Google Ads for Real Estate: Paying for Buyers, Not Browsers

They work when the account is built to exclude the enormous volume of casual property browsing that the category attracts. Agents who run generic listing campaigns against the portals generally lose money; agents who target specific areas, price bands and seller intent generally do not. The difference is structural rather than a matter of budget.

Click costs vary widely by market and by query type. Seller-intent terms such as home valuation searches typically cost more per click than buyer searches and are worth considerably more, because a listing is worth more than a buyer registration. The figure that matters is cost per transaction, which requires knowing your enquiry-to-viewing and viewing-to-completion rates.

Usually because the account is optimising toward whatever is easiest to convert, which in property is a brochure download or a listing view from somebody with no intention of moving. Fixing it means changing what counts as a conversion, tightening match types, and asking a qualifying question on the landing page even though it reduces enquiry volume.

Not in the way most advertisers expect. In the US and Canada, housing advertisers operate under restricted targeting: no gender, age, parental status, marital status or ZIP code targeting, and limited audience features. Intent targeting through the search query itself remains available and is generally more effective anyway.

A portal lead is sold to you and often to several competitors at once, and you have no control over how it was generated. A lead from your own account is exclusive, the query that produced it is visible, and you can improve the conversion rate over time. Portal leads are faster to start; your own account is cheaper per transaction once it works.

No. Landlord acquisition and tenant acquisition are different audiences with different values, and property management revenue is recurring where a sale is one-off. Running them together produces an account that cannot be optimised for either.

By importing outcomes from the CRM back into Google Ads as offline conversions, so the keyword that produced an enquiry is matched to what happened to it. Without that, the account optimises toward enquiries and nobody can tell which ones were real.

Yes, and they need different accounts. A developer has finite stock and must throttle when a phase sells out; an agency has continuously changing inventory it does not own. Our case study client is a homebuilder, which is why the account was structured one campaign per development.

Yes, and it generally should. The portals cover generic property search; paid search is where you win the specific queries and the seller-side searches the portals do not compete for. Most of our property clients run both and measure them separately.

Yes, free of charge. Read-only access, nothing changes, and you receive a written document naming what we found — including how much of your spend went to searches that could never have become a transaction.