My agency is pitching me a retargeting campaign and I have never closed a retargeted lead in three years

Retargeting converts buyers, not renters, lease decisions happen in under two weeks.

Six-unit Tulsa portfolio is too thin an audience for retargeting pools to ever hit critical mass.

The "warms the audience" line is genuinely one of the laziest things an agency can say because it is unfalsifiable, you cannot disprove warmth. Three years and two full runs with zero closed leases is not a sample size problem, that is a pattern. I manage STRs in two markets and retargeting has never moved the needle for me either, but I do know one operator in the Branson corridor who swears by it for 30-plus-day medium-term stays where the decision window is longer and people actually comparison-shop for weeks. The product matters here.

What is your average days-to-lease right now on those Tulsa units?

Three years and two runs with zero closed leases is the data. Rental decisions in a market like Tulsa move fast, somebody browsing your listing on a Tuesday has probably already signed somewhere by the time your display ad catches them on Friday. The "warms the audience" pitch is borrowed from e-commerce funnels where consideration windows run weeks or months, not the seven to ten day window a renter is usually working in. $550 a month over twelve months is $6,600 that could go toward a tighter zip-code campaign on the front end where you're catching people at the top of their search, not after they've already moved on. What I'd need to know before touching retargeting again is your average days-on-market per unit, because if you're filling in under two weeks your audience is genuinely gone before the pixel has time to build a pool worth serving ads to.

Rental leads in Tulsa specifically move fast or they ghost, and that $550 is probably funding an audience that's already signed a lease somewhere else by the time your ads catch up to them. I ran a 90-day Facebook retargeting push on a Cleveland duplex in 2022, spent about $380 that I'll never get back, and the one person who called had already moved into a place in Lakewood two weeks prior. The pixel was still chasing her. The decision window on a rental is maybe 48 to 72 hours from serious inquiry to application, so retargeting logic that works on a $900k home purchase just doesn't map onto someone hunting a $1,100 two-bedroom. What I'd push them on is why that $550 isn't being rolled into geo-targeted search ads running exactly when your vacancies are live, because that's where I actually got applications that turned into signed leases.