A click on "houses for sale london" costs £0.63. A click on "free house valuation" costs £7.30, more than eleven times as much (DataForSEO, Google Ads UK, September 2026; CPC converted from USD at £1 = $1.3242). The 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.
Google Ads for an estate agent works when it buys the searches of people selling (valuation, "sell my house + town", "estate agents + town"), sends them 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. Campaigns on listings, the ones that look most obvious, compete with Rightmove and Zoopla to bring in buyers who do not pay the fee.
A 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. Below: measured CPCs, what the big networks buy, account structure, the landing page, tracking and the minimum budget. The organic side is in the companion article on estate agent SEO.
How much a click costs in property
Three price bands, and each one matches a different kind of 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) |
Listing keywords sit below £0.65. "Estate agents + city" keywords around £3. Valuation keywords between £3.50 and £7.30, with "house valuation" and "free house valuation" marked as high competition. Advertisers have already voted with their wallets: the traffic that is worth paying for is the owner's. "Sell my house" at £38.99 (and "sell my house fast" at £39.93) is a separate case: at that price 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
The most common request we get from an agency is "I want more enquiries on my listings". It is the wrong request, and the numbers explain why.
On listing searches the organic results belong to the portals. An agency with forty listings buying "houses for sale + town" at £0.50 gets clicks from people who then go to Rightmove to compare, where they also find your listing. You have paid to send a buyer to a competitor who has the same property.
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 have tested the principle in a neighbouring sector. Sunscape, in Italy, looks for land for agrivoltaic plants: the client is the landowner, as it is for an estate agent. In 2026 the campaigns brought 144 enquiries from owners, after the tracking had been rebuilt (Sunscape case study).
Which campaign to open first
The order we follow in property accounts, from the safest to the least certain.
- Search "valuation + town". "House valuation london", "free house valuation", "how much is my house worth", each tied to your area by location targeting. CPC £3.50-7.50, clear intent, it is the campaign that wins instructions. Limit it to the towns and postcodes where the agency actually does 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 data below 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. Opened 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
You might think the national networks dominate Google Ads in the sector. The data says otherwise.
For Foxtons DataForSEO detects a single paid keyword, and it is not its own brand: "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. For Connells and Winkworth it detects no paid keywords at all.
Foxtons' organic traffic would be worth £592,766 a month in Ads, Connells' £303,295, Winkworth's £232,838 (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
One campaign per intent (valuation, selling, estate agents + town, brand), 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). Location targeting on "presence" and 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: in this sector broad match slides straight onto listing searches, where volumes are a hundred times larger.
The negatives to add on day one, 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", competitors' names if you are not conquesting, and "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
The organic SERP for "free house valuation" tells you what your landing page competes against. At the top there is an AI Overview pointing to the Rightmove and Zoopla calculators. Below, Rightmove, Zoopla, OnTheMarket, Property Checker, MoneySavingExpert and Nationwide's house price index: all give an automatic estimate in seconds. Among the People also ask questions: "Is rightmove valuation free?" and "Is Zoopla or Rightmove valuation more accurate?".
A landing page that asks for name and phone and promises "we'll call you back" loses to those tools. A landing page that imitates the tool with a made-up number loses trust at the first visit. The approach that works is to state the difference: 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), and 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
This is where property accounts break most often, and not because of the campaigns.
Two of our own cases show it. When we took over the Valore Solare account, one month counted 15,267 "conversions" against 5,467 clicks: they were menu clicks and scrolls, not enquiries. Sunscape in 2024 counted 1,487 conversions at €0.61 each: technical events. 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.
For an estate agent the primary conversions are three: the valuation form submitted with the address, a call longer than 30 seconds, a WhatsApp message started from the page. Enquiries on a listing should be tracked as a secondary conversion, 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
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.
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.
The minimum budget follows from this. With £20 a day (£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.
The figure we are missing is how many valuation requests become instructions: 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
Google's restrictions on targeting for the "housing" category (no segmentation by age, gender, marital status or postcode) apply in the United States and Canada, not in the UK. The rules that apply here are the general ones, 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, in the accounts we analysed before taking them on.
- 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. 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.
Google Ads or SEO for an estate agent?
The two channels cover different searches. Organically, "estate agents manchester" can be won: all ten results are agents and the local pack is made of individual profiles. "Free house valuation" is closed organically: portals, tools and an AI Overview, with agents only appearing further down with their own valuation tools. So SEO works on "estate agents + town" and on area pages, and Google Ads buys valuation and "sell my house", where organic results will not reach. 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
How much does an instruction from Google Ads cost an estate agent?
A valuation request costs between about £45 and £145 with the measured UK CPCs (£3.50-7.30) and a 5-8% conversion rate. The instruction depends on how many valuations your team turns into instructions: with one in five, £225-730.
Can franchisees run their own campaigns?
It depends on the contract, but the data shows the network does not do it for them: DataForSEO detects one paid keyword for Foxtons and none for Connells or Winkworth. On "valuation + town" and "estate agents + neighbourhood" the branch is on its own, and the competitor is the independent agent next door.
How long before I see results?
The first enquiries arrive in the first week. Cost per enquiry settles after two or three months, once the negatives are complete and the account has enough real conversions. The owner's cycle, from valuation to instruction, adds more weeks: judging the campaign after one month is too early.
Can I run remarketing to owners who visited the site?
Yes. In the UK there are no Google restrictions on remarketing specific to property (the "housing" category limits apply in the United States and Canada). You need cookie consent on the site and an audience built only from the "sell" and "valuation" pages, not from all the listings traffic.
Where to start
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. Then 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, get in touch.
