Advertising has a say in every business, and real estate is no exception. Whenever you check the housing market, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of for-sale houses there. Therefore, the ones that are not properly advertised will be ignored, if not forgotten. As a matter of fact, poor advertising is one of the most common reasons why houses don’t sell.
While many agents try to escape real estate advertising costs, smart agents appreciate its value and always set aside a good budget for it. Advertising helps agents sell properties in a shorter time, making them popular and reliable.
Consequently, more people come to them when seeking a property deal. In a sense, we can say that agents paying for real estate advertising are actually advertising themselves.
No marketing = No sales! Simple as that.
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What Are the Most Common Real Estate Advertising Tools?
You have quite a few options for using real estate advertising tools. Which one to try depends mainly on your personal experience and, more importantly, your budget. Let’s take a look at some of these tools and discuss their merits.
Digital real estate marketing
Many agents, for good reasons, choose to bet their money on the Internet. After all, it’s getting into our lives more and more, and we seem to enjoy it. It‘s a perfectly wise choice as, according to some statistics, about 62% of the world’s population uses the Internet at least once a day.
Google ads
Google ads appear on the top of the search results and hence receive thousands of clicks per month. They work best with agents with a real estate website where visitors can learn more about them and their services.
Several factors determine how much real estate Google ads cost. Quality score, ad rank, and landing page relevance are the main factors. All in all, real estate Google ads cost ranges from $1-$4 per click. And for 1k impression, the price is around 15 to 30 dollars.
Email marketing
Email marketing is another powerful tool that connects agents to potential buyers and is still a popular advertising method in the modern era. The only problem with email marketing is that they sound a little too promotional. This makes the recipients ignore them before they finish reading them.
If you want to invest in email marketing, you need to buy Server Massage Block (SMB) email marketing software that contains a certain number of email contacts.
Real estate email marketing costs are determined by the number of contacts in the software and tools or services you want to use. The cheapest MSB software contains 1000 contacts. Depending on the software you choose and how long you’re gonna use the service, you may have to pay between $9.00-$25.00 per 500 contacts. This means a single ad will cost something between $0.018-$0.05 per contact. As for pay-per-click cost, it’s around $0.10.2.
Youtube advertising
Youtube is now the most favorite video-sharing website in the world. That’s why many agents choose to use this platform to advertise their services. Apart from sharing their experiences, agents can share pictures and videos from the listed houses they want to sell.
Investing in a Youtube channel for advertising purposes will certainly pay off if you manage to create engaging videos and, more importantly, get enough subscribers.
If you don’t have a channel, you can advertise through other channels. Youtube ads could be CPM ( cost per 1,000 impressions). On average, you’ll have to pay $0.018-$0.05 per view, or $0.10-$0.30 per click, or $4-$10 CPM (Cost Per Mille).
Social media advertising
The latest statistics on social media platforms tell us that about 4.5 billion people use social media regularly.
This means that one in every two people uses social media in one form or another. Therefore, it’s easy to see why social media is now one of the favorite marketing platforms for many businesses. But what social media should you use for real estate advertising?
Having more than two billion active users, Facebook is arguably the best social media platform for advertising. An outstanding feature of Facebook is its micro-target feature that allows the user to narrow down the demographic for every search.
You can use posters, videos, and photos in your ads, specifying the target community based on age, location, business, etc. Facebook ads cost per click by industry. For real estate advertising, you’d have to pay $1.81 per click or $0.12 per engagement. As for CPM, it’s between $2.28-$30.97.
LinkedIn is a business-oriented social platform that allows for professional networking and career development. Using LinkedIn, you can easily target a large community of people who are close to your location and are more than likely to need a real estate agent. Having access to mutual contacts of other agents, appraisers, and home inspectors, you can send your ad to thousands of people looking for a new property.
If you want to pay per click, the cost is $8-$11. If you’d like to pay per impression, it’s $33.80 per 1,000 impressions. Regarding the cost for engagement, It’s about $0.50-$1.
With over two billion users, Instagram is another powerful advertising tool that real estate agents can use. Unlike other platforms where the user is forced to watch an ad, Instagram ads are non-intrusive, meaning they don’t interrupt what the user is watching. If effect, we could assume that people watching real estate ads on Instagram are more likely to be those looking for deals. Therefore, a higher conversion rate is achieved.
The average cost per click for Instagram ads ranges from $0.20- $2. As for cost per impression, it’s about $6.70 per 1,000 impressions. Also, for customer engagement, you need to pay $0.01-$0.05.
Traditional real estate advertising
Some agents, for one reason or another, may prefer traditional adverting methods to more modern ones. Money might be one reason. These methods are also more convenient in that they relieve the agent from finding a target community. With such methods, the target community is always the same. The neighborhood around the to-be-sold property. Below, you can learn about these advertising methods.
Flyers
Another way to advertise your services is to use real estate flyers. Using a real estate flyer, you can tell your customers about the newly-listed properties, the ones you’ve just sold, or the ones that will be soon listed. They can be mailed or handed out directly. Last but not least, they are affordable and come in various pre-designed formats that you can select from.
As flyers vary in type and design, some are more costly than others. Overall, you may have to pay $30-$199 monthly if you want to use real estate flyers.
Magazine & newspaper ads
A considerable number of people still rely on magazine and newspaper ads when looking for a service/product. Therefore, many real estate agents use such ads as their primary advertising device.
The good thing about such ads is that the intended target community reads them. The bad thing, though, is that these ads are very brief and non-inclusive at all. As a result, readers can’t get a clear picture of any of the advertised properties.
The amount you pay for such ads depends highly on how popular that magazine/newspaper is. So, you may have to pay a few hundred/thousand dollars depending on the publication you choose. For a typical ad in a local newspaper or magazine, you’ll have to pay $0.5-$8 per copy. Perhaps the downside of newspaper ads is that they don’t receive much attention one day after they’re published.
Brochures
Real estate brochures contain whatever a potential home buyer might expect. Through descriptions of the properties, neat pictures of every corner of each house, and contact information of the agent.
You can find various pre-designed real estate brochures on graphic design websites. Some of these brochures are free. Real estate brochures work best with busy individuals who are not much into social media, or for that matter, the internet. Real estate advertising through brochures can cost between $70-$150 per copy.
If you decide to choose one of the traditional methods, you should consider the following extra costs as well. Here, you should decide whether you want to list the property online or in print, go for photography or videography, and so forth.
| Advertising plan | Estimated cost |
| Auctioneer | $0-$1,000 |
| “For sale” signboard | $70-$300 |
| Print property listing | $ 1000- $1,500 |
| Open Inspection brochures | $200 |
| Real estate photography | $800-$1,500 |
| Real estate videography | $1000-$3000 |
| Property floor plan | $300-$400 |
Which Type of Real Estate Advertising Should I Adopt?
There are two types of real estate advertising methods that you, as a real estate agent, can go for.
- Advertising each property you’re responsible for individually.
- Advertising yourself as a realtor
Regarding the first method, you can advertise each property separately. The catalog, Facebook ad, virtual tour, and all the other content you prepare should only be about that one property.
Obviously, you can be as detailed as you want here.
By providing all specifics to the audience, you’ll let them make up their minds.
Regarding the second form of real estate advertising, you can showcase some of the properties you’ve sold or will sell/rent and invite your audience to contact you if they want to buy, sell, or lease a similar property.
What Determines Real Estate Advertising Costs?
There are several ways to determine the right advertising cost for your property. Let’s review the main four factors that help us come up with the right real estate advertising costs.
- Commission income: The simplest way is to allocate 10% of the commission you’re going to receive to advertising. I know, you’re going to receive your commission after selling the property, but you can always estimate the amount you’re going to receive for commission.
Advertising tools: Another way is to estimate the costs based on the advertising method you choose, which we discussed above. - Property value range: Yet another thing that affects real estate advertising costs is the property value range. This is the price range you consider fair for the house based on its size, age, location, etc.
As a rule of thumb, the higher the price range, the more you should invest in advertising it. The table below indicates how much you should pay for advertising depending on the property’s value range.
| Property value range | Estimated advertising cost |
| $500,000 | $ 2,000-$5,000 |
| $750,000 | $3,500-$7,500 |
| $1,000,000 | $5,000-$10,000 |
| $1,500,000 | $7,500-$15,000 |
Our Verdict
Adopting the right marketing strategy affects how long a property lingers on the market. So, the way you advertise the properties you want o sell/rent directly determines how many deals you make and, for that matter, much you earn per month.
The trick here is to throw the widest marketing net to attract lots of buyers/tenants. To do so, you’d better try each advertising tool a few times and keep a record of the results you get with each method. Little by little, you’ll find out which path you should take.
