Search captures the requirement; LinkedIn reaches the person who signs
Running a brokerage account on search alone caps your reach at the small share of the market that happens to be typing this week.
Google gets you the active requirement. Someone typing "warehouse for lease Palm Beach County 10000 sq ft" is in market now and worth a premium bid.
LinkedIn gets you the appointment. Facilities directors, CFOs at growing local employers, private owners of two or three assets, family office principals: they can be targeted by title, company size, industry and geography whether or not they are searching.
The two campaigns should carry different messages. Search answers a stated need with availability. Professional network ads carry a point of view, a market note, or a specific piece of expertise, because interrupting someone requires giving them something.
Budget split depends on your pipeline. A firm that needs listings weights the network side; a firm sitting on unleased inventory weights search.
The negative keyword list is where a brokerage account is saved
Left unmanaged, commercial real estate search terms fill with residential, jobs and licensing traffic that will eat a monthly budget without producing one tour.
Start with the obvious blocks: apartments, homes for sale, condo, rental, realtor near me, zillow. Residential intent is the single largest source of waste in this category and the phrases overlap heavily with yours.
Then block the career and education layer: commercial real estate jobs, CRE license Florida, broker course, salary, internship. Volume there is high and its commercial value to you is zero.
Add the research layer selectively: market report, cap rate definition, what is NNN. Some of that traffic is worth having on the content side of the site, but not at auction prices.
Exact and phrase match do most of the structural work. Broad match belongs in a separate, capped campaign whose only job is discovering the terms you did not think of, reviewed weekly and harvested.
Bid on the district names, not just the city
Downtown West Palm Beach is thirteen districts under one code, and the district-level phrases are cheaper and better qualified than the city-level ones.
The Downtown Master Plan Urban Regulations reflect districts including the Okeechobee Business District, the CityPlace District, the Quadrille Garden District, the Clearlake District, NoRA and Brelsford Park. People with real requirements name these places.
Build ad groups around them and write the ad copy to match. "Office availability in the Okeechobee Business District" is a different promise from "West Palm Beach office space," and the click through difference shows it.
Extend the same logic outside downtown to the industrial and flex corridors your team actually covers. Geographic specificity is the cheapest quality signal in a low volume account.
Set radius targeting carefully. A tenant requirement often originates from out of state headquarters, so location of interest matters as much as physical location, and excluding the rest of the country will cost you real demand.
Pace the budget against the listing calendar, not the calendar month
A brokerage's paid spend should surge when there is inventory to move and a pitch to win, and go quiet when there is not.
Even monthly pacing is a default that suits platforms, not brokerages. If a new office availability comes to market or a portfolio goes under an exclusive, the following weeks are when incremental spend is worth most.
Build the account so campaigns can be turned up and down by asset or submarket without rebuilding structure. Shared budgets across everything make that impossible.
Pitch cycles deserve their own treatment. When you know an owner is selecting a listing agent, targeted professional network campaigns aimed at that company and its peers keep your firm visible through the decision window.
Watch the auction seasonally rather than assuming it. Costs move with competitor activity, and the only way to know is to have been in the auction long enough to have a baseline.
Landing on the availability page beats landing on the homepage, every time
Paid traffic sent to a brokerage homepage converts poorly because the visitor has to restate a requirement the ad already knew.
If the ad said industrial in Riviera Beach, the page should open with industrial availability in Riviera Beach, with size bands, clear space, loading and the covering broker's direct line.
Keep the enquiry form short and specific to the trade: requirement type, approximate size, target timing, and whether they are a principal or representing one. Nothing else at first contact.
Give a second option that is not a form. A phone number that a person answers during business hours, and a calendar link for a tour or a call. Some of the best commercial enquiries will never fill in a form.
Where an offering memorandum needs a confidentiality agreement, say so on the page rather than after the click, and make the process one step.
Measure cost per signed agreement, not cost per enquiry
A brokerage that optimises to form fills will end up buying tyre kickers efficiently.
The chain that matters runs enquiry, qualified requirement, tour or meeting, offer or proposal, signed agreement. Every stage needs a status field somewhere your team will actually update, usually the CRM.
Feed the qualified stage back into the ad platforms as the conversion signal wherever your systems allow it. Optimising to the deeper event changes who the algorithms go and find.
Accept that attribution will be imperfect. Deals here close over months through phone calls and introductions, and no platform will claim the credit cleanly. Directional truth from a maintained pipeline beats precise nonsense from a dashboard.
Review at the campaign and submarket level rather than the keyword level. In an account with this little volume, keyword-level decisions are mostly noise.
Questions we actually get
- What should we budget for commercial real estate paid search here?
- We will not quote a figure without seeing your submarkets and the current auction, and any agency that quotes one before looking is guessing. What we can say about the shape: search budget should be sized to the small number of genuinely in-market queries rather than to a percentage of revenue, and anything above that ceiling is better spent on professional network targeting.
- Does Google Ads work at all for investment sales, or only leasing?
- Leasing is the stronger search fit because tenants search. Investment sales demand is mostly relationship driven and shows up as searches for specific asset types, submarkets, or the phrase "who bought." For the sell side, paid search plays a supporting role and professional network targeting plus your own list does the work.
- How do we stop paying for residential clicks?
- An aggressive negative list built before launch, exact and phrase match on the money terms, and a weekly search term review for the first two months. Residential overlap is the standard failure mode in this category and it is preventable, not inevitable.
- Can you target a specific company we want as a tenant?
- On professional networks, largely yes, by company and by job title, subject to audience size minimums and the platform's own rules. On search, no, you are targeting queries not people. That is exactly why the two run together.
- How quickly can we turn campaigns on for a new listing?
- If the account is already structured with submarket campaigns and approved copy templates, days rather than weeks. Building that structure up front is the point: it means a new exclusive can be behind paid support almost immediately instead of waiting on a new build.
