The Standard, The Craft, The Place

Some brands arrive with a legacy already built. Sotheby's International Realty has spent five decades representing the world's most extraordinary homes. When its Paddington Woollahra office looked at its Instagram, the gap was obvious. A globally recognised name. A near-new account with 22 posts, run by an executive assistant squeezing content between everything else on her desk.

The content wasn't bad. It was what most real estate feeds in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs are: team photos, listings, the occasional sold sticker. It just wasn't Sotheby's.

Core Studios is the social media agency that changed that - brought in as the office's end-to-end content partner to run strategy, shooting, editing, posting and reporting from the ground up. Today, the account has passed 6,500 followers, reaches over 100,000 accounts a quarter, and has become the reference point for how prestige real estate shows up online across Paddington and Woollahra.

Here's what changed.

WE STOPPED MAKING GENERIC REAL ESTATE CONTENT

The first decision was the most important one. Property feeds fail because they only ever say one thing: look what we're selling. Audiences scroll past because there's nothing in it for them.

We rebuilt the strategy around three pillars. The Standard: the properties themselves, shot with the cinematic weight a Sotheby's listing deserves. The Craft: the people, the process and the detail behind every campaign. The Place: Paddington and Woollahra themselves. The florists, the cafes, the terraces, the village life that makes the postcode worth the price.

That third pillar changed everything. The account stopped talking only to buyers and sellers and started talking to a community. Local platforms now pick up and share the content, extending reach well beyond the follower count, and when we approach local businesses about telling their story, most already know the concept and want in. The most recent collaboration paired the account with Grandiflora, one of Sydney's most loved florists, and its audience of almost 90,000.

THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE FEELING

Strategy is easy to talk about. Q2 2026 tells it straighter:

- 543,000+ views, with 83% from people who don't yet follow the account

- 108,000+ accounts reached and 9,800+ interactions

- 1,721 new followers in a single quarter

- One hero reel alone delivering 32,000 views and 141 new followers

The 83% is the number we watch closest. It means the content isn't circling an existing audience. It's winning new ones, week after week, and converting attention into followers. From 22 posts to 300. From standing start to 6,500 followers, on track for 10,000 by the end of the year.

THE PART BUSY AGENCIES CARE ABOUT MOST

Here's what the Sotheby's Paddington Woollahra team actually does to make all this happen: one strategy session a quarter.

Core Studios handles everything else. We coordinate every shoot, including the external stakeholders and local businesses involved. We cover auctions. We film properties without an agent needing to be on site.

When we do get in touch between quarters, it's for one of two reasons: a result worth celebrating, or an idea worth their time.

That's the model. A brand this established shouldn't be spending its energy on captions. It should be doing what it does best, while its digital presence quietly becomes the standard everyone else measures against.

We don't manage feeds. We build the presence everyone else measures against. If that's what your brand needs, we're at clientservices@corestudios.au