Marketing for housebuilders, measured on reservations
New home buyers search for places, not builders. Campaigns organised around your company rather than your developments reach almost none of that demand.
Working with property and construction clients
Client advertising spend under management
Certified on Google Ads
Enquiry count is the wrong measure for housebuilders
This sector generates a lot of enquiries that are genuine but not imminent. People register interest a year or two before they can move. That is fine, and it makes enquiry volume close to useless as a measure of whether the marketing is working.
Worse, optimising towards enquiry count actively rewards the campaigns attracting the least committed people, because they are the cheapest to acquire. Run that for a year and your budget drifts steadily towards browsers.
The number that matters is cost per reservation. Getting to it means the enquiry has to carry its source all the way into whatever the sales office uses, and the outcome has to come back out again.
| Source | Leads | Qualified | Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads | 142 | 88 | £61,400 |
| Organic search | 96 | 54 | £38,900 |
| Google Business Profile | 61 | 44 | £24,150 |
| Paid social | 38 | 19 | £9,800 |
How housebuilder marketing should be structured
Four things, and most builders we meet are missing at least three of them.
A page per development
Not a PDF or a row in a table. A real page carrying the development name, plot availability, specification and location detail, which accumulates search authority for that place over time.
Campaigns on a lifecycle
Pre launch to build the register, launch to convert it, mid phase on the plots moving slowly, run out narrowed to what is genuinely left.
The sales office joined up
Source carried into the sales system, outcome recorded, reservations pushed back to the ad platforms so bidding chases buyers rather than browsers.
Availability held once
Plot availability in one place, published to the website, the portal feed and the sales office together. Out of date availability does more damage than none at all.
Search your development names right now. If a portal outranks your own page for your own development, you are paying to send buyers somewhere else.
Marketing hands over at the enquiry
Everything after the enquiry is sales, and in this sector that handover is where most of the money is lost. Three numbers are worth measuring, and most housebuilders record none of them.
Time to first contact. A weekend enquiry answered on Tuesday is usually gone. Appointment rate. What share of enquiries convert to a site visit, which is the real measure of enquiry quality. Follow up depth. How many attempts before an enquiry is written off, when long cycle buyers routinely go quiet for months and come back.
If those are not being recorded, fixing that comes before increasing the budget. It is almost always cheaper to convert more of the enquiries you already have.
| Source | Leads | Qualified | Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads | 142 | 88 | £61,400 |
| Organic search | 96 | 54 | £38,900 |
| Google Business Profile | 61 | 44 | £24,150 |
| Paid social | 38 | 19 | £9,800 |
“…we’re after a price on 200mm spiral, about forty lengths, delivered to site next week…”
Mark the outcome
Connecting a phone call back to the keyword that produced it
What housebuilders ask us
Should each development have its own website?
Usually not. A separate site splits your search authority and doubles the maintenance. A well structured section on your main site, with a strong page per development, performs better and costs less to run.
What happens to a development page when the site sells out?
Keep it and repurpose it. Mark it sold out, keep the photography and specification, and point visitors to current and upcoming developments. Those pages hold search authority for the location, which is exactly what you want when you launch nearby.
We already use the portals. Why do we need this?
Portals deliver volume and you should keep using them. What they do not give you is the relationship or the data. The buyer meets your development inside somebody else’s brand and you get an enquiry stripped of context.
How early should marketing start before a launch?
Earlier than most builders think. Building a register costs very little when nobody is competing for a development name that does not exist yet, and launch weekend then starts with an audience rather than from nothing.
Get in touch about marketing for your developments
Tell us how many sites you have live and how enquiries reach the sales office. We will show you what is currently invisible.
