Google Ads for real estate: the portals own the generic terms, so buy project names and localities

In Indian property search the generic phrases, flats in a city, 3BHK for sale, property near me, are held by the portals, who bid on them all day because a lead is their product. A builder or broker who competes there pays portal prices for portal quality. The inventory worth buying is narrower and far better: your own project names, the localities you actually sell in, competitor project names, and the long tail that carries a constraint such as ready to move, RERA registered or a specific budget. And because one closed deal is worth lakhs, a cost per lead that would be ruinous in retail is perfectly rational here, which is exactly why the only honest metric is cost per site visit rather than cost per lead.

This page covers who you are bidding against, the keyword pools worth money, the landing page a project needs, the lead handling that makes or breaks the spend, budgets and benchmarks in rupees, and the clauses to settle with an agency.

Who is in the auction with you

Three kinds of advertiser: the property portals, who monetise the lead itself and can therefore outbid everyone on broad terms; large developers running brand campaigns with budgets that do not need to be efficient every week; and lead aggregators who resell the same enquiry to several brokers. None of them is beatable on the generic head terms, and none of them can outbid you on your own project name or on a locality you know better than they do.

The keyword pools worth buying

Pool	Why it works	Intent
Your project and builder name	Cheap, high conversion, and it stops aggregators intercepting your brand	Highest
Locality plus configuration, 2BHK in Hinjewadi	Specific enough that the portals are not dominant, and you know the area	High
Competitor project names	People comparing two projects nearby. Legal in search, so keep the ad text about yours and never use their trademark in the copy	High
Constraint long tail, ready to move, RERA registered, near metro station	Low volume, low competition, best lead quality on the board	High
Generic city phrases	Portal territory, expensive, poor quality	Skip

Start with the first two pools, add the third once the account has conversion data, and keep the fourth running permanently because it quietly produces your best enquiries.

The landing page a project needs

Sending property traffic to a home page wastes most of it. One page per project, and it carries: the project name and locality in the heading, the price starting point, configurations with carpet areas, the possession date, the RERA registration number, floor plans, at least one walkthrough video, a location map with travel times to the places people care about, and the developer's track record. A form with three fields and a phone number that somebody answers.

Carry the registration number in the creative and on the page, because a registered project's advertising is required to state it and because buyers read its absence as a warning.

Lead handling, which decides whether the spend worked

• One qualifying question in the form. Budget band or possession timeline. It cuts volume and raises the share you can actually work.
• A call inside ten minutes. Property enquiries go cold faster than almost any other category because the same person is filling three forms.
• Two specific site visit slots offered in the first conversation, never an open invitation.
• Every lead in one CRM with the campaign and keyword attached, so you can switch off what does not produce visits.
• A nurture sequence for the eighty percent who are not ready. Property cycles run months, and the deal often comes from a lead that looked dead in week two.

Budgets and benchmarks, as I read the Indian market

These are my own working figures from accounts of this kind rather than published data, so use them to interrogate a proposal:

• Cost per click on locality and configuration terms: roughly INR 25 to 150, higher in Mumbai and Gurgaon micro markets.
• Cost per form lead: roughly INR 300 to 2,500 depending on city and price band.
• Cost per site visit, which is the number that matters: typically INR 3,000 to 20,000.
• Minimum sensible monthly media for a single project: around INR 50,000, because less does not gather enough conversion data to optimise.

Treat 18 percent GST as sitting on top of both the media and the management fee when you build the budget. TDS has to come out of the agency payment, at a rate that follows how the engagement is structured, and your accountant can fix that in one conversation.

What to settle with an agency in writing

The ad account belongs to you, under your billing, with the agency given access that can be withdrawn. The lead data lands in your CRM, not theirs. The reporting is on cost per site visit and cost per booking, not on impressions and cost per lead alone. And the fee is either flat or tied to visits rather than to spend, because a percentage of spend rewards your agency for raising the budget. If an agency resists the account ownership point, that one issue tells you enough.

Paid search is only half of this. The organic side, which is where the locality knowledge compounds over years, is covered in our guide to neighbourhood pages and listing structure for property sites.

Google Ads for property: what builders and brokers push back on

Is Google Ads worth it for a real estate agent with a small budget?

Yes if you spend it narrowly. A broker with INR 25,000 a month should buy two or three locality and configuration phrases plus their own name, run a tight radius, and ignore everything generic. Spread the same amount across broad city terms and it disappears without a single site visit.

Why is the cost per lead so high in real estate?

Because the portals and aggregators monetise the lead directly, so they bid up to what a lead is worth to them, and because a closed sale earns lakhs in commission. A cost per lead of INR 1,500 is sound arithmetic when one deal in forty closes, and that is why the industry measures visits and bookings rather than leads.

Is a project page or an in app lead form the better destination?

Landing page for projects, because the page does the selling and filters casual enquiries. In app lead forms produce volume cheaply and far more of it needs qualifying, so use them for top of funnel interest with a budget question built in, and keep your project campaigns on a proper page.

Can you bid on a competitor's project name in India?

Bidding on a competitor's name as a keyword is permitted in search advertising, and using their trademarked name inside your own ad text invites a complaint. Keep the keyword and keep the copy about your project, your price and your possession date.

What is the best campaign type for real estate?

Search for intent, with a small Performance Max or demand campaign added once your conversion tracking records site visits rather than form fills. Display on its own, bought as cheap impressions, is where most property budgets quietly go to die.

The project name that does not appear in the answer

Buyers researching a purchase now ask assistants which projects in an area suit a budget, whether a builder has delivered on time before, and what the catch is with a particular locality. The reply names projects and developers with a reason attached, drawn from portal pages, news coverage, forum threads and registration records, and no bid changes it.

Whether your projects feature in those answers is worth knowing before the next launch. AI Knows Us tracks whether your projects surface in those answers and which listings the assistants used, and a first pass is free to run.