Common questions
Questions we hear most
How do real estate agents get found on Google?
By winning the searches the portals leave behind. The portals outrank every agent for homes for sale in any city, and that is not a contest worth entering. A detailed neighbourhood page, a school catchment guide or a monthly market update for one community can rank, because the portals do not write them. What those pages have in common is that they answer a question a listing feed cannot: what it is actually like to live there, what the housing stock is, what a semi sold for last month against what it sold for last year, which streets back onto the rail line. We run a platform with more than 180 such neighbourhood pages, so this is tested daily rather than theory. The second half is your Google Business Profile, which most agents leave half-built. It ranks in Maps for agent searches, it carries your reviews, and it is one of the few places where an individual competes on level terms with a brokerage. Reviews that mention the neighbourhood and the property type do more work than a star rating alone. The compounding is the point. Every guide and market update adds to a library a newer agent cannot assemble quickly, and after a year it is the library, rather than any single page, that ranks.
Do Google Ads work for real estate?
Yes, with the budget pointed at the right intent. Buyer search terms are expensive and portal-dominated, so an agent bidding on them pays premium prices to lose the click to a national site. Seller intent is where the value sits: valuation searches, home worth searches, downsizing and probate-related terms, and neighbourhood-specific searches a local page can carry. A seller lead is worth more than a buyer lead in almost every market, and far fewer agents compete for it. The other half of the equation is follow-up, and it decides most of the outcome. A homeowner who requests a valuation is usually contacting more than one agent in a single sitting, and the one who responds first gets the conversation. Minutes matter here, not hours. Ads without an automated response behind them leak most of their value, which is why we run the campaign and the follow-up system together rather than handing over leads and wishing you luck. One more thing worth saying plainly: a lot of enquiries are early. Someone starting to plan a move is often twelve months out. In week one they look like a dead lead, and with follow-up that keeps going they are a listing next spring.
What does a real estate lead cost?
It varies widely with your market and the intent level you are buying, so we give honest ranges on a call rather than a number in a paragraph. A valuation enquiry in a competitive urban market and a buyer enquiry in a quieter suburb are different products at different prices, and any agency quoting a single figure for real estate is quoting an average that fits nobody. The more useful measure is what a pipeline produces over a year. For Verity Real Estate, one year of campaigns produced over 300 enquiries and five completed transactions, with the pipeline still delivering afterwards. That ratio is worth sitting with, because it is the honest shape of the business: most enquiries are not ready, and the few that are ready are worth enough to carry all the rest. Real estate leads mature slowly, which is why the number we manage to is cost per transaction over a year rather than cost per enquiry this month. It is also why nurture and retargeting go into every engagement. An enquiry that gets three emails and then silence is a cost. The same enquiry, kept warm with something genuinely useful about their own neighbourhood until they are ready, is a commission, and keeping it warm costs almost nothing.
How long does SEO take for an agent?
Neighbourhood content typically begins ranking within three to six months, and faster where competition is thin, which in most suburbs it is. A guide to one community, written properly and kept updated, can reach the first page inside a quarter simply because nobody else has written it. City-level terms are a different matter and are usually not worth chasing, since the portals hold them and will keep holding them. The compounding matters more than the start. Every guide, market update and review builds on the last, and after a year it is the library as a whole that ranks, which is dramatically harder for a newer entrant to displace than any single page. Two things stall an agent's SEO programme more often than competition does. The first is writing a blog instead of building pages: general advice about buying a home ranks nowhere, while a page about one neighbourhood's housing stock and prices ranks. The second is abandonment. A market update published monthly for six months and then dropped reads as stale to Google and to the person who finds it in November. Paid campaigns carry the pipeline while the library builds, and the agents who win search are usually the ones who started a year before their competitors thought about it.
Can AI tools like ChatGPT recommend me?
Yes, and property is one of the categories where it is moving fastest, because the questions people ask an assistant are exactly the ones they are too early to ask an agent. What is this neighbourhood like for families. Is it a reasonable time to sell a condo. What does a semi cost near that school. The tools answer from what they have already crawled and from sources they trust: your own site, your profiles, your reviews, and the local content attached to your name. Two things decide whether you can be named. Consistency, since an agent whose name, brokerage, phone number and service area differ across the web gives the assistant nothing solid to hold. And specificity, because the content that gets quoted has facts in it, prices, streets, dates, rather than a description of your commitment to service. A neighbourhood page with real market numbers gets cited. Schema markup helps by stating who you are and where you work in a form the machine does not have to infer, and reviews carry weight in local recommendations. We build that citation potential into everything we run for agents. It is becoming a genuine referral channel, particularly for the early-stage questions that used to be invisible to us entirely.
