Content Marketing Manager at Promodo
Taras has 16 years of hands-on copywriting experience overseas with 3000+ unique copies.
Accredited with Certificate of Proficiency in English (C2 level) by Cambridge University. Studied at Writing Launch Academy (United States) and owns an Academic Writing Certificate from Oregon University. Author of 12 dictionaries with Apriori Publishers.
Marketing plays a major role in real estate, and it’s getting more expensive. In the United States, chief marketing officers report that 21.11% of total company budgets in real estate now go to marketing. That’s a significant share—and a clear sign of how competitive the market has become.
With more listings, higher customer acquisition costs, and longer decision cycles, real estate companies can’t afford to guess what “good performance” looks like. This article breaks down real estate marketing benchmarks for 2026, giving a clear view of how much companies are spending, which channels matter most, and how teams can set realistic goals based on actual market data.
In the real estate industry, websites demonstrated 3.22K sessions almost caughting up with the estimated median value of website sessions across all industries,namely 3.93K.
Pro Tip: To boost sessions on your real estate site, tailor content targeted at low-hanging fruit keywords on the bottom of Google page one or the second page within the real estate industry. While these keywords may not be related to your primary real estate offerings directly, be sure to optimize them for long-tail search queries. This is the proven way to engage a broader audience, bet on less saturated keywords, and win more focused traffic to your website. With that, the incorporation of internal links will improve search rankings and foster user engagement.
Given the median value of pageviews across industries of 8.82K, the real estate niche scored 9.03K.
Pro Tip: It is crucial to monitor the pageviews on your website to track month-over-month growth or declines. This is how you’ll follow real estate trends continuously and set timely adjustments to enhance your website performance.
The average time on a page for the real estate industry is 1m.34s. The benchmark almost correlates with the median time of 1m.31s. across all industries.
Pro Tip: Crafting top-tier content stands as one of the most effective methods to increase user time on your pages. When users perceive your content as informative, engaging, and well-crafted, they are more inclined to invest time in reading it. Conduct thorough real estate research and delve into topics that best resonate with the local property needs of homebuyers, sellers, tenants, lessors, lessees, and real estate investors. Employ clear and concise language, and break up the text with headings, subheadings, and eye-catching images.
Returning users are people who’ve returned to your website within two years after their first visit. With that, they interacted with your website with the same device they used for their first visit.
30% to 50% is considered a sound returning customer rate across the industries.
Given the tough competition in the real estate market, aim at <50% mark as relevant proof that your content is engaging to regular readers.
Pro Tip: RCR marks the balance between customer acquisition and retention strategy. Once your strategic real estate count is on one-time purchases, your new-to-returning visitors' rate should favor acquiring new visitors. Whether you care about the retention and lifetime value (LTV) of your customers, bet on returning visitors. In addition to attracting new visitors and converting them to paying customers, RCR will signal whether your existing customers are satisfied with your real estate services and are willing to get back to you.
30% marks a healthy balance of new vs. returning visitors for eCommerce.
With a median bounce rate of 60.78% across the industries real estate scored 46.85%. Given the acceptable customer churn rate (CCR) of >10%, the key question is how soon users leave real estate pages and why.
Pro Tip: To mitigate your site's bounce rate, ensure that content aligns seamlessly with user search intent. Basic steps include optimizing load times and implementing effective content interlinking. Faster websites offer a more enjoyable browsing experience and positively affect search rankings. Optimize file sizes, eliminate unnecessary code, and streamline the design to encourage visitors to linger on your website.
While paid ads potentially generate $2 in return for every dollar spent, real estate businesses consider a pay-per-click (PPC) strategy as a sustainable option to surge the return on investment (ROI).
Given the extended buying cycle and substantial investment associated with real estate, it's reasonable to orient at an average monthly spend on paid ads of $1000 compared to businesses offering less expensive and less personalized products.
Google Ads shows the following averages across top-performing industries:
🔴 Click-through rate (CTR) 8.29% for search ads and 1.12% for display ads
🔴 Cost per click (CPC) $10-$100+. It has also increased by 7% compared to the previous year.
🔴 Cost per lead (CPL) $$473 for B2B and $212 for B2C
🔴 Conversion rate (CVR) 7.04%
In real estate, lead generation remains one of the most expensive areas in digital marketing. B2B cost per lead (CPL) is the highest, averaging $473, reflecting longer sales cycles and high-value deals. B2C CPL is lower at $212, but still above many other industries due to strong competition and local market saturation. When combining both segments, the blended CPL averages $342, making efficiency and lead quality critical for real estate marketing teams in 2026.
In real estate, search ads significantly outperform display ads in click-through rate. The average CTR for search reaches 8.29%, reflecting strong intent when users actively look for properties or services. In contrast, display ads average just 1.12% CTR, making them better suited for awareness and retargeting rather than direct lead generation.
Cost per click (CPC) in real estate remains one of the highest across industries, ranging from $10 to $100+. Compared to the previous year, CPC has grown by 7%, driven by intense competition for high-intent keywords and rising auction pressure in local markets.
In real estate, lead generation remains one of the most expensive areas in digital marketing. B2B cost per lead (CPL) is the highest, averaging $473, reflecting longer sales cycles and high-value deals. B2C CPL is lower at $212, but still above many other industries due to strong competition and local market saturation. When combining both segments, the blended CPL averages $342, making efficiency and lead quality critical for real estate marketing teams in 2026.
In the real estate industry, understanding conversion rates across channels is essential for optimizing marketing strategies. On average, the industry boasts a 4.7% conversion rate, with organic search achieving a 3.2% success rate. Paid search and email marketing follow with conversion rates of 1.5% and 1.4%, respectively, while referral marketing trails slightly at 1.3%. Interestingly, phone interactions dominate conversions, accounting for 38% of all successful transactions. Notably, 61.7% of organic search users and a remarkable 75.4% of ad clickers in real estate prefer converting over the phone, emphasizing the importance of seamless call handling in closing deals.
With the highest open rate shown by government-related emails of 28.77% vs. the all-industry median of 21.33%, the average open rate in the real estate industry is 19.17%.
With the average all-industries click rate of 2.62%, hobbies scored the highest at 5.01%, while the estimated click rate for the real estate industry is 1.77%.
With an average hard bounce rate across industries of 0.40%, real estate scored 0.38%.
With an average soft bounce rate of 0.61% across the industries, real estate scored 0.56%.
Finally, real estate almost catches up with a 0.27% unsubscribe rate compared to the all-industry average of 0.25%.
Monthly Facebook page impressions in real estate account for 84K. To compare, as the top scorer across all industries, the entertainment industry wins 2M monthly Facebook page impressions.
As for Facebook posting frequency (the average number of posts shared daily), with 0.36 posts a day real estate lags behind the entertainment industry with 1.89 daily posts.
With a post engagement rate of 1%, a declining monthly audience rate of -2.66% on Facebook comes as no surprise.
With over 1M monthly page impressions, the entertainment industry topped Instagram. By contrast, the retail industry scored a mere 646K page impressions.
With monthly Instagram profile impressions of 65,000 across the real estate industry, the audience growth rate of -0.26% shows a negative tendency.
Instagram post engagement rate across the real estate industry is 1.47%, while Instagram posting frequency is 0.56 posts a day.
As for Instagram posting frequency, with 1.02 posts a day real estate almost catches up with the lead entertainment industry with 1.24 daily posts.
Measuring benchmarks for your digital marketing success in the real estate industry is much about achieving a solid return on investment (ROI). The metric objectively assesses the overall effectiveness of your marketing initiatives by juxtaposing the total investment with the total profit you generate.
Ultimately, the success or failure of your marketing endeavors hinges on the calculated ROI, especially when your primary marketing objective is lead generation.
Our practice shows that organic channels consistently yield a superior long-term ROI compared to paid ad options across media channels. This indicates that real estate clients are far more inclined to organic engagement.
Considering estimated real estate benchmarking indicators, your strategic marketing task is to allocate a marketing budget across diverse inbound demand generation channels.
Benefit from paid lead generation as an effective short-term supplement to driving traffic organically.
In parallel, strategically bet on search engine optimization (SEO) of your real estate website as a slower though higher-ROI channel that will gain momentum in 2026 and beyond.
Total Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) is a high-level metric that swiftly signals the effectiveness of your campaign by assessing the potential lifetime value (LTV) of each of your real estate MQLs.
The recommended MQLgrowth benchmark in real estate is +40% YoY.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is how much you spend on acquiring a single new customer. CAC encompasses the entire marketing and sales process. The metric shows whether or not your marketing efforts exceed budgetary limits per customer acquisition.
Unlike ROI, CAC does not consider the inherent value of each customer, so make sure you apply these metrics as complementary.
Optimize CAC by:
🔴 Allocating paid media CAC channels to target high-value audiences
🔴 Reserving organic CAC channels for the majority of lead generation efforts.
Recommended customer acquisition cost benchmarks in real estate to achieve i 2024: organic benchmark of $660 vs. paid benchmark of $1,185.
Cost Per Lead (CPL) is the cost you pay for generating a new lead from your real estate website. CPL specifically assesses the cost you pay for gaining new customers at the top of the lead generation funnel.
The recommended cost per lead benchmarks in real estate: organic benchmark of $410 vs. paid benchmark of $470.
Pro Tip: Achieving low CAC and Low CPL is your ideal marketing scenario in the real estate business for 2024 and beyond.
The Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate (traffic conversion rate) will help you monitor the proportion of your visitors who leave their details in your contact form, subscribe to an email list, or engage in conversions through call-to-action (CTA) offers on your real estate website.
The metric measures the effectiveness of your website performance in terms of conversion optimization and content quality.
The recommended visitor-to-lead conversion benchmark in real estate is 2.2%.
The Lead to MQL conversion rate gauges the proportion of generated leads that transform into your real estate sales prospects. The metric assesses the potential of your marketing efforts to target a genuinely valuable audience.
The best-fit approach here is to refine your targeting strategy by creating detailed customer personas for your potential real estate clients.
The estimated appropriate Lead to MQL conversion rate benchmark in retail industry is 25-30%.
Click-through Rate (CTR) gauges the ratio of users who saw a link to your real estate website and those who clicked on it. In the real estate industry, the CTR benchmark considers organic search results, PPC ads, and email marketing.
We’ve estimated CTR for the real estate industry as follows:
🔴 Organic Search: 39.6% for the 1st position in search engine results pages (SERPs)
🔴 Pay-per-click (PPC): 1.9%
🔴 Email marketing: 4.9%.
The typical budget for a real estate website ranges from $5,000 to $10,000. With that, lead real estate agencies may allocate upwards of $50,000 or more to ensure a superior user experience (UX) and optimal search engine optimization (SEO).
Real estate websites typically rank between 50 and 100 for relevant keywords in search engine results pages (SERPs), but top performers secure positions in the top 10, which enhances their visibility and brings more qualified leads.
This metric gauges the proportion of website visitors undertaking specific actions, such as requesting property valuations or contacting agents.
While the average conversion rate for real estate websites is 2%, top industry performers like Zillow.com and Realtor.com consistently achieve CVR exceeding 5%.
On average, real estate agents generate approximately 100 monthly leads. High-performing agents, however, achieve 200 or more monthly leads.
The average home sales price in the United States is around $350,000. Distinguished real estate agents consistently secure sales at or above this average.
While the median sales conversion rate (CVR) for real estate agents hovers around 20%, top performers consistently achieve 30% or more.
Content Marketing Manager at Promodo
Taras has 16 years of hands-on copywriting experience overseas with 3000+ unique copies.
Accredited with Certificate of Proficiency in English (C2 level) by Cambridge University. Studied at Writing Launch Academy (United States) and owns an Academic Writing Certificate from Oregon University. Author of 12 dictionaries with Apriori Publishers.
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