Meta Ads Case Study: 30 Seller Leads in a Month for £6.90 Each.
289 £207 of ad spend. 15,666 impressions. 30 qualified vendor leads.
Most estate agents who have tried Facebook ads have tried the same ad: a property, a price, a “Just Listed” banner and a boost button. It reaches people who already follow them, generates a few likes from other agents, and produces no enquiries.
Then they conclude Meta doesn’t work for estate agency.
Meta works fine. The ad was the problem – because it asked strangers to do something nobody does on social media, which is to enquire about a house they weren’t looking for.
This campaign asked for something much smaller.
The Situation.
An estate agent who needed vendor leads – not applicants, not followers, not engagement. Sellers.
The difficulty with seller leads is timing. At any moment, only a tiny slice of homeowners in a town are ready to instruct an agent. The rest are somewhere on a spectrum from “vaguely curious” to “probably next spring.” Advertise only to the ready-now slice and you’re bidding against every other agent for the same few people. Ignore everyone else, and you leave the entire market unattended.
So we went after the people who were thinking about it – and gave them a reason to identify themselves.
What We Did.
1. We built a genuinely useful lead magnet.
A free guide to preparing a property for sale over the summer months, positioned around a specific and real deadline: get the work done now, list in September, sell before the winter market slows down.
That framing matters. “Free property guide” is a shrug. A guide that helps you hit a window that is actually closing gives someone a reason to download it today rather than someday.
2. We gated it behind a form that asked the two questions that matter.
To get the guide, you gave your contact details – and answered two more:
- When are you looking to sell?
- What type of property do you own?
Those two fields turn a name on a list into a prioritised, segmented lead. Someone selling a four-bed detached within three months is a phone call this week. Someone with a flat and a twelve-month horizon is a nurture sequence. Same campaign, same cost, completely different follow-up.
Most agents ask for an email address and nothing else, then wonder why the list doesn’t convert. You can’t nurture people you know nothing about.
3. We targeted local homeowners, not everyone.
Local, homeowner-weighted audiences within the patch he actually serves. There is no value in a lead thirty miles outside your area, and no value in reaching renters with a guide about selling.
4. We handed the leads to a system, not a spreadsheet.
Every lead entered an email nurture sequence and a Meta retargeting audience. The guide isn’t the end of the campaign – it’s the introduction. Someone who says they’ll sell in nine months is worth nine months of quiet, useful contact, so that when they do decide, there’s one agent they already feel they know.
The Results.
£207 of ad spend served 15,666 impressions to 5,914 unique local people, and produced 30 downloads of the guide – a cost per lead of £6.90.
Every one of those thirty handed over a name, contact details, their property type and when they intend to sell. That last field is what turns a list into a pipeline.
Why £6.90 is The Number to Sit With
Compare it to what you already spend to reach a vendor. Portal upgrades, print, leaflets, sponsorships – think about the cost per genuine seller conversation any of those produce. Then consider that this one produced thirty of them for £207, and told you when each person intends to sell.
Consider the arithmetic on the other side. One instruction from those thirty leads pays for the campaign many times over. The whole month’s spend is a rounding error against a single fee.
And it reached 5,914 local people, 2.6 times each. Even the 5,884 who didn’t download the guide saw a local agent being useful rather than shouty. That’s brand-building you’d otherwise pay separately for.
Most importantly, the asset is reusable. The guide didn’t expire on 31 July. It runs again – refreshed for the season, pointed at a fresh audience – and the list it builds keeps growing. Meanwhile, the thirty people from July are being nurtured towards a decision they’ve already told us they intend to make.
The Takeaway For Agents
Stop advertising your properties to people who aren’t looking for a house. Advertise something useful to people who are quietly thinking about selling one, and make the price of it their contact details and their timeline.
Thirty of those a month, nurtured properly, is a pipeline that doesn’t depend on who happens to be ready this week.
£207 a month, 30 seller leads, and a list that gets warmer every month. Learn about our estate agent Meta ad services.