steadily build a circle of influence that returns to them and recommends them.
It is not marketing for the elephant graveyard, as Olga accused me of with a laugh. It is the exact opposite: it is what sustains the majority of real estate businesses that actually work, year after year, without depending on the mood of an algorithm.
Persistence eats brand for breakfast
I gave a talk at an industry conference with that title, and I still stand by it. The real difference — the thing very few agents achieve, but which is within everyone's reach — does not lie in having a dazzling brand. It lies in persist in an organised manner with actions to maintain and grow the database. Person by person, family by family. It's trench warfare.
And here is where I have to give Olga the right answer on something important: organized persistence is not the exclusive property of old-school agents. Anyone who bets on personal branding on social media also has to be persistent and methodical, or the algorithm will bury them.
The real estate agent's job, whether digital or analog, is a job for tough people.
If you stop calling, sending your newsletter, or following up via WhatsApp, you lose your circle. If you stop posting, you lose visibility. The curse of having to persist to maintain attention affects us all: it’s the price we pay for choosing a personal brand or influence circle without a plan behind it.
Value does not come in a one-size-fits-all
My main reservation with personal branding as a core strategy is that it tends to be a one size fits allthe same message for everyone. And it's difficult for there to be a truly transformative and personalised contribution of value when you're speaking to everyone all at once.
If we want to be the go-to agent, the family's agent, we owe them a loyalty of proximity. That is what we at Monapart call working with few customers and well-attended.
Olga rightly countered me: you can build loyalty in a community in many ways — tips that work for everyone, success and failure stories that others learn from — and almost no agent who works well on their personal brand gives up working their local area. They are complementary activities, not mutually exclusive. Fair enough.
Watch out for the network toll
Yes, I do want to leave a warning, especially for anyone about to dump their €10,000 into a single channel. The algorithms of the big platforms are nowadays more at the service of monetisation than the user: you pay more and more and reach fewer people, and that behaviour is unpredictable. To that we must add a cost that is rarely talked about, the cost of mental healthIf you stop, if you go on vacation, if you get sick and stop posting, the system penalizes you, and that changes the calculation between personal brand or circle of influence.
And there is something more honest to say: not everyone wants to expose themselves, they are not good in front of the camera, and they are not able to generate value with the cadence that the networks demand. Selling the personal brand from the fallacy of «where there's a will, there's a way» excludes a lot of people who would be excellent agents in other ways. The dilemma between personal brand or circle of influence It's not about exposure; it's about judgment.
The solution is not easy, it is difficult
At the end of the debate, Olga and I arrived at the same conclusion, which is usually a sign that the answer is good. There is no choice. There is only one answer. to do a bit of everything and do it all well: Face-to-face meetings, calls, WhatsApp and well-crafted social media: the best strategy doesn't separate personal brand or circle of influence; it adds them together.
And if I have to give you a criterion to distribute those 10,000 euros, it is this: focus first on the channels you control and that will always be yours —your website, your CRM, your contact list—and use the networks as amplifiers, not as a foundation. What you build on rented land may disappear when the landlord changes the rules; what you build on your own database is yours forever, whether you call it personal branding or a circle of influence.
It's that easy? No. It's that difficult.
In the end, the dilemma between personal brand or circle of influence It’s not like that: in 2026 they are the two sides of the same investment.
Listen to the full episode here from the Gente Real podcast by Monapart.
