Google Ads for realtors

Google Ads for realtors buys the single highest-intent moment in the funnel — a person actively typing a housing question into a search box — at prices that published 2026 benchmarks put around $2.40–3.25 per click on average for real estate, rising to $4–8 for the sharpest buyer and seller terms (industry benchmark reports, accessed July 2026). That intent premium is why search ads convert better than any social placement, and why the budget math is unforgiving: this page covers the realistic monthly floor, keyword strategy for a Canadian agent, and the landing-page dependency that decides the whole outcome.

Search versus social: pay for intent or attention

The comparison worth making before any budget is set. Meta ads manufacture demand — they interrupt people who were not looking, cheaply and at volume, and hand you cold registrations to nurture (the Canadian numbers are in Facebook ads for realtors). Google search ads harvest demand that already exists — fewer, dearer clicks from people mid-task. The practical split: search wins for seller capture and for markets where you can genuinely serve the search (“condos near a named transit station”), social wins for reach and listing promotion, and the honest answer for many agents is search-first with social as amplification, not the reverse.

The floor math

Average click prices set a minimum viable budget. At roughly $3 a click, $1,000 a month buys ~330 visits; at a solid 5% landing-page conversion that is ~16 leads, and at typical online-lead close rates that pace works out to a transaction every few months — an arithmetic that holds together at $1,000–2,000 monthly and falls apart below it, where the campaign never accumulates enough data to optimize and every conclusion is noise. US benchmark averages put real estate search CPL near $100; treat that as the sanity check for your own cost-per-lead once the campaign matures. And run the chain all the way to commission with your own conversion rates — the worked method is in lead cost Canada — because “we got clicks” is not a result.

Keyword strategy for a Canadian agent

Structure the account around three intents, funded in this order. Seller terms — “home value” plus your city, “sell my house fast” variants — are the most expensive and the most leveraged: one listing pays for a quarter of clicks. Point them at a valuation or CMA request page, never a homepage. Specific buyer terms — neighbourhood, building, and property-type searches — convert when the landing page is a live, filtered search of exactly what was asked. Brand terms — your name and team — cost pennies and protect searches referrals already generated; competitors can bid on your name, and in some markets they do. What you exclude matters as much: add negative keywords for rentals you don’t serve, jobs, courses, and the word “free,” or broad match will spend your budget educating tourists.

The landing dependency, said plainly

Google grades ads on the page behind them, and so does the visitor: ad-to-page coherence drives both your quality score (hence your real click price) and your conversion rate. The pattern that works is one ad group, one promise, one page that keeps it — with fast load, a form that asks little, and proof of local substance. This is where a platform stops being a website and starts being ad infrastructure: our sites give every campaign a live search or capture page to land on, with the speed receipts documented in real estate SEO Canada. However you build it, build the landing before the campaign — the full channel context lives in the marketing hub — because in search advertising the click is the commodity and the page is the business.