Case study · Real Estate · Netherlands

Real Estate Case Study Netherlands: +110% Leads

Name: Marketing & Lead Expert
Address: IN
Price range: $$

How an agency with 8 sales agents in Rotterdam grew appraisal requests 110% and cut cost per lead 37% in 6 months with Email Marketing, SEO and Meta Ads.

Illustrative case study: the business is anonymised and the figures are modelled on typical results for this market.

Real Estate · Netherlands

Realty

An agency with 8 sales agents in Rotterdam, selling and leasing homes across the wider Rotterdam area. Most seller leads came from Funda and referrals, so the agency was competing with every other agent for the same vendors. The goal was to win more vendor appraisals directly, cut dependence on portal lead products and turn more appraisals into signed listings.

Results After 6 Months

Appraisal requests

+110%

Cost per lead

-37%

Marketing-sourced revenue

+123%

Return on marketing spend

12.4x

The challenge

Where the business was stuck

Portal leads are shared with every agency in the area, and portal fees keep rising.
Seller and landlord leads are worth far more than buyer enquiries, but most marketing attracts buyers.
Agents spend hours on enquiries that were never going to list, buy or rent.
Peak season (activity is steady, with more new listings in spring) was not being planned for, so budget ran out when demand was highest.

The approach

Three services, one goal

We focused on Email Marketing, SEO and Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram), the three channels with the best cost per listing for real estate agencies in Rotterdam. Every call, form and chat was tracked to a booked outcome from week one, so every decision was based on revenue, not clicks.

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What we did

The technical work behind the numbers, service by service.

Service 1

Email Marketing

Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the sending domain and warmed it up, taking inbox placement from 63% to 94%.
Segmented 6,900 past customers and quote recipients by job type, area and last service date.
Built 5 automated flows: welcome, quote nurture, post-job review request, annual service reminder and win-back.
Sent a monthly campaign with seasonal offers for free valuations and sales mandates and related work, A/B testing subject lines and send times.

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Service 2

SEO

Technical audit and fixes: 157 crawl errors removed, mobile Largest Contentful Paint cut from 6.0s to 1.9s and indexing issues resolved.
Built 18 dedicated service pages for high-value work such as free valuations and sales mandates and purchase guidance, each targeting one search intent.
Added LocalBusiness, Service and FAQPage schema and rebuilt internal linking between services, locations and guides.
Earned 40 links from local news, suppliers, associations and community sites instead of low-quality link packages.

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Service 3

Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram)

Installed the Meta Pixel and Conversions API server-side, lifting event match quality from 5.4 to 8.8 out of 10.
Launched Instant Form lead ads with 5 qualifying questions (area, job type, timeframe) to filter out low-intent leads.
Tested 39 creatives: before and after photos, short job videos and owner-to-camera clips; the top 4 now carry the budget.
Built audiences from website visitors, video viewers and a 1% lookalike of past customers, excluding existing clients.
Synced lead ad submissions to the CRM in real time so every lead was called within minutes.

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The numbers

Before and after

Metric	Before	Month 6	Change
Appraisal requests per month	31	65	+110%
Cost per lead	€161	€101	-37%
Cost per listing	€1,477	€871	-41%
Appraisal-to-listing rate	11%	12%	+1 pts
Website conversion rate	3.1%	4.3%	+37%
Marketing-sourced revenue / month	€47k	€104k	+123%
Share of leads from portals	78%	24%	-54 pts
Email open rate	18%	44%	+26 pts
Organic sessions / month	1,651	4,842	+193%
Meta Ads leads / month	0	18	new channel

Lead growth

Appraisal requests per month

Marketing-sourced revenue went from €47k to €104k a month, measured from booked listings won in the CRM.

Optimisations That Moved The Numbers

01
Email flows now bring in €36k of repeat and referral work a month from customers who were already on the books.
02
Segmented campaigns reach a 44% open rate and 5.4% click rate, compared with 18% for the old one-size newsletter.
03
Consolidating 19 overlapping pages that competed for the same keyword doubled the surviving page's clicks.
04
Adding qualifying questions to the lead form cut junk leads by 30% while keeping cost per lead 31% below the account average.

The 6-month timeline

From tracking to scale.

Weeks 1 to 2
Audit, tracking and baseline
Call tracking, conversion tracking, CRM connection and a full audit covering Email Marketing, SEO and Meta Ads.
Weeks 3 to 6
Build and launch
Email Marketing, SEO and Meta Ads live for vendor appraisals.
Months 2 to 4
Optimise
Weekly search term, call and landing page reviews. Budget and effort moved to the jobs that close.
Months 5 to 6
Scale
Expansion into Groningen and nearby areas, plus new services with proven demand.

Illustrative case study: the business is anonymised and the figures are modelled on typical results for this market. Your results depend on your market, budget, capacity and follow-up. We share realistic forecasts in your free audit.