Fill your pipeline with qualified buyers.
We help real estate brands generate qualified leads through local SEO, paid ads and high-converting project microsites.
Common challenges
- Low-quality leads
- High cost per site visit
- Weak local visibility
How we solve them
- Local SEO & GBP
- Lead-gen campaigns
- Project landing pages
Recommended services for real estate
Go deeper on real estate
What we actually do differently for real estate, service by service.
Ready to grow your real estate brand?
Let's talk about where the growth is — and how we'll get you there.
Indian real estate is the only category we work in where the advertising is legally constrained before it is creatively constrained. Since the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act came into force in 2016, a promoter cannot advertise, market, book or offer a project for sale until it is registered with the state RERA authority, and every advertisement thereafter must carry the registration number and the authority's website. That single rule rewrites the media plan: launch campaigns get scheduled around registration dates, not around a marketing calendar, and 'coming soon' teasers for an unregistered project are a regulatory exposure rather than a clever pre-launch tactic.
The second structural fact is that you do not own demand aggregation. 99acres, MagicBricks and Housing.com sit on the head terms, the brand recall and a listings inventory no single developer can match. Trying to outrank them for 'flats in Gurgaon' or 'property in Indore' is a losing trade at any budget. What is winnable is the layer underneath — specific project names, micro-locality queries, configuration-plus-locality searches, and the map pack around your site office. Those queries carry far higher intent per impression, and the portals cover them shallowly because they have thousands of localities to service and you have four.
Third, and most expensively misunderstood: the lead is not the product. A booked, attended site visit is. Meta will produce real estate leads at ₹150–₹600 apiece in most Indian markets, and a large share of them will be brokers, job-seekers, students, tenants and people who tapped an instant form because it was pre-filled. Google search leads cost several times more and convert far better. Judged on cost per lead, Meta wins every month. Judged on cost per booked site visit — which is the only number that touches revenue — the ranking often reverses entirely. Almost every dysfunctional real estate account we inherit is dysfunctional because it was optimised to the first number.
How a property buyer actually moves from search to booking
Discovery is portal-first and social-second. A buyer starts on 99acres or MagicBricks with a budget band and two or three localities, or they see a reel while scrolling and register interest without much deliberation. These two entry points produce completely different people. The portal user has already self-selected on budget and location; the social user has expressed curiosity, not capacity. Feeding both into the same follow-up queue is why sales teams stop trusting marketing.
Shortlisting happens across four or five projects simultaneously, and it is comparative rather than sequential. The buyer is checking carpet area against super built-up, price per square foot against the neighbouring project, possession date against their rent commitment, and increasingly the RERA portal itself — state RERA sites publish registration status, approved plans, quarterly progress and complaint history, and a meaningful share of serious buyers now look. Anything you claim on a landing page that the RERA filing contradicts is discovered at exactly the wrong moment.
Then comes the credibility check, which is where most developer marketing quietly fails. Buyers search your company name plus 'reviews', 'complaints', 'delay' or 'possession'. They read forum threads and Google reviews of your completed projects. For a purchase this size, one delayed handover from six years ago outweighs a well-produced walkthrough video. Reputation work is not an add-on in this sector; it is a demand-generation channel.
The site visit is the real conversion event, and its probability decays fast. A prospect who filled a form at 9pm and gets a call at 11am the next morning has, in the interim, been contacted by three competitors and two brokers, and has lost the emotional context that made them enquire. We consistently see contact within the first ten to fifteen minutes convert to visits at multiples of the rate achieved after a few hours. After that, the curve flattens into a long, low-yield nurture tail measured in weeks. Speed to first contact is not a nice operational detail — for most developers it is the highest-leverage change available, and it costs nothing in media spend.
Post-visit, the cycle runs anywhere from a fortnight to six months, involves a spouse and often parents, and stalls on home-loan sanction more than on price. Marketing's job through that window is not more ads — it is supplying construction updates, loan-partner clarity and possession confidence at the cadence the buyer needs.
What each channel is actually for
Not every channel does the same job in real estate. Here's how we use each one.
Google Ads
Search is where buyers with money and a timeline show up, and it is one of the most expensive auctions in India — competitive metro clicks routinely run ₹80–₹300, and Tier-2 markets a fraction of that. The account's profitability is decided almost entirely by what you exclude and what you optimise towards, not by how aggressively you bid.
- Build the negative list before the keyword list — 'broker', 'dealer', 'job', 'vacancy', 'salary', 'rent', 'PG', 'resale', 'sq ft rate' and competitor project names drain budget silently on broad match
- One campaign per project mapped to one microsite, so a search for a named project never lands on a corporate homepage listing eleven others
- Import CRM outcomes — site visit booked, visit attended, booking done — as offline conversions so Smart Bidding trains on qualified outcomes rather than form fills
- Run brand and competitor-brand campaigns separately; your own project name is cheap to defend and expensive to lose to a portal listing or an aggregator
Meta Ads
Meta creates demand rather than capturing it, and it does so at volume and low apparent cost. Treat it as a top-of-funnel machine whose output must be filtered hard before it reaches a salesperson — the discipline is entirely in qualification and speed, not in creative volume.
- Prefer higher-friction lead forms with a manual review step and budget/locality qualifying questions over one-tap instant forms, even though cost per lead will rise two to four times
- Wire the form to WhatsApp and the CRM via webhook so first contact happens in minutes, not on the next morning's call list
- Exclude and suppress broker audiences deliberately — job-title and interest exclusions help, but a hard CRM-based suppression list of known broker numbers helps more
- Feed the CRM's 'visit attended' event back to Meta as the optimisation event once you have enough weekly volume; below roughly 20–30 such events a week, optimise to a qualified-lead proxy instead
SEO & local search
Organic in real estate is a long-tail and map game. You will not beat the portals on head terms, so the strategy is to own project names, locality-plus-configuration queries and the physical map presence around your site office, where competition is thin and intent is high.
- A genuinely useful page per micro-locality — connectivity, schools, upcoming infrastructure, honest price-band trends — rather than a template with the locality name swapped in
- Google Business Profile for every site office and sales gallery, with real photos, current hours and a steady review flow; the map pack outperforms position three organically for 'near me' property searches
- Project pages that publish RERA number, carpet area, price band, possession date and floor plans as indexable text, not inside a PDF or an image
- Capture the branded-plus-modifier searches — 'project name review', 'project name possession status', 'project name price' — before a forum or a portal does it for you
Website & conversion
Developer sites are usually built as brochures and gated as if attention were abundant. The site's job is to get a qualified buyer to book a visit with the minimum number of unanswered questions, which means giving information away rather than trading it for a phone number.
- Publish floor plans, price bands and RERA details openly — gating them suppresses far more enquiries than it filters, and the buyer simply gets them from a portal instead
- Replace the generic 'enquire now' box with a site-visit booking flow offering real time slots, plus a WhatsApp handoff for people who will never fill a form
- Build for a mid-range Android on congested 4G; heavy walkthrough videos and unoptimised renders are the most common cause of buyers abandoning a project page
- Instrument the page properly — scroll depth on floor plans, brochure downloads, WhatsApp taps — so you learn which inventory the traffic actually wants
Lead operations & CRM
In this sector the CRM is a marketing channel, because without outcome data flowing back, every bidding algorithm you use is optimising towards junk. This is the least glamorous work in a real estate account and reliably the highest-returning.
- Sub-fifteen-minute first contact as a hard operational SLA, with automated round-robin assignment and escalation when it is breached
- A single disposition vocabulary across sources — qualified, unqualified, broker, visit booked, visit done, booked — so channel comparison is possible at all
- Pipe dispositions back to Google and Meta as conversion events, with a value attached, rather than only reporting them internally
- Track source down to campaign and creative on every CRM record; 'Facebook' as a source field tells you nothing you can act on
The mistakes we see most often
Every one of these is something we've inherited from a previous agency in real estate.
Optimising campaigns to cost per lead
Cost per lead and cost per booked site visit diverge violently in this sector. A channel producing leads at ₹200 that converts one in eighty to an attended visit is more expensive than one producing leads at ₹1,200 that converts one in eight — and the dashboard will insist otherwise every single month.
Make cost per booked site visit the reported headline number from month one, feed CRM outcomes back into both ad platforms, and accept that cost per lead will rise when you do. If your sales team cannot yet log visit outcomes reliably, fix that before touching the media plan.
Sending all paid traffic to the corporate homepage
Someone searching a specific project name and landing on a page listing your entire portfolio has to re-find what they searched for. The bounce is instant, and Quality Score punishes the mismatch, so you also pay more per click for the privilege.
One microsite per project, one campaign per microsite, ad copy that repeats the project name. This is the single change that most reliably improves a real estate Google Ads account, and it is a build task rather than an optimisation task.
Gating floor plans and pricing behind a form
The reasoning — 'we only want serious buyers' — assumes the information is scarce. It is not. The buyer gets the layout and the price band from a portal listing in thirty seconds and never returns, so the gate filters out the impatient rather than the unqualified.
Publish plans and price bands openly, then gate something genuinely worth trading for: a site-visit slot, a cost sheet with payment schedule, or a loan-eligibility conversation. Qualification belongs in the form fields and the follow-up call, not in a wall.
Running ads without the RERA registration number, or before registration
Section 3 of the RERA Act prohibits advertising, marketing, booking or selling an unregistered project, and Section 11(2) requires the registration number in every advertisement and prospectus. Authorities in several states — MahaRERA among the most active — have issued notices and penalties over exactly this, and the financial exposure is calculated as a percentage of estimated project cost, not of ad spend.
Treat registration status as a media-plan gate. No creative goes live for a project until the number exists, and the number plus the authority website goes into the ad, the landing page and the brochure as a standing template requirement, not a legal review at the end.
Buying Meta leads at volume and following up the next day
Meta lead value is perishable in a way that most sales processes are not built for. By the time a next-morning call happens, the prospect has been contacted by competitors, has cooled, and often does not remember which advertisement they responded to. The leads were not bad — the latency destroyed them.
Automate the first touch. A WhatsApp message within two minutes acknowledging the specific project, followed by a human call inside fifteen minutes, converts a materially higher share of the same leads. Reduce lead volume until your team can service it at that speed rather than buying more.
Ignoring broker and job-seeker contamination
Brokers click property ads professionally; job-seekers search company names looking for vacancies; students research the sector for coursework. In an unfiltered account this traffic routinely consumes a substantial slice of budget, and because it produces form fills, it looks like performance.
Aggressive negatives, career-page traffic routed away from lead forms, an explicit broker-enquiry path so they self-select out of the buyer funnel, and a suppression list built from CRM dispositions that grows every month. This is maintenance work, not a one-time setup.
The numbers that actually matter
Cost per booked site visit
The closest measurable event to revenue that marketing can influence directly. It exposes channel quality differences that cost per lead conceals, and it is the number a sales head will actually recognise as meaningful.
Site-visit attendance rate
A booked visit that nobody attends is a booking that never existed. Attendance rate separates genuine intent from polite agreement on a call, and it is the fastest way to detect a follow-up script that is over-promising to secure the appointment.
Median time to first contact
Measured in minutes from lead creation, not hours. It correlates with visit conversion more strongly than almost anything else in the account, and unlike creative or bidding, it can be improved this week at zero media cost.
Lead-to-visit and visit-to-booking ratios, by source
Two ratios that let you price each channel honestly. A source can look expensive at the top and be the cheapest source of bookings — you only find out by holding both ratios per source rather than reporting a blended funnel.
Marketing cost as a percentage of realised sale value
The board-level number. It normalises across projects with different ticket sizes and makes the trade-off between inventory velocity and acquisition cost explicit, which cost-per-unit metrics never do.
Vanity metrics to ignore
Total leads generated, cost per lead in isolation, impressions, reach, page likes and video views. Every one of them can be improved by making the funnel worse, which is precisely why agencies fond of them tend to report them.
RERA, advertising rules and platform policy
RERA is the constraint that shapes everything else. Section 3(1) bars a promoter from advertising, marketing, booking, selling or offering for sale any plot, apartment or building in a registrable project before registering it with the state authority. Section 11(2) requires that the registration number and the authority's website appear in every advertisement and prospectus. Contravention of Section 3 attracts penalties calculated as a share of estimated project cost — up to ten per cent under Section 59 — and contraventions of other provisions up to five per cent under Section 61. Because the base is project cost rather than campaign budget, the downside is disproportionate to any upside a pre-launch teaser could produce.
What you claim matters as much as whether you disclose. Amenities, possession dates, carpet area and approvals stated in advertising should match the RERA filing, because the filing is public and buyers increasingly check it. Artist's impressions and computer-generated imagery need clear labelling — several state authorities have specifically pulled up developers for renders and location maps that implied infrastructure or approvals that did not exist. The Advertising Standards Council of India's code applies in parallel, and property advertising is a recurring category in its complaints.
Platform policy adds a layer most Indian developers discover by accident. Meta's Special Ad Category for Housing restricts age, gender and detailed location targeting, and it applies to advertisers targeting audiences in the United States and Canada — which catches Indian developers running NRI campaigns. A domestic campaign is unaffected; the same creative pointed at Toronto or New Jersey is. Plan NRI campaigns as a separate, differently-targeted build rather than a geography toggle on an existing one.
Two further points worth building in early. NRI transactions sit under FEMA rules governing who may buy what and how funds repatriate, so NRI-facing landing pages should route to someone who can answer that accurately rather than to a generic sales queue. And under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, the buyer records accumulating in your CRM are personal data with consent, purpose-limitation and retention obligations attached — real estate CRMs, which tend to hoard every enquiry indefinitely and share them freely with channel partners, are among the least prepared systems we encounter.
This is a practitioner's summary of how these rules affect campaign work, not legal advice. Get your own counsel to review anything you publish.
What the first 90 days look like
Instrument and diagnose
- Audit RERA disclosure across every live ad, landing page and brochure, and pause anything non-compliant
- Establish CRM disposition vocabulary and get site-visit and attendance outcomes logged reliably
- Set up offline conversion import to Google Ads and CAPI events to Meta from the CRM
- Baseline the numbers that matter: cost per booked visit, attendance rate, median time to first contact, per source
- Build the initial negative-keyword and broker-suppression lists from three months of search terms and CRM data
Restructure and rebuild
- Ship project microsites with open floor plans, price bands, RERA details and a site-visit booking flow
- Rebuild campaigns one-per-project against those microsites, with brand defence separated out
- Replace one-tap instant forms with qualifying forms and instant WhatsApp acknowledgement
- Implement the sub-fifteen-minute first-contact SLA with automated assignment and escalation
- Launch locality pages and Google Business Profile work for each site office
Optimise to visits, then bookings
- Shift bidding to visit-booked or visit-attended conversions once weekly volume supports it
- Reallocate budget on cost per booked visit rather than cost per lead, source by source
- Build patient retargeting for the post-visit consideration window, including construction-progress creative
- Start the review and reputation programme against completed projects, since brand searches are checked before every visit
- Report against marketing cost as a percentage of realised sale value alongside the funnel metrics
Real Estate questions
Almost always one of three things, usually all three. The form is too easy — one-tap instant forms pre-fill everything and capture curiosity rather than intent. Follow-up is too slow, so the leads that were real go cold before anyone calls. And the bidding algorithm is being trained on form fills, so it has learned to find people who fill forms rather than people who buy flats. Fixing the measurement first is what makes the other two fixable, because until CRM outcomes flow back into the platforms you are asking the algorithm to optimise blind.
Usually yes, at least initially. Portals are where a large share of buyers begin, and being absent means being excluded from the shortlist before you can compete. What changes is the role — portals become discovery, and your own campaigns capture the branded and project-specific searches that discovery generates. Over time, as project-name search volume grows, the portal share of your budget should fall. Cutting them on day one tends to cost more demand than it saves in listing fees.
In metro markets, ₹3–8 lakh a month per active project is a realistic range for consistent site-visit flow; in Tier-2 cities like Indore or Bhopal, ₹1–3 lakh often achieves comparable volume because the auction is far thinner. Those are ranges, not quotes — the honest driver is inventory value and absorption target, not city. A project needing four bookings a month at ₹80 lakh a ticket justifies a very different budget from one needing twenty at ₹35 lakh.
No. Section 3 of the RERA Act prohibits advertising, marketing, booking, selling or offering for sale before the project is registered, and the penalty is assessed against estimated project cost. In practice this means planning the launch backwards from the expected registration date. You can build the site, produce the creative, warm up the pixel with brand-level content that makes no project claims, and be ready to go live the day the number is issued — but the project-specific advertising waits.
Project-name and branded queries can rank within four to eight weeks because competition for them is minimal. Micro-locality content typically takes four to eight months to build meaningful traffic, and map-pack visibility around a site office often arrives in two to four months in Tier-2 markets, considerably slower in metros. Generic city-level property terms are effectively unwinnable against the portals, and any agency promising them is either misunderstanding the market or misrepresenting it.
Let's build your growth engine.
Book a free strategy call. We'll audit your funnel and show you exactly where the growth is.