Twomey Schriber had built one of Cairns’ strongest independent real estate businesses. The problem wasn’t the agency. The marketing needed to catch up.
Founded in 2014 by Kev Twomey and Zeta Schriber, Twomey Schriber has grown into Cairns’ leading independent real estate brand, competing head-on with the major franchise names.
Kev and Zeta also have very clear strengths. Kev leads the sales side of the business. Zeta leads property management.
It is a partnership that works because each of them can concentrate on the part of the real estate business they know best.
But as Twomey Schriber grew, so did the marketing.
At the time of our review, the agency was completing around 470 residential sales and 230 leases a year, backed by 5,361 online reviews across RateMyAgent, Google, realestate.com.au and Facebook.
This was no small operation. And its marketing had become no small operation either.
The problem was that more and more of the responsibility for deciding what the marketing should do, who should do it and whether it was working was ultimately landing back with Kev and Zeta.
That is a familiar problem for growing real estate agencies.
- The business has grown.
- The sales team has grown.
- Property management has grown.
- The marketing activity has grown.
But the marketing function hasn’t grown with it.
You hire a marketer and still run marketing
This is where many larger real estate agencies get stuck.
You employ an in-house marketer to take this function off your plate. Then you discover they need you to tell them what to do.
- What should we promote?
- Which agents should we feature?
- What should we spend?
- Should we be doing Google Ads?
- What should go in the EDM?
- Can you approve this?
- What do you think of the video?
- Which supplier should we use?
Suddenly, you have not removed marketing from your workload. You have added another person to manage.
A junior or mid-level marketer can be very good at producing marketing. It does not mean they have the experience to decide how a large real estate business should position itself, allocate its budget, build agent brands and connect all its marketing channels.
That responsibility ends up back with the principals.
At some point, you think: **
“I don’t have time to keep running the bloody marketing department.”
Neither did Kev and Zeta.
They needed someone else to own the marketing function so Kev could concentrate on leading the sales team and Zeta could concentrate on property management.
Lots of marketing. Nobody conducting it.
Twomey Schriber was already spending serious money on marketing. In 2025, the total marketing spend was around $170,000.
Television alone was reaching almost 30,000 people in Cairns, with viewers seeing the commercial around six times each. Radio was reaching more than 30,000 people, around five times each.
So this was not a business that needed convincing that marketing mattered. Nor did it simply need more marketing.
It had media companies handling TV and radio, a real estate website as the digital shopfront, and individual agents promoting themselves via a range of different suppliers.
Plenty of musicians. No conductor!
Digital marketing is now an orchestra of different disciplines. Strategy, content, social media, video, photography, design, paid advertising, search, SEO, email, websites and data all have different roles.
Hiring another specialist does not automatically make the orchestra play better.
- Someone needs to write the score.
- Someone needs to decide who comes in when.
- Someone needs to hear when something is off.
- And someone needs to be accountable for the performance.
Kev and Zeta should not have to be the conductors simply because they own the real estate agency.
That became our role.
Spending more wasn’t the answer
When a real estate agency is already investing around $170,000 a year in marketing, my first recommendation is not: “Let’s spend more.”
First, we need to find out whether the existing $170,000 is pulling in the same direction.
My team at Hoole reviewed what Twomey Schriber already had.
- Where was the money going?
- What was working?
- What were prospective sellers and landlords seeing?
- What were agents doing themselves?
- Where were the gaps?
- What made Twomey Schriber genuinely different?
- Only then did we build the marketing strategy.
Because more posts, more ads and more video will not fix a fuzzy strategy.
We then turned that strategy into something Kev and Zeta could actually run a business around: an annual marketing plan and budget.
Instead of separate suppliers, campaigns and invoices appearing throughout the year, they could see what we were doing, what it would cost, why we were doing it and how the different activities worked together.
A marketing budget should be an investment plan, not a collection of channel expenses.
Keep the emotion. Add the proof.
Twomey Schriber already had a strong brand message.
Its television and radio campaign talked about the many different ways people live, ending with the idea that real estate is ultimately about people (with very different wants and needs), not simply property.
That was worth keeping.
Emotion gets attention. It creates familiarity. It gets the brand into someone’s head. But familiarity alone does not win the property listing.
A homeowner can see a Twomey Schriber television commercial today and decide to sell six months from now.
When that day comes, the research starts.
- They Google the agency.
- They Google the agent.
- They read reviews.
- They look at recent sales.
- They scroll social media.
- They visit the real estate website.
And the question changes from:
“Do I know them?”
to:
“Can I trust them to sell / lease / manage my property?”
Now the brand promise needs proof underneath it.
- Why Twomey Schriber?
- Why this agent?
- What do they do differently?
- What evidence is there that it works?
We did not need to throw away the emotional brand story. We needed to build the evidence underneath it.
Your brand can create the feeling. Your marketing still needs to give homeowners a reason to believe it.
Stop inventing claims. Start mining your data.
Established real estate agencies are often sitting on a goldmine and don’t realise it. They have years of client outcomes, reviews, sales results, local knowledge, agent specialisations and property management expertise.
The problem is that the best material becomes normal inside the business.
- Everyone knows Mary is brilliant with downsizers.
- Everyone knows John dominates a particular suburb.
- Everyone knows the property management team handles difficult situations exceptionally well.
- Everyone remembers the vendor who had tried another agency before coming across.
But none of it has been turned into marketing.
So businesses start looking outside themselves for a clever new tagline when the strongest reasons to choose them are already sitting under their noses.
We did not need to manufacture reasons to choose Twomey Schriber. We needed to uncover them. And one particularly valuable piece of gold came from the sales data.
Twomey Schriber was selling homes, on average, in under a month. Across the general Cairns market, homes were taking more than six weeks.
Now we had something meaningful to say.
Not another claim that the agency was “experienced”. Not “results driven”. Not “your local property experts”.
Proof.
The best marketing claims are not invented in a brainstorming session. They are mined from the business.
Six weeks feels very different when it’s your home
Average days on market can sound like another real estate statistic.
Until you are the seller.
Then every extra week matters.
- Another open home.
- Another Saturday spent cleaning and getting out of the house.
- Another round of wondering whether anyone is going to make an offer.
- Another week before you know what you can spend on the next property.
- Another delay before you can make decisions about moving, finance, family plans or whatever comes next.
Home sellers want a strong result.
They also want certainty. And they want to get on with their lives.
So when the evidence showed us that Twomey Schriber was achieving a substantially shorter average selling period than the wider Cairns market, that was not simply an interesting statistic.
It was a genuine client benefit.
Strong marketing turns business data into something the client actually cares about.
Stop making social media a property feed
Real estate social media has spent years looking like a buyer or renter’s shopping list.
New listing >> Open home >> Just sold.
New listing >> Open home >> Just leased.
There is nothing wrong with promoting property. But a feed full of property listings primarily markets the stock. A stream of property listings is distribution, not a marketing strategy.
We needed Twomey Schriber’s social media to market Twomey Schriber.
It needed to become less of a buyer’s shop window and more of a property owner’s reason to choose the real estate agency. So we broadened the conversation.
We moved beyond just listings to include the people inside the business, Cairns itself, useful advice, neighbourhood knowledge, and the real questions sellers and landlords are actually asking. And, most importantly, real client stories.
A sold post becomes much more powerful when you explain why the client was selling, what stood in their way, how the agent approached the campaign and what happened next.
Now another homeowner can see themselves in that story. And this matters because most homeowners seeing your content today are not listing their property tomorrow. They can be a couple or more months away from making that decision.
Your marketing needs to keep giving them reasons to notice you, remember you and trust you before they ever request an appraisal.
Make your real estate agents famous too
For a larger real estate agency, building the masterbrand is only half the job. You also have to build the people inside it.
Ultimately, homeowners appoint people.
Twomey Schriber has a large sales team with different personalities, suburb knowledge, property specialisations and client stories. Those differences are valuable. We want prospective clients to understand them.
So the agency marketing now gives individual agents professionally produced video, photography, articles, case studies and social content that puts the agent front and centre. This also builds on what they are known for, while keeping everything connected to the Twomey Schriber masterbrand.
The agency gives the agent credibility and reach.
The agent gives the agency personality and local expertise.
And for Kev, there is another commercial benefit.
Good agent marketing helps win property listings, strengthens the agency brand and gives good salespeople another reason to stay.
If the agency does not give agents a professional way to build their profile, they have to work it out for themselves. Now you have salespeople spending valuable selling time trying to become marketers.
You also end up with different logos, different messages, different suppliers and 20 different interpretations of what the brand should look like.
A large sales team needs a system behind it. Agent marketing should strengthen the real estate agency, not splinter it into 20 separate brands.
Principals shouldn’t have to hold it all together
This was the bigger reason outsourcing the marketing function made sense for Twomey Schriber.
The agency didn’t need a single “unicorn” marketer expected to be strategist, writer, designer, videographer, media buyer, SEO specialist, web expert and marketing manager all at once. That person does not exist.
It needed access to specialists across those disciplines, working under one strategy with one point of accountability. That is what my team at Hoole provides.
Zeta does not need to become the marketing strategist for property management.
Kev does not need to brief six different suppliers and then work out whether their recommendations make sense together.
Their sales agents do not need to write their own blogs or work out what videos they should make.
And the person coordinating the marketing does not need to keep walking back into Kev or Zeta’s office asking:
“What do you want me to do next?”
That is the difference between outsourcing marketing tasks and outsourcing the marketing function.
Does marketing match your business stage
At agency level, Twomey Schriber now has marketing that better reflects the calibre of the business.
- Its positioning is clearer.
- Its strongest claims are backed by proof.
- Its content is planned around the clients it wants to attract.
- Its agents have professional marketing support.
Its digital activity works alongside the established brand advertising instead of sitting in a separate universe. And there is now a team responsible for joining those pieces together.
At agent level, individual strengths can become visible without every salesperson having to invent, write, film and manage their own marketing.
At principal level, Kev and Zeta can spend more of their time where they bring the most value to the business. Kev can lead the sales team. Zeta can lead property management. Neither of them needs a second career in marketing.
The aim was never to make Twomey Schriber look busier online. It was to make the marketing as good as the real estate business behind it.
When you need grown up marketing
Twomey Schriber was already a successful real estate agency.
- The capability was there.
- The agents were there.
- The property management expertise was there.
- The client stories were there.
- The results were there.
The marketing had simply grown piece by piece around the business rather than being deliberately built as one function.
I see the same thing in established real estate agencies all the time. Eventually, adding another in-house marketer, another supplier or another campaign stops solving the problem.
At a certain size, your real estate agency needs more than someone doing marketing. It needs someone running marketing.
That does not mean you have to build and manage an entire marketing department yourself. If your business has grown faster than your marketing function, talk to me, Melanie Hoole.
My team at Hoole can uncover what makes your real estate agency genuinely different, build the strategy around it and manage the specialists needed to bring it to life. The best part is …
You run the real estate business. We’ll run the marketing.
