Split the account by jurisdiction before you split it by asset class
Geography is the first cut in this market because it determines whether you can take the deal at all.
Start with three top level groupings: the District, suburban Maryland, Northern Virginia. Within each, break by asset class and then by submarket. That order matters, because the budget question you will be asked every month is where the money went, and the first answer needs to be a jurisdiction.
Set the targeting to location of interest rather than only location of the user. Someone sitting in Bethesda searching for Old Town Alexandria office space is a Virginia inquiry, not a Maryland one. Someone in New York searching Navy Yard retail is a real prospect. Radius targeting around your own office gets both wrong.
Draw the boundaries deliberately. A twenty mile circle from a downtown office covers three jurisdictions and a lot of water and parkland. Polygon targeting on the submarkets you actually work is more effort to set up and considerably cheaper to run.
If your firm is licensed in only one or two jurisdictions, exclude the others outright. Confirm the licensing position with your own counsel, then let the account reflect it.
'Real estate' in the District pulls rowhouse buyers and job seekers
The exclusion list is where a brokerage account in this metro is won or lost.
Broad real estate phrases here return residential intent at volume. Rowhouse buyers, condo renters, people researching neighborhoods. None of them will ever sign a lease with your industrial desk, and all of them will click.
The second drain is employment. Searches around commercial real estate careers, broker salary, licensing courses and internships are common in a metro full of people considering a career change. They convert on contact forms at a surprising rate, which makes them worse than useless.
Build the negative list before launch rather than after the first invoice. Residential terms, rental terms, jobs and licensing terms, coworking and virtual office terms unless you actually place those, and anything naming a portal brand by name.
Review search terms weekly for the first month and monthly after. New phrasings appear constantly, and a list that was clean in March is leaking by summer.
The phrases worth money name a size, a submarket and a use
Specificity in the query is the closest proxy you have for a real requirement.
Someone typing office space for lease Tysons Corner has a problem. Someone typing commercial real estate Washington DC is reading. Bid accordingly, and let the broad terms go to organic if they go anywhere.
The valuable patterns combine a use with a place: warehouse space Prince George's County, retail space for lease Columbia Heights, medical office Bethesda, flex space Reston. Add size and Metro proximity modifiers where the volume supports it.
Owner side phrasing is a separate campaign with a separate landing page. Someone searching for a broker to sell a building in Silver Spring is a different person with a different concern, and sending them to an availability page wastes the click.
Keep ad copy literal. Name the jurisdiction, name the submarket, name what you do there. Buyers here are used to procurement style review and discount promotional language quickly.
Fund Tysons and Navy Yard from separate budgets or the cheap clicks win
Shared budgets drift toward whichever submarket has the loosest auction, which is rarely the one you need to win.
Left alone, a single budget will pour itself into the cheapest available inventory. In practice that means the campaign you care least about gets the impressions and the assignment you must win gets throttled at eleven in the morning.
Cap and floor by campaign. A submarket you are actively pitching, or a building you have just taken to market, gets its own budget line that cannot be raided by anything else.
Pacing should follow your own calendar rather than the month. A new listing, a lease expiration cycle you track, a pitch you are preparing for: those are the moments to concentrate spend. A flat monthly spread is administratively tidy and strategically inert.
Small accounts should run fewer campaigns. Ten campaigns across a metro this size will starve all ten and give you nothing to learn from. Three or four, funded properly, will tell you something.
A qualified inquiry here is one that names its jurisdiction
Cost per lead is a comforting number that hides whether the lead was ever yours to work.
Define a qualified inquiry before you spend anything, and make jurisdiction part of the definition. An inquiry that does not say whether the requirement is in the District, Maryland or Virginia is incomplete, and the form should be built so that it cannot be submitted that way.
Push the outcome back into the platform. Feed the stage that matters, a booked tour or a pitch meeting, from your CRM into the ad account so bidding optimizes on that rather than on form submissions. Without it you are paying to maximize the cheapest possible action.
Price the thing you actually want. Work backward from a booked tour or a signed listing agreement to what a click can be worth, and hold the account to that number. It will be higher than most agencies quote and far more useful.
Report by jurisdiction as well as by campaign. A blended cost per inquiry across three jurisdictions can look healthy while one of them is producing nothing.
Clicks arrive at nine at night and your callback is the real bid
Paid demand in commercial real estate does not respect office hours, and response time changes the economics more than bid adjustments do.
Tenant reps and principals research at night and on weekends, often after a day of meetings. The click is bought at that moment. The conversation happens whenever someone at your firm gets to it.
Decide in advance who owns after hours inquiries and by which jurisdiction. An Arlington inquiry sitting in a shared inbox until Tuesday is money already spent and value already lost.
Dayparting is worth testing but rarely worth being aggressive with. Turning off evenings to save budget usually removes the highest intent research window in the week.
Winter matters more than people expect. Snow and ice move tours, and a week of canceled site visits creates a backlog that shows up as a bad month in the ad report. Note it, rather than reacting to it with bid changes.
Questions we actually get
- What should we spend to start?
- Enough to fund three or four campaigns properly rather than ten thinly. The right floor depends on the submarkets you are bidding in and how competitive the auctions are there, and we would rather look at your target submarkets and set a number than quote one blind. What we will not do is spread a small budget across the whole metro, which is the most common way brokerage accounts waste money here.
- Can we just run ads for our current listings?
- You can, and it works for buildings with genuine demand behind them. The limitation is that a listing leases and the campaign dies with it, so you never accumulate anything. A more durable structure runs submarket and requirement campaigns continuously, then adds a funded campaign for a specific building when you take it to market and retires that campaign when it is gone.
- Is LinkedIn worth it for owner side work?
- It reaches the person who appoints a broker, which search often does not, because an owner deciding to sell is not necessarily typing anything into a search engine. It is also slower and more expensive per action, and it works best as a sequence rather than a single ad. Treat it as a separate budget with separate expectations, not as an extension of the search account.
- How do we stop getting inquiries from jurisdictions we do not cover?
- Three things together: exclude those jurisdictions in targeting, name the jurisdictions you cover in the ad copy, and make jurisdiction a required field on the form. Any one of them alone leaks. Doing all three also gives you a clean way to route the ones that do arrive, since a referral out is better handled at intake than after a broker has spent an hour on it.
- What should we measure if we cannot measure closed deals quickly?
- Booked tours and pitch meetings, split by jurisdiction. Closings in commercial real estate happen too far downstream to steer an ad account, but tours happen inside a reporting cycle and correlate with what you care about. Feed that stage back into the platform so bidding optimizes on it, and treat cost per inquiry as a diagnostic number rather than a target.
