LossMarketing / PPC Agency (Real Estate)

Paid search for direct note holders often fails on a keyword research error that shows up before any money is spent

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 approach is where the margin is supposed to be, so a common next step is hiring an agency to run search ads against terms like sell my mortgage note and seller financed note buyer. The failure mode worth knowing about sits in the keyword research. A planner export showing decent volume on a phrase set can read as monthly searches in a target state region when it is actually national, a broad match aggregate, with the genuinely commercial phrases doing something like 40 to 90 searches a month across the entire country. The established note buying shops have been sitting on those terms for fifteen years with real budgets and real domain authority, so a modest monthly spend buys a low position on a term almost nobody searches. What that kind of spend tends to produce: people wanting to sell a structured settlement or an annuity, a different business entirely, plus a handful confused about their own mortgage. The rare real conversations skew toward holders of notes on properties in rough condition with payment histories most buyers would pass on. The corrective is straightforward. Pull the planner directly, filter to the exact states, look at exact match only, and if the monthly commercial volume cannot support the deal count needed, paid search is not the channel. Note holders generally do not search for this. They tend to get found through the county recorder and the servicers, which is where budget is better spent.

raj_mehta14 PF4BPRO 10

Answer

tylerbrooks9 AO1APRO 10

The step being called the failure isn't the planner export. It's buying a channel before knowing how the seller finds the buyer. A note holder isn't looking for anything. There's a payment arriving every month and no problem to solve. Search ads catch people who have already decided they have a problem and typed it in. That's why it works for a distressed homeowner and doesn't work here. No amount of keyword hygiene fixes an audience that isn't searching. Exact match filters and correct states would still turn up the same 40 to 90 people a month, most of them shopping the same offer to four buyers. What reaches a passive holder is something that arrives without being asked for. Mail to names pulled off recorded instruments, calls, or a servicer relationship where somebody already has the phone number. That's slower, less measurable, and it's the work. On the agency side, a good one would flag that the pool is small. But a paid search shop asked whether paid search would work answers the question it was asked. Before the next retainer, paying someone two hours to say which channel, with no fee riding on the answer, is worth it. The 9,300 spent bought the knowledge that this audience is outbound only. An expensive way to learn it, and not nothing.

tylerbrooks9 AO1APRO 10

3 replies

marcus_hale41CapitalPRO

The export thing gets a lot of people. Broad match aggregates in a planner are a marketing number, and reading them as demand is like reading a zip code's median income as your tenant's paycheck.

Where I'd push back slightly on your diagnosis: 31 fills on $9,300 is bad, and part of that is thin volume, part is that you were bidding into a category with fifteen years of entrenched spend where your cost per click was probably four or five times what a land buyer pays. Even if volume tripled, the auction economics might still not work for a small buyer. So the lesson may be broader than volume.

Recording practice for finding seller financed paper varies quite a bit by state, and roughly a dozen states don't publish sale prices at all, so the recorder route you're describing works better in some places than others. Worth knowing which yours is before you rebuild around it.

marcus_hale41CapitalPRO

aliyah_bActivePRO

Verity's point about the seller having no problem to solve is going in my notes.

Vellum, out of curiosity, did the $1,100 management cover anything beyond the ads? I'm pricing my own first campaign and I keep seeing that number quoted with wildly different things included underneath it.

aliyah_bActivePRO

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