Google Business Profile for real estate offices

A brokerage’s Google Business Profile is usually either unclaimed, mis-named, or quietly competing with its own agents. Getting it right is unglamorous work with outsized returns, because for “real estate office near me” and brand searches, the local pack ranks profiles — not websites.

One profile per real office

The structure rule comes straight from how Google models businesses: a profile represents a staffed physical location customers can visit. A single-office brokerage gets one profile. A multi-office brokerage gets one per branch, each verified at its own address with its own phone number and hours. Resist the tempting shortcut of minting profiles for cities where you merely want business — location-less “service area” spam is the fastest route to a suspension that takes your legitimate branches down during appeal.

Name it what the regulator thinks you are called

The profile name is the registered brokerage name — the same name your provincial regulator requires in advertising — not “Brokerage Name | Top Homes for Sale in Mississauga”. Keyword-stuffed names violate Google’s guidelines and invite both suspensions and competitor corrections, and they read as exactly what they are. The category does the classification work: “Real estate agency” as primary, with secondaries like property management only where the office genuinely offers the service.

Link each profile to its own office page

The website field is where most multi-office setups leak value. Every branch profile should link to that branch’s own page — address, team, office-specific contact — not to a shared homepage that mentions no location. This is the join between GBP and local SEO: the office page confirms to Google that the entity on the map and the entity on the site are the same thing, carries the branch’s reviews and staff, and gives the profile somewhere relevant to send a visitor. On a BrokerFold brokerage site, every branch gets its own page for exactly this reason — each profile has a real destination instead of a homepage redirect.

Offices and agents are different entities — keep them that way

Google allows practitioner profiles for individual agents alongside the office profile, and a healthy brokerage wants both: the office profile wins brokerage-intent searches, the agents’ own profiles win agent-intent searches. The failure modes are blending them. Do not rename the office profile after the broker of record’s personal brand; do not let a departing agent walk away holding the office profile’s login; and record, in writing, who administers what. Ownership of the office profile belongs to a brokerage email account, never a personal one.

Reviews: volume for the office, stories for the agents

Review strategy differs by entity. Agent profiles want detailed transaction stories; the office profile wants steady volume and recency, which signal an operating business. Ask for office-profile reviews from the relationships only the brokerage has — recruits who onboarded well, landlords using property management, past clients of departed agents whose experience the office serviced. Reply to everything, including the unfair ones, because the reply is read by the next hundred searchers, not the reviewer.

Measure it like a channel

Keep the profiles visibly alive: current photos of the actual office and team, hours that survive holidays, and occasional posts for new listings or market updates. A profile last touched in 2023 whispers the same thing an empty storefront does.

GBP reports calls, direction requests, and clicks, but the number that matters is leads. Tag each profile’s website link with UTM parameters so branch-profile traffic shows up attributed in your analytics and the office’s SEO reporting can say what the local pack is actually producing. Offices that measure this usually discover the profile outperforms channels they spend real money on — which is a strong argument for giving it an hour a month of deliberate attention.