Estate agency marketing strategy: the four questions that decide whether it works
An estate agency marketing strategy has to answer four questions: whether the people moving in your patch know you exist, whether they find you when they start looking, whether they believe you when they do, and whether you know when they are ready. Most agencies can answer two.
Ask ten agencies for their marketing strategy and nine will hand you a list of channels. Social, email, the portals, maybe a newsletter, definitely a rebrand at some point.
That isn't a strategy. It's an inventory.
A strategy is a set of decisions about how somebody in your patch goes from not thinking about moving, to moving, to choosing you. And the useful thing about framing it that way is that it turns into four questions you can actually answer honestly about your own business this afternoon.
I'd be surprised if you can answer all four. Most agencies I've sat with can answer two.
Question one. Who is going to move in your patch this year, and do they know you exist?
Roughly one household in twenty moves in a given year. On a patch of ten thousand homes that's five hundred moves, and somewhere between forty and eighty instructions if you're doing well.
Those five hundred people are already in your patch right now. They're not searching yet. Most of them don't know they're moving yet. The trigger hasn't happened.
And that's the window nobody markets into.
What most agencies do. Market when it's quiet, stop when it's busy. Which means you appear precisely when your pipeline is thin, which is precisely when everyone else's is too, and you're competing for attention in the noisiest possible month.
What good looks like. Being consistently present in a patch you've defined properly, so that when the trigger does happen, you're already familiar. Not top of a search result. Top of mind, before there's a search.
That means knowing your patch as a set of numbers rather than a feeling. How many homes. How many transact. What the average time to sell is here versus the town next door. Which streets turn over and which never do.
Most agents know this instinctively and have never written it down, which means it can't be used to make a decision about where the money goes.
Our Property Agency Benchmark is the quickest way to see how your patch actually behaves rather than how it feels.Â
Question two. When they start looking, will they find you?
The trigger happens. A baby, a job, a divorce, a parent who can't manage the stairs. Now they start looking, and looking has changed more in the last two years than in the previous ten.
They search. They open Maps. And increasingly they ask an AI, which returns three names and no list of ten blue links to scroll through.
What most agencies do. A website built four years ago by somebody who has since left, a Google Business Profile that was set up once and never touched, and a vague sense that SEO is something you either pay for or ignore.
What good looks like. Being findable in all three places at the moment somebody looks. That's a different job from having a website. It means:
- A Google Business Profile that is complete, current and actively reviewed, because for local intent it outranks your website
- Pages that answer the questions people actually type, not the pages you wanted to write
- Being the kind of source an AI will name, which means specific, structured, evidenced content rather than adjectives
That last one is the one nobody in this sector is taking seriously yet, and it is the one that will matter most by this time next year. When a seller asks an AI which agent to use in their town, something decides the answer. At the moment, in most towns, that something has very little to go on.
The local search guide covers the Google Business Profile work in full, and it is free.
Question three. When they find you, will they believe you?
Here's the bit that took me longest to understand when I moved from selling houses to marketing them.
By the time somebody sits down opposite you, they've already decided quite a lot. They've looked you up. They've read a couple of reviews. They've probably asked someone. What happens in that hour is mostly confirmation, not persuasion.
Which means the job isn't convincing them in the room. It's making sure that what they found before the room did the convincing for you.
What most agencies do. Sold boards, which prove you listed something. A wall of five star reviews with no dates on them. And a lot of adjectives about being local, family run and different, which is word for word what the agent down the road is saying.
What good looks like. Numbers you can evidence.
Your average days from listing to offer accepted. The percentage of asking price you actually achieve. Your fall-through rate. Three recent sales with addresses and prices, which anyone can check against Land Registry.
A seller choosing between three agents with identical fees and near-identical photographs will pick the one who can say, and prove, "we agree sales in an average of 34 days at 97% of asking". Every single time. Not the one who tells them how much they love the area.
Almost no agent I've met can quote those numbers off the top of their head, and they're already sitting in the CRM.
Question four. When they are ready, will you know?
You do a market appraisal. It goes well. They say they've got a bit of thinking to do, you say of course, and everybody means it.
Then nothing. And four months later they list with someone else.
That is the single most expensive thing that happens in an estate agency, and it happens constantly. The appointment cost you time, fuel and preparation, the relationship was good, and somebody else got the instruction because they were there in month four and you weren't.
What most agencies do. A CRM full of people nobody has spoken to since the appointment, and an automation somebody set up in 2023 that sends a market update nobody opens.
What good looks like. A system that surfaces the right person at the right moment, and something worth sending when it does.
The six weeks after an appraisal matter more than the hour of the appraisal. So does the six weeks before, if you know a valuation is coming. And the people who registered as buyers two years ago are now sellers, which almost nobody works.
None of this is complicated. All of it is the thing that stops when the branch gets busy, which is why it needs to be a system rather than an intention.
The marketing ROI calculator will show you what a lost instruction actually costs, which tends to change how people feel about follow-up.
Which one is broken?
The four questions fail in a pattern, and the pattern tells you where to spend. So which of these is broken is answered by one of the questions.Â
Nobody in the patch seems to know you exist
Question One
You are known locally but do not appear when people search
QuestionTwo
You get appointments but lose them to cheaper agents
Question Three
Appointments go well and then go quiet
Question Four
Instructions come in but properties sit
Three, but applied to the property rather than the agency
Most agencies try to fix all four at once, usually by spending more on the one they understand best, which is normally question two.
If you are winning appointments and losing them, more visibility will not help you. You have a proof problem and it is cheaper to fix.
Most of what is on this page can be done in-house, and plenty of agencies do it. The part that does not happen on its own is doing all four consistently, in the right order, while you are also running a business. That is the job we take on. We build the plan and then we run it alongside you, and we work with one retained client per patch, so what we build for you is not being run by whoever you are competing with next month.Â
What this costs.
Everyone wants a number and nobody wants to give one, so here is the honest version.
We do not publish retainer rates, because quoting a figure before understanding your position helps nobody and you would be right to distrust anyone who does. What we can tell you is how to work out your own number.
Take your gross commission income for the last twelve months. Divide your total marketing spend by it. That percentage is your current answer, and most agencies are surprised by it in one direction or the other.
Then do the more useful sum. Divide your marketing spend by the number of instructions it produced. That is your cost per instruction, and it is the only figure that tells you whether the spend is working.
If your cost per instruction is comfortably below your average fee, spend more. If it is close to it, the problem is not the budget, it is what the budget is being spent on. And if you cannot calculate it at all, that is question four again.
The only price we publish is the Marketing Audit and Health Check, at £495 plus VAT, credited back in full against your first month if you go on to retain us within 90 days.
Frequently asked questions
The short version.
Four questions. Do the people who will move know you exist, will they find you, will they believe you, and will you know when they are ready.
You can answer all four yourself. Most agency owners could write the plan on the back of an envelope, and quite a few have.
The difference between the agencies that grow and the ones that plateau is almost never the quality of the plan. It is whether anybody was still doing it in month five.
If you want to know which of the four is actually broken in your business, that is exactly what the Marketing Audit and Health Check is for. £495 plus VAT, credited back in full against your first month if you retain us within 90 days. We will tell you what is wrong before you commit to anything, and we are better at this than most people you have paid before.
Â
No spam. No automated phone system. Just us.
Written by Adam Graver, Co-founder, House of Marque Adam has spent a decade running marketing for property businesses, most of it inside a national property network across multiple brands and hundreds of offices, finishing as Head of Marketing for one of the largest property groups in the country.
Questions three and four written by Lucy Collinge, Co-founder Lucy spent six years on the front line of estate agency sales from 2015, across multiple brands, before moving into senior marketing roles across new homes and residential property.