As most of you know, a few years ago my wife @Carly got licensed in real estate.
A big part of this was based on her desire to join this amazing community of professionals and have a rewarding career adjacent to our main business here at Real Estate Webmasters Inc
The other reason, however, was to have a testing ground for REW’s Renaissance platform, CRM, and lead generation programs.
To have a TRUE demo as it were. And be able to share results without worrying about asking for permission or competitors knowing specific clients’ details etc.
It’s been a pretty great way to learn more about the business side of real estate. (And a lot of fun)
For Carly’s marketing, we focus exclusively on SEO / PPC via REW and I thought it would be a good time to share the results we’re seeing “right now” from programs.
Hopefully, this gives you some perspective if you’re thinking of taking on SEO / PPC yourselves or if you’re considering hiring Real Estate Webmasters to do it for you.
Alright, so here at the year-to-date numbers:
Total leads 662 : (For a single agent website after junk is deleted)
Total deals: (in 2023) 7 deals in first 3 months (includes signed contracts not yet closed)
Estimated CGI: $80,000 (I’m doing napkin math, haven’t calculated it out yet, but this is close)
Here is how the leads break down:
PPC - we’ve spent a total of $5,880 CAD ($4,355 USD) on PPC this year.
Our cost per lead is higher than REW average by quite a bit due to the fact that
A: We focus almost exclusively on luxury-related keywords which tend to be more expensive
B: Because we use Carly’s account to test things, CPL can vary quite a bit.
CPL on PPC is $25.34 CAD (or $18.77 USD) again, keep in mind this is much higher than REW’s average due to A and B above.
SEO: We have 330 leads generated via SEO.
We have only spent $3,000 USD on SEO this year so far (barely anything) and this is because
A: Real Estate Webmasters SEO has been sold out, so we have not had available capacity
B: We’ve been doing SEO for quite a while now, and so we can get away with short period of smaller investment and still keep maintaining traffic and rankings.
Traffic has stabilized around 5,000 visits per month from SEO and will likely only increase again once we start investing more heavily in additional SEO / content.
Most importantly for SEO though - we dominate the rankings for our target keywords and get some amazing luxury/waterfront leads from them.
We also get the powerful 1-2 punch from our adwords / SEO combination: Where we show first in the ads, and we know that if they see our ad first (but don’t click) they are far more likely to click on our organic result (I call this the 2 billboard effect)
Here it is in the real world: (what the consumer sees)
That’s where we’re at! Full transparency of what you can accomplish if you stick with an SEO / PPC program over time.
The final numbers?
Spent $7,355 USD this quarter for 662 leads ($11,11 CPL blended cost)
Landed over $80,000 in GCI (this is all leads in DB, not just those that came in this quarter) new leads generally close down the road.
Achieved an ROI of over 10 x 1 on our investment.
We have a database full of leads that we can continue to work to extract move value over time.
Hundreds of thousands of visitors have seen Carly’s brand multiple times since we launched.
Not going to lie - there have been ups and downs in deal volume. The first year was well over $10M in the deals, the next not so much. This year is shaping up to be awesome.
Real Estate is TOUGH (and life happens, it’s not just real estate that is tough)
But that’s a current view of where we’re at this year so far.
It’s a lot of fun, and a lot of hard work (I completely empathize with you real estate marketers out there)
But the rewards are definitely worth it!
Any questions, let me know 
