Google Ads budget for realtors

The right Google Ads budget for a realtor is not a percentage of GCI or a number a sales rep suggests — it is the smallest spend that produces statistically usable data in your market, held long enough to judge. That framing answers most budget questions by itself. Here is the floor logic, three worked CAD scenarios, and the rules for scaling up or shutting down.

Why there is a floor at all

Two consumers of your budget need volume. Google’s automated bidding learns from conversions; starve it and it never leaves the guessing phase. And you need enough leads per month to tell a working campaign from a lucky one — three leads in thirty days is an anecdote either way. At Canadian metro click prices, those two requirements put the practical floor around $1,000 to $2,000 monthly for search campaigns. Below that, the honest options are a tighter geography, a single-intent campaign (seller terms only, for instance), or saving the money until the floor is affordable. What the clicks themselves cost, line by line, is broken out in real estate PPC cost Canada.

Three budgets, worked honestly

Every figure below rests on stated assumptions — a $3.50 blended click in a mid-competitive metro and a 4% landing conversion rate. Swap in your own numbers as soon as you have them.

$1,000 a month. Roughly 285 clicks, about 11 leads. Viable for a solo agent with one focused campaign and patient expectations. Note the management ratio: a $350 minimum fee is 26% of total outlay at this level, so either self-manage at this size or accept that the ratio improves as spend grows.

$3,500 a month. Around 1,000 clicks, roughly 40 leads, and the level where a 10%-of-spend fee equals its own floor — the management math turns clean here. Enough room to run seller and buyer campaigns side by side and compare them on data instead of instinct.

$10,000 a month. Team territory: several thousand clicks, triple-digit lead counts, management at $1,000. At this scale the constraint stops being budget and becomes follow-up capacity — which is a routing and speed-to-lead problem, not an ads problem.

Allocating within the budget

Fund intents in order of leverage, not volume. Seller and valuation terms first: the clicks are the dearest in the account, but one won listing outearns months of spend, and the searcher is the closest to a transaction — the dedicated playbook is seller lead Google Ads. Specific buyer terms second: neighbourhood and property-type searches where your site can genuinely answer the query. Brand terms last and always: your own name costs pennies and should never be conceded to a competitor’s bid. Broad category terms (“real estate”, “MLS”) get nothing — they are how budgets evaporate politely.

The ninety-day rule and the kill criteria

Commit to ninety days at your chosen level before judging, because the first weeks are the learning phase and real estate leads mature slowly. But commit with kill criteria written down in advance: a cost per lead that must fall below a threshold you set from your own conversion math — work it through in lead cost Canada — and a lead quality bar checked against actual conversations, not form counts. Ninety days of data with pre-agreed criteria produces a clean decision: scale, fix, or stop. Ninety days of vibes produces a renewal you cannot defend.

When to raise the budget

Raise when three things are simultaneously true: cost per lead has been stable for at least a month, your search-terms report shows you are missing impression share on terms that convert, and your follow-up is answering current lead flow within minutes rather than hours. Raise in 20–30% steps and let bidding re-stabilize between moves. If any of the three is false, more budget buys more of the existing problem — and if managing this cadence is not how you want to spend evenings, that is the actual case for handing the account to a manager.