We sell marketing. So it is awkward to report that across fourteen of our own $5M+ campaigns, what was spent and what was achieved do not track each other.
The two strongest results in the set came from the two smallest budgets. One of them had no campaign at all.
Does a bigger marketing budget get a better price?
Not reliably, and not in any pattern I can find in our own numbers.
Across fourteen campaigns above $5 million, disclosed spend ranged from nothing to $66,439. The non-zero budgets spanned $1,634 to $66,439, a difference of more than forty times, with a median of about $15,000.
Where both the spend and the sale price are disclosed, marketing ran between 0.02% and 0.42% of the eventual price. An $8,375,000 sale carried a campaign budget of $1,634. A $6,000,000 sale carried $25,000.
That is an observation rather than an experiment. Fourteen very different properties, sold in different conditions, is not a controlled comparison and I would not claim it proves causation. But if spend were the lever people assume it is, you would expect to see something. There is nothing obvious there.
So what is the money actually doing?
Buying reach, which turns out to be the part that was never scarce.
The same fourteen campaigns generated 481,087 online views between them. Those views produced 248 inspections.
That is roughly one inspection for every 1,900 people who looked online. One property drew 100,211 views and six inspections. Another drew 17,033 views, produced a single inspection, and sold for $5,930,000.
Reach at this level is abundant and cheap relative to the asset. What is scarce is the small number of people who can actually transact, and getting in front of more strangers does not produce more of them.
Why do so few online views become inspections?
Because the audience for a $5M+ property is mostly spectators, and that is fine.
Premium property is interesting to look at. A large share of any online figure is people enjoying the photography with no intention or ability to buy. That is not a failure of targeting, it is the nature of the content.
The number that matters is the second one. Six inspections that are all genuinely qualified is a better campaign than sixty that are not, and the case where a single inspection produced a near-$6M sale makes the point more sharply than any argument could.
This is why I am wary of campaigns sold on projected impressions. Impressions are the easy number to promise and the one least connected to the outcome.
What about the properties that sold without a campaign?
Two of the fourteen carried no marketing spend, and both did well.
One sold off market for $10,200,000 to a buyer already looking for a premium coastal property, matched through the network with no public advertising at all. Another, listed at $8,375,000, sold in twenty days on a budget of $1,634 after sitting unsuccessfully with other firms.
I want to be careful here, because the obvious reading is that marketing does not matter. That is the wrong conclusion. Both of those results depended on already knowing where the buyer was. The spend was unnecessary precisely because the relationship and the network had done the work in advance.
You cannot decide to run a zero-dollar campaign. You can only find out afterwards that you did not need one.
What changed on the properties that had failed before?
Five of the fourteen had been on the market unsuccessfully with other firms first.
One had been listed for over a year, with more than twenty-five viewings and no offers. Relaunched properly, it had six qualified viewings and an offer within ten days. Another had six months on the market at around $5,000,000 without selling, and sold for $6,000,000 the following year.
In none of these did the property change. The positioning, the buyer targeting and the process did.
That is the most useful pattern in the fourteen, because it separates two things vendors routinely conflate. A property that is not selling is usually not a property problem.
What a vendor should take from this
Ask what the spend is for, rather than how large it is.
A budget aimed at reaching qualified buyers who are not currently looking is doing real work. A budget aimed at impressions is buying a number that our own figures suggest has almost no relationship to the result.
The useful question at a listing presentation is not what the campaign costs. It is who specifically this reaches that we would not otherwise reach, and how.
