Google Ads for estate agents: costs, campaigns and budget for instructions (the click worth paying for is the owner's)

Google Ads for estate agents works when it buys the searches of people selling a home, not people looking for one: a click on "free house valuation" costs £7.30, a click on "houses for sale london" £0.63, more than eleven times less (DataForSEO, Google Ads UK, September 2026; CPC converted from USD at £1 = $1.3242). The right campaign sends that owner to a page that promises a visit rather than an automatic number, and counts as a conversion only the request that includes the property address.

Eleven times? For one click?

Yes. And that price gap shows where the money is in the sector.

People searching listings are buyers and are worth little. People searching for a valuation are owners about to instruct an agent, and agents are willing to pay for that click.

Yet the accounts we see get it wrong in almost the same way every time:

• most of the budget on "houses for sale + town" campaigns, because they are cheap;
• conversions that count menu clicks instead of enquiries;
• a landing page that is the home page, with the listings search front and centre.

Campaigns on listings, the ones that look most obvious, compete with Rightmove and Zoopla to bring in buyers who do not pay the fee.

And why should you listen to us on this?

Because Sunscape, which looks for land for agrivoltaic plants in Italy, has the same client you do: the owner. In 2024 its account recorded 1,487 "conversions" at €0.61 each, and they were technical events. Once the tracking was rebuilt, 144 real enquiries from landowners arrived in 2026.

An honest note on the keyword: "google ads for estate agents" gets about 20 searches a month in the UK, according to DataForSEO. We write about it anyway because the questions come from agents, not from Google.

Here you'll find measured CPCs, what Foxtons, Connells and Winkworth actually buy (almost nothing), account structure, the landing page, tracking and the minimum budget, with the sums done. The organic side is in the companion article on estate agent SEO.

Let's start with prices.

How much a click costs in property (from £0.44 to £7.30, and one outlier)

A click in property costs from £0.44 on listing searches to £7.30 on "free house valuation", with "estate agents + town" around £3 in between. Three price bands, and each one matches a different person behind the search.

Keyword	Searches/month	Average CPC	Top of page bid (high)	Who is searching
houses for sale	246,000	£0.44	£0.90	buyer
property for sale	49,500	£0.53	£1.14	buyer
houses for sale london	33,100	£0.63	£0.78	buyer
how much is my house worth	33,100	£1.69	£1.92	seller (partly informational)
estate agents london	6,600	£3.01	£3.82	local seller or buyer
estate agents manchester	3,600	£3.05	£3.72	local seller or buyer
house valuation	22,200	£3.50	£4.40	seller
house valuation london	210	£5.51	£9.81	seller
free house valuation	3,600	£7.30	£9.83	seller
sell my house	1,900	£38.99	£37.55	seller (crowded auction)

Read it from the bottom up: valuation between £3.50 and £7.30 (with "house valuation" and "free house valuation" marked as high competition), "estate agents + city" around £3, listings below £0.65.

Advertisers have already voted with their wallets: the traffic worth paying for is the owner's.

And "sell my house" at £38.99?

A separate case. At that price (and £39.93 for "sell my house fast") a high-street agent rarely wins, so check who is bidding before joining that auction.

A limit of the data: on the SERPs we pulled for "estate agents manchester" and "free house valuation" there were no ads at all; time of day and device change the picture. The CPCs in the table are averages estimated by Google Ads, not the price you will pay.

Buyers or sellers: the decision that comes before the budget (and why your listings aren't the point)

An estate agent on Google Ads should buy sellers, not buyers: on listing searches the organic results belong to the portals, while the owner is up for grabs only before choosing an agent. It is the decision that comes before any talk of budget.

The most common request we get from an agency is: "I want more enquiries on my listings".

It is the wrong request.

Why? Because paying for them doesn't pay. An agency with forty listings buying "houses for sale + town" at £0.50 gets clicks from people who then go to Rightmove to compare.

And there they find your listing, next to the competitor who has the same property.

You have paid to send a buyer to a competitor.

The owner, on the other hand, is not on the portals until they have chosen an agent. They search "house valuation", "sell my house + town", "estate agents + their neighbourhood", and at that moment they are up for grabs.

Every instruction won then produces listings, boards and buyer enquiries on its own.

The only sensible exception is an agency doing lettings with management, where the flow of tenants is part of the service.

We tested the principle in a neighbouring sector: for Sunscape, as for an estate agent, the client is the owner (of land, in that case), and the 144 enquiries of 2026 came from there (Sunscape case study).

Which campaign to open first (from the safest to the least certain)

The first campaign to open is a Search campaign on "valuation + town": CPC £3.50-7.50, clear intent, it is the one that wins instructions. The full order:

• Search "valuation + town". "House valuation london", "free house valuation", "how much is my house worth", each tied to your area by location targeting, and only on the towns and postcodes where you actually do valuations.
• Search "sell my house + town" and "estate agents + town". "How much is my house worth" on its own (33,100 searches, £1.69) is partly informational; with the town next to it, the intent becomes commercial. "Estate agents manchester" at £3.05 collects both sellers and buyers, and the ad copy has to speak to the first.
• Brand protection. If the agency's name has searches of its own, a brand campaign at a few pence stops a competitor from buying it. It is the one thing the big networks do nationally, and the next section shows why it matters.
• Remarketing to visitors of the "sell" pages. An owner takes weeks to decide. Someone who opened the valuation page without filling in the form is worth a second attempt with Display or Demand Gen (how to do remarketing).
• Performance Max, but later. With the Google Business Profile linked and a couple of months of real conversions, it covers Maps and YouTube in your area.

And if I open Performance Max first?

With messy conversions it spends on buyers, because there are more of them.

Further reading: when Google Ads makes sense.

What Foxtons, Connells and Winkworth actually buy (one keyword, and it isn't theirs)

The national networks buy almost nothing on Google Ads: DataForSEO detects a single paid keyword for Foxtons and none for Connells or Winkworth. You might think they dominate the auctions in the sector.

They don't.

Foxtons' only detected paid keyword is not its own brand: it is "savills hampstead estate agents" (320 searches a month), with the ad "London's Number 1 Agent" pointing to its landlord page and a rental valuation offer.

Connells and Winkworth: no paid keywords detected.

Not even their own names?

No. Their organic traffic would be worth £592,766 a month in Ads for Foxtons, £303,295 for Connells, £232,838 for Winkworth (DataForSEO Labs, September 2026, converted from USD). The networks get their traffic from organic pages and leave generic paid searches to individual branches, independents and portals.

DataForSEO's paid data is partial (campaigns run by individual franchisees are not attributed to the national domain), but the direction is clear: on "house valuation" the competitor in the auction is not the national network. It is the agency down the road, or a portal.

And the Foxtons example shows why a brand campaign is worth having: a competitor may be buying your name.

How to structure an agency's account (and the negatives to add on day one)

An agency's account is structured with one campaign per intent (valuation, selling, estate agents + town, brand) and one ad group per area, when the areas have names people search for: "estate agents didsbury" gets 480 searches a month at £3.63; an administrative ward name nobody uses does not.

Three settings:

• location targeting on "presence", not "presence or interest", otherwise you buy clicks from people in Aberdeen looking at homes in Manchester;
• phrase and exact match at the start, broad only after three months of clean conversions;
• negatives from day one.

Why so careful with broad match?

Because in this sector broad match slides straight onto listing searches, where volumes are a hundred times larger.

The negatives, taken from related searches and the questions Google shows:

• "calculator", "instant", "online" and "without" (people who want an automatic number from a tool);
• "rics", "survey" and "mortgage valuation" (people looking for a surveyor);
• "council tax";
• "course", "jobs", "salary", "how to become" (aspiring agents);
• "rightmove", "zoopla", and competitors' names if you are not conquesting;
• "to rent" if you do not do lettings.

Without these, half the first week's budget goes on searches that will never produce an instruction.

Ad assets: call, sitelinks to the area pages, structured snippets with the neighbourhoods covered, and the Google Business Profile linked to the account to show address and reviews.

In the Manchester local pack the profiles have between 52 and 672 reviews: an ad showing them carries more weight than a well-written headline.

Where to send the click: the valuation landing page (up against the portals' calculators)

The valuation landing page has to state its difference from the automatic tools, because that is what it competes against: the organic SERP for "free house valuation" opens with an AI Overview pointing to the Rightmove and Zoopla calculators, then Rightmove, Zoopla, OnTheMarket, Property Checker, MoneySavingExpert and Nationwide's house price index, all giving an estimate in seconds. Among the People also ask questions: "Is rightmove valuation free?" and "Is Zoopla or Rightmove valuation more accurate?".

So should I build a calculator too?

No.

A landing page that imitates the tool with a made-up number loses trust at the first visit.

And one that asks for name and phone and promises "we'll call you back" loses to those tools.

What works is telling the truth: the automatic estimate uses area averages and Land Registry data, the agent uses the sales agreed in recent months on the same street.

Then the right fields: address, floor area, bedrooms, condition, phone.

The longer form puts off the curious and qualifies the owner.

The page also needs the things a tool does not have:

• the name of the agent who will do the valuation;
• Google reviews;
• three homes sold locally with time on the market and achieved price (if you can publish them);
• your redress scheme membership (The Property Ombudsman or the Property Redress Scheme) plus any professional body membership such as Propertymark.

Further reading: how to build a landing page that converts.

What to count as a conversion (15,267 "conversions" on 5,467 clicks)

An estate agent should count only three actions as conversions: the valuation form submitted with the address, a call longer than 30 seconds and a WhatsApp message started from the page. This is where property accounts break most often, and not because of the campaigns.

When we took over the Valore Solare account, one month counted 15,267 "conversions" against 5,467 clicks.

More conversions than clicks?

Exactly: menu clicks and scrolls, not enquiries.

Sunscape in 2024 counted 1,487 conversions at €0.61 each: technical events there too.

In both cases automated bidding was optimising on fake signals.

Once the tracking was rebuilt, Valore Solare closed 11 months with 1,506 real enquiries at €70.78 each; Sunscape brought 144 enquiries in 2026.

So, for an estate agent:

• primary conversions: form with address, call over 30 seconds, WhatsApp started from the page;
• secondary conversion: enquiries on a listing, so you see them but the bidding does not chase them.

The step almost nobody takes is importing the signed instruction into Google Ads as an offline conversion.

At that point the algorithm learns to look for owners who sign, not owners who fill in forms.

Further reading: how to set up Google Analytics to count real enquiries.

How much budget you need (and why below £300 a month you'll never know anything)

The sensible minimum budget for an estate agent is £20 a day (£600 a month). The sum uses the CPCs in the table and a realistic conversion rate for a valuation landing page with a long form, which in the local projects we run sits between 5% and 8%.

• "Free house valuation" at £7.30: one enquiry every twenty clicks (5%) costs about £146; one every twelve (8%) about £91.
• "House valuation" at £3.50: between £44 (8%) and £70 (5%) an enquiry.
• "Estate agents manchester" at £3.05, with a mixed audience and a 4% rate: about £76 an enquiry.
• "How much is my house worth" at £1.69, with partly informational intent and a 2% rate: about £85 an enquiry, with more curious visitors among them.

A lot or a little?

For comparison, in our own accounts:

• Contesini (energy, two offices in the province of Mantua, Italy) pays €7.20 per conversion, with 68% of leads becoming opportunities;
• Macropix (B2B) €39.44 per enquiry in 2025;
• Valore Solare €70.78.

A UK valuation request between £45 and £145 sits at the upper end of that range, and a single agency fee pays for it with a margin.

With £600 a month you buy between 80 and 170 valuation clicks, depending on the keyword mix, and get 4-14 enquiries: enough to see whether the landing page works, too few for automated bidding, for which Google suggests around 30 conversions a month.

With £1,500-2,000 a month you reach 20-30 enquiries and the account starts to learn.

Below £300 a month you get three to five enquiries, and you will never know whether the problem is the campaign or chance.

And what does an instruction cost, not an enquiry?

Honestly: that's the figure we are missing. We do not have a property account large enough to give a reliable percentage.

Ask your valuers about the last six months. If one valuation in five becomes an instruction, an instruction from Google Ads costs £225-730, and you know straight away whether your average fee justifies it.

Further reading: Google Ads for SMEs: the sensible minimum budget.

The rules for property ads (the ones broken without realising)

In the UK there are no Google targeting restrictions specific to property: the "housing" category limits (no segmentation by age, gender, marital status or postcode) apply in the United States and Canada. The general rules apply here, and they are often broken without realising it:

• a "free" valuation must really be free, with nothing charged for the visit;
• "we sell in 30 days" or "guaranteed price" without evidence fall under Google's misrepresentation policy and the ASA's CAP Code, which requires objective claims to be substantiated;
• the form needs a privacy notice under UK GDPR, and a landing page without one can get ads disapproved.

The mistakes we find in agency accounts (in order of frequency)

The most frequent mistakes in the accounts we analysed before taking them on are five, and the first is the budget concentrated on listing campaigns:

• campaigns on listings ("houses for sale + town") taking most of the budget, because they are cheap per click: they bring buyers who then go to the portals;
• broad match with automated bidding from day one, on an account with fake conversions: the algorithm optimises for menu clicks;
• the landing page is the home page, with the listings search front and centre: the owner arrives and starts browsing other people's houses;
• targeting the whole county, when the agency does valuations in three neighbourhoods;
• a campaign switched off after three weeks because "it's not bringing anything", on a decision cycle that lasts months.

Are three weeks really too few?

Valore Solare's first month produced 9 enquiries at €212 each. Eleven months later the average was €70.78, 40% lower than in the first quarter.

Switch off after three weeks and all you see is the €212.

Google Ads or SEO for an estate agent? (different channels for different searches)

Google Ads and SEO for an estate agent cover different searches: SEO works on "estate agents + town" and on area pages, Google Ads buys valuation and "sell my house", where organic results will not reach. Organically, "estate agents manchester" can be won (all ten results are agents and the local pack is made of individual profiles), while "free house valuation" is closed: portals, tools and an AI Overview, with agents only appearing further down with their own valuation tools.

The organic side is in estate agent SEO; how to make the two channels work together is in SEO and Google Ads together.

The reasoning about who sells and who buys also applies to builders and installers, with different numbers: we covered it in Google Ads for construction companies. The method does not change from one market to another; the budget does.

Frequently asked questions

Where to start (with a single number)

Not "houses for sale", but "valuation + town": £7.30 a click, but it's the owner's click.

Not menu clicks, but enquiries with an address: 15,267 "conversions" in one month were technical events.

Not three weeks, but three months: from €212 to €70.78 per enquiry.

Now, two concrete things.

One: before opening a campaign, count the valuation requests of the last six months and how many became instructions. That is the number that decides everything else: without it, you will never know whether £80 per request is a lot or a little.

Two: a single Search campaign on "valuation + your town", £20 a day, a landing page with the long form and the agent's name, and three months of patience.

The campaign can be set up in-house. Tracking and importing offline instructions are the part agencies usually ask for help with, and it is how we work in our Google Ads service.

If you want an opinion on your account or on the numbers for your area, book a strategy consultation.

See you next time!