Best Realtor Advertising Companies in 2024
When I was a kid, I naively believed that companies who spent money on advertising must not be very good. Why would they need to advertise? They could grow via word of mouth. All that money spent on commercials could be passed along to compete on price!
But I’ve since learned that is not the real world. It takes a lot of effort to make your target market aware of your real estate company and what you have to offer.
High-quality advertising can deliver consumer brand awareness.
As a term, advertising covers a huge range of marketing spending, including digital advertising like Facebook Ads, search engine marketing like Google Ads, and more traditional advertising like radio, TV commercials, billboards, and print ads. Practically the only form of marketing that isn’t advertising is inbound, or content marketing.
Spending money on advertising as a real estate agent can be an easy money pit if not spent carefully, though. Be sure your funnel and processes are already well developed and you can make the most of what you are spending.
Then, when you’re ready to make the leap, you could do worse than some of these real estate advertising companies below!
The Contenders
Adwerx
$500+/mo. Adwerx is one of the best known advertising companies for real estate. They run a large variety of ad types including retargeting ads, custom audience, by zip code, and even TV commercials and recruiting ads. Their ads show up practically everywhere on the Internet via the Google and Facebook ad networks. They also have sophisticated automation allowing you to automatically advertise your listings online.
Nextdoor
~$20+/mo. Nextdoor is a popular community-based social media company that connects members of the same neighborhood. They offer paid “sponsorships” from real estate agents that will feature your information in their local Realtor pack, advertise yourself, and allow you to post advertisements twice monthly to the neighborhood.
Yelp
$300+/mo. Yelp is a popular local business review site. Local real estate agents should claim their business, but also have numerous advertising options to promote their business within Yelp’s ecosystem. The advertising options are a la carte, including promoting your brand, removing competitor information on your page, or adding your logo.
Others
There are a number of other paid lead services for real estate, including:
- Nestigator
- Newborhood
Paid Leads
I separate paid leads from advertising based on whether you are usually paying per impression (CPM) versus either pay-per-click (PPC) or per lead.
Realtor.com, Zillow, running social media marketing campaigns on Facebook, and running Google Ads campaigns are all forms of advertising. But you’re often paying per click or per lead.
Yelp, Nextdoor, and Adwerx are generally paid per impression. You’re paying to be “top of mind” among potential buyers and sellers rather than for a hot lead.
Paid lead programs include:
Lead Attribution
The trickiest part about investing in advertising is marketing attribution.
You can easily identify which leads came from Zillow or Realtor.com. You can see when someone clicks through on your email marketing campaign and signed in on the landing page. You can precisely calculate the ROI by dividing your closed commissions by your customer acquisition cost.
But will you know if someone called you because they saw your billboard every day for a year on their drive to work? Or your Adwerx retargeting campaign on every website they visited for a month? Or your face plastered on every Nextdoor gossip thread for a year?
Maybe those kept you top of mind, but the proximate lead source may show up as your website. Or they searched your name and found your Realtor.com profile.
Realtors may complain about Zillow and Realtor.com leads, but at least they know pretty confidently which source those leads came from.
That is one of the most challenging things about spending money on advertising: tracking your income. In an industry where it’s already too easy to lose track of how much you’re spending, be careful before sinking too much on advertising.
Print and Local Advertising
If you’ve been an agent more than a minute, you’ve no doubt fended off a few solicitations for spending money on local advertising.
The local newspaper. The high school yearbook. A local magazine.
Obviously these are legitimate places to advertise and might be worthwhile as part of a concerted, deliberate strategy. If a main pillar of your business, for example, are client and charity events, then maybe local exposure fits in nicely with that tactic.
As with any advertising solution, lead attribution can be difficult and ROI nearly impossible to track. I don’t recommend spending on advertising unless it’s money you can afford to lose and part of a broader marketing strategy.
Conclusion
I don’t recommend spending on real estate marketing as a new agent. It’s best seen as a supplement to your branding strategy rather than a pillar of your lead generation. Get leads first, build your funnel, and do some deals.
Then, when you’re ready and your business is red hot and ready for more fuel, these are places you may consider some investment.
Hopefully, these real estate advertising companies will set you on the right path to execute on your business plan.
