Industries · Real estate
Real Estate Lead Generation: Bid on Closings, Not Inquiries
Portals and ads bring plenty of enquiries, and most never reach a closing. Use your own history of which enquiries closed, and what the commission was, to estimate what each new lead is worth on the day it arrives, so bidding learns to find the clients who transact.
Why lead counts fall short
Why a count of enquiries misses what a closing is worth
Real estate funnels are long and leaky. A homeowner asking for a valuation before listing this quarter, a buyer with financing arranged and a short timeline, and someone browsing listings for next year all arrive as one enquiry each. Bidding on the count pays for whichever is cheapest to generate, and the cheapest are usually the browsers.
Your CRM knows what each kind of enquiry became. Whether they were buying or selling, the price range, the timeline and whether financing was in place all show up in how often enquiries closed and in the commission a closing paid. That is the signal the ad platforms need, and it has to arrive on day one: a transaction that closes five months after the click is past the point where Google counts it.
Sellers, buyers and renters are different leads
A listing enquiry can close less often than a ready buyer and still be worth more, because the commission on a listing is larger or because one listing brings buyer enquiries of its own. Expected value weighs both the rate and the commission.
Commission, not sale price
The business earns the commission, not the price of the home. Price on the gross commission or the company's share that your CRM records on a closing, and use one basis across the export.
Price on the transaction, never on who or where
In the US and Canada, Google's housing policy and Meta's Special Ad Category rule out targeting housing ads by age, gender, family status or postcode, and fair housing law sits behind both. The product refuses protected characteristics by column name. Leave neighbourhood and postcode columns switched off on the mapping screen too: a value that pays more for some areas than others is a problem even when nobody meant it to be.
The funnel
From enquiry to closed
- Enquiry
- Conversation
- Appointment or valuation
- Under contract
- Closed
Known when the lead arrives
What a new lead can be priced from
- Buying, selling or renting
- Price range
- Timeline to move
- Financing arranged, cash, or not yet
- Home to sell before buying
- Already working with another agent
- Property type
- Valuation requested
- Listing enquired about
- Form or portal the enquiry came from
Whatever your CRM records is tested on your closed deals. The signals that separate your buyers are priced; the rest are dropped, each with the reason.
Learned later
What the history is trained on
- Whether a conversation happened
- Whether a showing, appointment or valuation took place
- Whether a contract was signed, and whether it closed
- The commission on the closing
What the enquiry says about the transaction prices a new lead. Nothing about who the person is or where they live does. Appointments, contracts and closings are what the history is trained on.
How it works
From your sales history to what the ad platforms see
- 1
Bring in your history
A CRM export or a HubSpot connection: leads with their outcomes, won, lost or still open.
- 2
Find what relates to value
Each field known when a lead arrives is tested against your closed deals. Only the ones that clearly moved outcomes are kept.
- 3
Estimate each new lead
Its expected value: how likely leads like it are to become customers, times what those customers were worth.
- 4
Send the value
To Google Ads or Meta, as a conversion value on the lead. Sending changes no bid by itself.
- 5
Judge it on real outcomes
Compare closed deals before and after your campaigns start optimising on the values, never the values we sent.
Worked example
Three leads, three different values
Expected lead value = the estimated chance of becoming a customer × the expected value of that customer.
Value basis: Commission on the closed transaction. The gross commission income or the company dollar your CRM records when a transaction closes. Use one basis across the export; the product does not forecast repeat business or referrals.
Seller, valuation requested
- Plans to list within three months
- Home value around $650,000
12% × $16,000
$1,920
estimated value of this lead
Buyer, financing arranged
- Price range $400,000 to $500,000
- Wants to move within three months
8% × $11,000
$880
estimated value of this lead
Buyer, browsing
- No financing yet
- Timeline over a year
1% × $9,000
$90
estimated value of this lead
Illustrative example, not customer results.
The seller is worth about twice the ready buyer and more than twenty times the browser. The browser and the ready buyer are looking at similar homes; what separates them is the timeline and the financing, both of which the form already asked.
How the product actually estimates this
It does not score each lead on its own. It starts from your overall close rate times your average won deal, with any deal above five times the median counted at that cap, then applies a multiplier for each field that clearly moved outcomes in your history, and rescales so the average estimate matches what your leads were actually worth. Fields that do not clear the evidence thresholds are left out and listed. The formula above is the same idea in one line.
What data you need
Your CRM already has most of it
- Enquiry dateWhen the enquiry arrived, not the closing date.
- Closed, lost or still openLost and gone-quiet enquiries teach the model as much as the closings.
- Commission on closingsOne basis for the whole export: gross commission or company dollar.
- Fields from the enquiry formBuying or selling, price range, timeline and financing. Nothing about the person, and no neighbourhood or postcode.
- Matching informationGoogle's click ID or the enquirer's email for Google; email or phone, plus Meta's cookies from your site, for Meta.
What matters most is reliable outcomes and enough of them. The report checks your own file and names anything it could not price, rather than applying a one-size minimum.
How activation works
Estimating, sending and optimising are three steps
The product estimates each lead's value and sends it. Your campaigns use it only once you set them to optimise for value, a change you make in the ad platform, and the platform decides when an account qualifies.
Google Ads
Sends each enquiry's estimated value to a conversion action in Google Ads, matched on the click ID or on email. Your campaigns use it only once they bid on value, for example with Maximize conversion value. The housing policy limits how campaigns are targeted, not the values you send.
Switching a live campaign, step by stepMeta
Sends a ValuedLead event with the value through the Conversions API. Housing ads run in Meta's Special Ad Category, which removes some targeting and some options, so check in Ads Manager which optimisation goals your housing ad sets offer before planning on value optimisation.
How the Meta route worksThe full method, from pricing a lead to measuring the result, is in the complete guide. Leads that reach your CRM without a click ID are covered in the click ID guide.
How to judge success
Measured in outcomes, not in the values we sent
Closings per enquiry
By buying, selling and renting, before and after the switch.
Cost per closing
Ad spend against transactions closed, not against enquiries.
Commission per enquiry
Recorded commission divided by the enquiries that produced it.
Reported conversion value going up is not the result; it repeats what we sent. The product's evaluation compares closings before and after the switch, with enquiries from other sources as a control. Real estate cycles are long, so give it the months your own closings take.
Questions
Real estate, specifically
Can we send lead values on housing ads at all?
The housing rules on Google and Meta restrict who a housing ad is targeted to: no age, gender, family status or postcode in the US and Canada. A value worked out from what the enquiry says about the transaction, such as buying or selling, timeline and financing, is a different thing. Keep the values to those facts, leave location and anything about the person out, and check with your own compliance adviser.
Our transactions take months to close. Can Google still learn from them?
Not from the closing itself if it lands more than 90 days after the click, which is where Google stops counting imported conversions. That is why the value is sent on the day the enquiry arrives, estimated from how similar enquiries closed in the past. The slow closings still matter: they are what the estimate is learned from.
Should the value be the sale price or our commission?
The commission, gross or the company's share, whichever your CRM records consistently. The sale price is not what the business earns, and it would make every home look worth a hundred times more than it is.
We also buy leads from portals. Should they be in the export?
Yes. Every enquiry with a known outcome helps the history show which kinds of enquiry close. Values are only sent for leads that came from your ads and can be matched back to them.
Can we price on the neighbourhood the buyer is looking in?
We advise against it. Paying more for enquiries about some areas than others can amount to discrimination under fair housing law even without intent. Price range, timeline and financing carry the signal without it.
We are a mortgage broker. Can we use this?
Yes, with a funded loan as the outcome and the commission or fee you earn on it as the value. Mortgages fall under the credit rules rather than the housing ones: Google's policy for credit in the US and Canada, and Meta's special category for financial products, restrict targeting in the same way. Price on the loan purpose, amount, timeline and whether the applicant is already working with an agent, never on credit, income or anything about the person.
Further reading
Before you send a value
- ChecklistIs Your CRM Data Ready for Value-Based Bidding?Five checks before you turn your sales history into Google Ads conversion values. Stage timestamps, source fields, deal ranges, click ID coverage and late outcomes all mislead in ways that become spending instructions.
- GuideMeta Value Optimization for Lead Generation - The Complete GuideHow to give Meta a value for every lead, which of its three optimization goals your account can actually use, why the value has to arrive once and on day zero, and how to tell whether Meta is now finding better customers or just more leads.
- PerspectiveThe Future of Lead-Gen Bidding Is Better Value SignalsWhy the next improvement may come from what you tell the algorithm, not from a more complicated prediction model. Ranking is not enough, magnitudes matter, and delivery is part of the model's practical value.
Terms on this page
Each one is a page: what it is, what goes wrong with it, and the threshold we hold it to.
- Conversion actionGoogle AdsThe object in Google Ads a conversion is recorded against, with its own counting rules, attribution window and goal category.
- Conversions APIMetaMeta's server-to-server route for sending events, used alongside or instead of the browser pixel.
- Value-based biddingBidding on what a conversion is worth rather than on how many conversions arrive.
- Maximize conversion valueGoogle AdsThe bid strategy that spends the budget to bring back the highest total conversion value rather than the highest count.
- Value optimisationMetaMeta's ad set optimisation goal that bids toward the highest total conversion value rather than the highest conversion count.
Other industries
The same method, worked through for other kinds of business.
Check whether your lead data is ready
Upload a CRM export or connect HubSpot. In about five minutes you see which of your fields relate to value, what new leads would be estimated at, and whether your history is enough to send. The file is read in your browser; you are asked for a name and work email before the full report.