Google Ads for real estate

How customers in this market actually search

The portals own buyer search and they are not going to stop. Competing for ‘homes for sale’ against national listing sites is a bad use of an agent’s budget, and it produces enormous volumes of browsers who are eighteen months from moving. The segment where an individual agent or team can win is seller intent — home valuation, ‘should I sell’, relocation, downsizing, probate and divorce sales.

Seller leads cost more per enquiry and convert far more slowly, sometimes over a year. That makes patience and nurture non-negotiable. A real estate account without email follow-up, remarketing and a long-horizon view of return will look like a failure at day sixty and might have been working perfectly well the whole time.

The campaigns worth separating

These are the splits that usually matter in real estate. Each one deserves its own budget, because a shared budget always drifts toward whatever converts most cheaply — which is rarely what pays you best.

• Home valuation and seller lead campaigns
• Relocation and out-of-state moves into your market
• Luxury or specific price-band positioning
• Neighbourhood and community-specific targeting
• Investor and cash-buyer campaigns, where that is your model
• Property management enquiries, a stable recurring counterweight to sales

Negative keywords from day one

Every real estate account we build launches with a negative list, and it grows every week from the search terms report. A starting point for this trade:

This is a fraction of a real list. Mature accounts in this category typically carry several hundred negatives, most of them discovered from actual search terms rather than guessed in advance.

Timing and seasonality

Listing activity rises in spring and cools through late autumn in most markets, but seller research runs ahead of it — the valuations people request in January turn into February and March listings. Interest rate news moves this market more sharply than the calendar does, and a rate drop reliably produces a short, intense lift in both buyer and seller enquiries that is worth funding on the day.

What counts as a conversion here

Valuation requests are the core conversion, but they need honest handling: many are curiosity, and counting them all equally will teach the account to buy curiosity. We separate valuation requests, booked consultations and listing appointments, and where your CRM supports it, feed back which enquiries actually listed. Given the long cycle, cohort reporting by month of origin tells you far more than a monthly cost per lead.

What the landing page needs

Paid traffic in this category should not land on a homepage. The page that receives the click needs, at minimum:

• A genuine instant valuation tool rather than a form promising a call back
• Local market data that proves you know the specific neighbourhood
• Recent sales with days-on-market and outcome, not just addresses
• A clear explanation of what happens after the enquiry, which lifts form completion
• Agent credentials and local track record, since this is a trust purchase

We build these when the existing site cannot carry the traffic — it is the one design service we offer, precisely because the campaign depends on it.

The mistakes we see most often in real estate accounts

• Buying buyer traffic in an auction owned by national portals
• Judging seller campaigns on a thirty-day window when the cycle runs six to twelve months
• Valuation leads with no follow-up sequence, which wastes the entire spend
• Sending paid traffic to an IDX search page and calling it a landing page