Absorption, not just enquiries

Industry guidance lands around 5-10% of gross commission income for brokerages and higher during launch phases, but for a developer the useful frame is cost per site visit and cost per booking against unit value, not a percentage of revenue. A project with a long absorption curve and a high ticket can justify spend that would be absurd for a resale brokerage. We budget per project phase rather than per year.

Local and project-level search, then paid social for launch reach. Search catches the buyer already looking in your micro-market and converts at a fraction of portal cost; portals buy volume but rent you the lead and sell it to your competitors at the same time. The highest-return work in most accounts is defending your own project name in search, which portals and brokers bid on aggressively.

By qualifying on budget, timeline and micro-market before the sales team ever calls. Project-level landing pages instead of one generic enquiry form, configuration and price-band questions in the form itself, and scoring that separates an investor from an end-user mean the site-visit calendar fills with people who can actually transact. Lead volume usually falls when we do this. Site visits per hundred leads goes up.

By building the search and content surface while approvals are still moving, so the project name already ranks on the day inventory opens. Pre-launch is also when expression-of-interest capture is cheapest, because you are competing against nobody for your own name. The brands that start marketing at launch spend the first six weeks buying back an audience they could have assembled for a fraction.

Yes, and the two need different systems. A developer is marketing one inventory set with a fixed absorption curve and a channel network to keep supplied. A broker is marketing a position in a market. Where a developer sells through partners, the marketing job includes partner enablement — collateral, lead routing and attribution that does not start an argument at month end.

Cost per qualified enquiry, site visits per hundred leads, site-visit-to-booking rate, and cost per booking against unit value. Lead count on its own is the metric that hides a failing campaign, because the cheapest leads in this category are almost always the least likely to visit.