Google Ads for realtors

Google Ads is the fastest honest way for a realtor to buy demand: people typing “homes for sale in” plus your market are telling you what they want while they want it. It’s also the easiest place in real estate marketing to burn money — wrong keywords, rented landing pages, and slow follow-up quietly convert budget into portal-grade disappointment. BrokerFold’s managed ads exist to remove those three failure points, at pricing you can read before anyone calls you.

The economics, stated first

Management is 10% of your monthly ad budget, in published bands with a $350 CAD/month floor, rising to $1,000/month at $10,000 in spend. No setup fee — that SKU is retired. Your ad budget goes straight to Google, never through us, so you always see exactly what the media cost versus what the management cost. And ad spend is never a requirement of any plan: the platform works without it, and the pricing page keeps the two costs separate on purpose.

That structure kills the usual conflicts. We don’t mark up media, so we have no incentive to inflate your budget. The fee scales with band, so a small book of business gets the same mechanics as a large one.

What’s included in management

• Campaign build and keyword strategy for your actual market and inventory — the searches with transaction intent, not vanity brand impressions.
• Landing pages on your own site. Clicks land on live listing search, sold-data registration, and community pages under your domain, which is where real estate intent actually converts. No third-party landing tool, no data silo.
• Tracking wired end to end. Because the destination and the CRM are one platform, every ad lead arrives attributed, with its on-site behaviour on the timeline from the first click.
• Ongoing optimization. Budgets shift toward what converts; negative keywords keep the money off tire-kicker queries.
• The follow-up layer beneath. Automated first-touch in seconds and staged nurture — paid traffic is where speed to lead stops being theory and starts being unit economics.

The queries that matter

Real estate search intent sorts into tiers. Address and MLS® number searches are the hottest — someone staring at one specific property — and your ads should own them for your own inventory. Neighbourhood-plus-intent queries carry serious buyers worth paying for. Broad dreamy searches mostly burn budget. Campaign structure follows that hierarchy, and negative keywords do the unglamorous work of keeping spend off queries that never transact.

Deliverables

Live campaigns in your market; landing destinations chosen and instrumented; conversion events defined; leads flowing into the CRM with source attribution; and a spend picture you can audit at Google itself, since the media account is yours. You keep visibility into what runs — this is management, not a black box you mail money into.

On reporting cadence: the numbers live where you already work. Spend and clicks read at Google in your own account; leads, registrations, and their behaviour read in your dashboard with the ad source attached. Month over month, the question worth answering together is the only one that matters — what did a conversation cost, and is that price worth scaling — using figures both sides can verify independently.

How the engagement starts

1. Platform first. Ads without the capture-and-CRM loop is renting attention you can’t hold — the website and board feed come first.
2. Pick a band. Choose the monthly budget you can commit without flinching; the management fee is published per band.
3. Launch and calibrate. Early weeks establish which queries and destinations convert in your specific market.
4. Scale on evidence. Move up a band when the conversion data — not the sales rep — says so. The engagement is month to month.

Who should buy this

Realtors with the platform live and follow-up automated who want demand on a schedule — ads are the layer you control with a dial, against SEO’s compounding and the registration engine’s steady accrual. Realtors entering a new farm area where organic presence is years away. Listing agents who want seller-intent queries in their own name rather than a portal’s.

Who shouldn’t: anyone who ignores their phone. Paid leads decay in hours; if notifications go unanswered, spend the money on your database instead. The trial matters here too — fourteen free platform days let you verify the capture-and-response loop on organic traffic before a single media dollar is committed.

What we deliberately don’t do

No media markup — spend sits in your own Google account, visible at the source. No proprietary landing-page tool holding your conversion data hostage. No annual commitment: the engagement is monthly because results should be the retention mechanism. And no pressure toward higher bands — the fee scale is public precisely so a recommendation to raise budget can be judged on the conversion data it cites rather than on what it earns us.

Why run it through your website platform

An external agency optimizes to the data it can see — clicks and form fills. We see further down the funnel: which queries produce registrations that keep browsing, which produce contacts that go quiet, and how ad-sourced leads behave on-site over weeks. That closed loop — the ad, the landing page, the CRM record, the behaviour trail, all one system — is the structural advantage no standalone ads vendor can match, whatever their deck says.