Where smart real estate agencies are really spending their marketing money

I often explain it like packing for a long-haul flight.

You don’t get more suitcase space just because you want to take more items with you.

You have to get more ruthless about what goes in the case.

How much should you spend?

Across the agencies I work with, marketing spend typically sits between 6 and 12 per cent of gross revenue, depending on growth ambition.

Generally, agencies in growth mode allocate closer to 12 per cent of revenue to marketing, while more mature businesses focused on maintaining market share are closer to the lower end of the scale.

That means a business retaining $1 million might sensibly spend about $120,000 annually if they’re in growth mode and $60,000 if the goal is stability, not expansion.

So the question you need to ask isn’t “How much can I cut?”, but “Which spend will compound over time?”

Where high-growth agencies take advantage

High-growth real estate businesses make one key decision differently from everyone else.

They don’t just invest in exposure; they invest in systems to support it.

Strong brand performance relies on accurate customer relationship management (CRM) data, clear segmentation, and reporting that shows how prospects engage over time.

When you operate with disconnected tools, you’re forced to rely on instinct rather than evidence, because you can’t clearly see what is influencing sellers, landlords or buyers.

When you can follow the journey from early awareness through to enquiry, you can see which channels build familiarity and confidence, rather than just counting clicks.

Without a clear structure, a database becomes potential rather than a pipeline, and marketing spend delivers less than it should.

Where budgets are actually going now

Marketing budgets are no longer being spread across dozens of disconnected channels; they’re being concentrated in higher-impact areas.

• Visibility – brand presence, recognition and familiarity
  

• Conversion – enquiries, appraisals and landlord leads
  

• Retention – past clients, landlords and referrers
  

If you put all of your eggs in one basket, performance suffers, rather than feeling steady.

Should you opt for print or digital marketing?

Print still has a role in real estate marketing, but it has become more specific and less forgiving with tight budgets.

When you slow down and look closely at where the money actually goes, the difference in value between print and digital becomes hard to ignore.

A letterbox drop targeting 5,000 homes a month can easily cost more than $5,000 once copy, design, printing and distribution are factored in.

If you want to cover a 50,000-home neighbourhood, the spend needs to run multiple times at an additional cost over the course of a year, distribution needs to be reliable, and the material has to be noticed.

By comparison, a well-managed digital campaign that costs about $30 per day can place your brand in front of thousands of residents every week.

In one month, that same budget can reach most of the 50,000 people living in the neighbourhood multiple times, with the added benefit of targeting, frequency, and longevity.

Digital marketing doesn’t just offer faster reach, but repeated exposure, which builds familiarity and trust over time.

There’s another reason digital marketing has become harder to ignore. Printed materials reach homes, but once they are delivered, visibility stops there.

You can’t track whether they go straight from the mailbox to the recycling bin, or how many are kept, let alone if they are read and by how many people.

On the other hand, digital can tell you how many people watched the video, read the post and visited your website.

You can even ask the ad platforms to ‘target’ the engaged prospects by sending them follow-up ads.

Content that actually earns attention

So how can your marketing make it feel as though your agency is “everywhere”?

Businesses that personalise their marketing perform better financially.

That’s not because personalisation is fancy, it’s because relevance boosts conversion.

Did you know that only about 5 per cent of people in any suburb are ready to sell at any one time?

That’s why constant “Get an appraisal” messaging often falls flat.

It speaks to the smallest slice of your audience, and it exhausts everyone else.

The content that performs best does three things:

• Answers real questions owners already have
  

• Demonstrates your agency’s local involvement and credibility
  

• Helps people feel informed before they enquire
  

Think of your content like a 100-metre sprinter warming up before a race.

No athlete bursts from the starting blocks cold and expects to take the gold medal.

Preparation guides, cost breakdowns, frequently asked questions (FAQs) about commissions or fees, and local explainers all perform because they reduce uncertainty.

They don’t “sell”, but they do support decision-making, and when the time comes, you want that choice to be your agency.

Understanding influence matters more than attribution

Measuring marketing return on investment (ROI) in real estate sounds simple, but it rarely is.

In one recent agency analysis I did, more than 1,000 listings were secured in a year, yet fewer than 100 enquiries came through website forms.

Most leads came from direct contact with agents, phone calls, emails and existing relationships.

In real estate, decisions are relationship-driven and often happen offline.

The goal is not perfect measurement, but to develop a better understanding of who is warming up, who is active and who needs nurturing.

That visibility only improves when marketing and the sales team work closely together.

The sales team is closest to inbound enquiries, but if calls, emails and conversations are not captured, marketing only has part of the picture.

When agents log where enquiries came from, and why that prospect got in touch, marketing messaging, timing and spend can be refined with much greater confidence.

Melanie Hoole is a digital marketing strategist and founder of Hoole.co, helping real estate professionals build powerful personal brands and online marketing systems that attract leads and grow their businesses.