Happening Now
I've been quoted anywhere from $85 to $340 per lead by three different agencies in the last six weeks, all claiming their number is competitive for the Southern California market.…
Discussion
I run 6 units in the Tulsa metro and have used two different agencies since 2021. Every proposal I get now includes retargeting as a line item, usually $400 to $600 a month on top…
Discussion
It was a guy at a site I was doing punch list work on, investor type, said he'd tried paid search in a mid-size Ohio city, Youngstown area, and burned through about $2,400 before…
Discussion
Here is a spend worth examining. A vendor takes $4,800 over six weeks targeting a three-zip area in the outer suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. The pitch is that ads get served to people…
Happening Now
A common situation for a marketing shop that specializes in agent lead gen: an investor finds the shop through an agent client and wants seller lead generation in a metro the shop…
Discussion
Two common pricing structures for a real estate PPC agency are worth laying side by side before assuming either is cheaper. One shop charges $2,000 a month flat with ad spend bill…
Poll
A common decision point when hiring a marketing agency for owner lead generation is choosing between a proposal promising a fixed lead count, say 25 qualified leads a month or the…
Discussion
Numbers on the table from an agency proposal worth picking apart. $6,000 monthly retainer, 15 percent of media spend, $18,000 media spend. That's $26,700 out the door monthly. The…
Happening Now
An agency told me I can't run ads to my own site because the page is slow and has nothing on it that asks for a phone number, and quoted $650 to build a landing page for one 40 ac…
Loss
Consider a ten week paid search test for off-market small rentals in a secondary market, budgeted at $6,400 with $5,200 in media, targeting three counties. A 40 mile radius drawn…
Poll
A few deals in and I am hitting the ceiling on leads that come from people I already know. So the next question is who runs the paid side. The case for doing it myself: the budget…
Poll
Been going back and forth on this for a couple of weeks and I can't get to a clean answer, so I'll put it up. Small metro, maybe 180,000 people, and an investor client wants motiv…
Loss
Worth laying out as a case, because the arithmetic is clean. A four unit turn in a small multifamily building, all four vacant at once after a roof job pushed everyone out on sche…
Loss
Here's a case worth examining closely. An operator building an interest list of prospective private lenders for a note buying vehicle spent about four months and 11,600 dollars wi…
Loss
A small mistake worth writing down because it's an easy one to repeat. Say an operator pays a two person shop $600 a month for two months to run Facebook lead ads pointing at priv…
Discussion
A small multifamily owner hunting off market deals often gets quoted $2,500 a month in ad spend plus $1,500 management, and told $800 isn't worth testing. That isn't just margin p…
Happening Now
A recurring situation for a lead gen agency: an investor client is three weeks into a new account with leads coming in at a reasonable market cost, then calls annoyed that the lea…
Poll
A recurring argument in real estate marketing work: where should the first dollars go for a client running a modest budget, say 1,500 to 2,500 a month all in. Search is the obviou…
Happening Now
Reading through a deal package on a small multifamily syndication and there's a line I haven't seen broken out this way before. The sponsor charges a 2 percent acquisition fee, an…
Discussion
A common pitch runs 2,500 dollars a month for SEO with a six month minimum, with the agency fairly blunt that paid ads turn off the moment the card stops. For a small portfolio ad…
Loss
Consider a plan to buy seller financed first position notes direct from the people holding them, rather than through brokers where everything is already picked over. The direct ap…
Win
A small acquisitions operation buying single family homes in two metros spent 186,400 dollars in media plus 78,000 dollars in agency retainer over twelve months, with monthly chan…
Win
Take an operator who buys vacant parcels, 5 to 40 acres, across four counties that are rural but not empty. After two years of reading about direct mail without pulling the trigge…
Discussion
A typical agency onboarding sheet, before anything is signed: CRM $99/mo, call tracking $45/mo plus $0.03 a minute, landing page builder $99/mo, skip trace credits billed as used.…
Discussion
Got off a call with an agency that wants to run seller ads for me so I can stop paying finder fees on rehab deals. The guy said "we're at $45 CPL in your market, CPA on signed con…
Happening Now
Say an operator running seller acquisition ads wants to know whether AI generated creative is actually as good as agencies are pitching it. A clean way to test it: same offer, sam…
Loss
Six months, $18,400 all in, and the failure was a sentence of ad copy I approved without thinking about it. I came at seller leads from the renovation side, so my underwriting sta…
Poll
Anyone weighing how to pay for lead gen runs into the same three structures, and each one breaks in a different place. Flat retainer plus ad spend is the standard. The agency gets…
Poll
Take a service business built around seller leads that is choosing between two agency structures. One agency wants to run everything inside its own stack, landing pages, call trac…
Win
A short term lender against renovation projects relying on two brokers for deal flow faces a familiar tradeoff: brokers cost a point on origination and, more importantly, control…
Discussion
A guy I know wholesales and asked if I'd run his Facebook ads. He'd pay me $500 a month and put $1,500 on the card for spend. I've built landing pages before and I can read a dash…
Discussion
I'm getting my first rental sorted and reading around the investor side while I wait. Three different people quoted me wildly different numbers for what a seller lead costs. One s…
Happening Now
Here is a scenario worth working through, because it comes up constantly with passive money. Say an investor wants income without a second job and puts capital with a partner who…
Discussion
Say a property manager is asked to help an owner sell off two doors, and a marketing shop pitches them on running sell my house fast ads and passing along the calls. The shop's co…
Happening Now
I've held land a long time and I'm finally trying to sell three parcels rather than keep paying taxes on them. A marketing agency quoted me $1,500 setup and $900 a month to run Go…
Happening Now
Not buying property here. A friend runs a small real estate PPC shop and wants $85,000 for a minority stake to hire two media buyers. What he showed me: 14 active clients, $4,000…
Discussion
A common first client situation. Someone has built landing pages and run small campaigns for their own deals, and a local flipper asks what they would charge to run seller ads for…