Case study · Real Estate · New Zealand

Real Estate Case Study New Zealand: +70% Leads

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How an agency with 14 sales agents in Tauranga grew appraisal requests 70% and cut cost per lead 31% in 6 months with SEO and GEO.

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

Real Estate · New Zealand

Realty

An agency with 14 sales agents in Tauranga, selling and leasing homes across the wider Tauranga area. Most seller leads came from Trade Me Property and realestate.co.nz 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

+70%

Cost per lead

-31%

Marketing-sourced revenue

+93%

Return on marketing spend

8.3x

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 (listings rise in spring (september to november)) was not being planned for, so budget ran out when demand was highest.

The approach

Two services, one goal

We focused on SEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation), the two channels with the best cost per listing for real estate agencies in Tauranga. 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

SEO

Technical audit and fixes: 243 crawl errors removed, mobile Largest Contentful Paint cut from 6.4s to 2.1s and indexing issues resolved.
Built 17 dedicated service pages for high-value work such as appraisals and listings and auction and tender campaigns, each targeting one search intent.
Added LocalBusiness, Service and FAQPage schema and rebuilt internal linking between services, locations and guides.
Earned 21 links from local news, suppliers, associations and community sites instead of low-quality link packages.

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Service 2

GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)

Created a consistent entity profile: the same business facts across the website, Google Business Profile, directories, LinkedIn and review sites.
Published 48 citation-ready answers on costs, timelines, regulations and brands, written in the formats ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity quote.
Earned mentions on 28 trusted third-party sites (industry bodies, local news, comparison articles) that AI models draw from.
Tracked 40 buyer prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews every month to measure citations and share of voice.

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The numbers

Before and after

Metric	Before	Month 6	Change
Appraisal requests per month	20	34	+70%
Cost per lead	NZ$316	NZ$218	-31%
Cost per listing	NZ$3,238	NZ$1,962	-39%
Appraisal-to-listing rate	10%	11%	+1 pts
Website conversion rate	2.3%	3.0%	+28%
Marketing-sourced revenue / month	NZ$46k	NZ$89k	+93%
Share of leads from portals	72%	15%	-57 pts
Organic sessions / month	2,200	5,697	+159%
AI answer citations (tracked prompts)	3 of 40	12 of 40	+9

Lead growth

Appraisal requests per month

Marketing-sourced revenue went from NZ$46k to NZ$89k a month, measured from booked listings won in the CRM.

Optimisations That Moved The Numbers

01
Consolidating 8 overlapping pages that competed for the same keyword doubled the surviving page's clicks.
02
Rewriting title tags around price and location intent raised organic click-through rate from 2.0% to 5.5%.
03
The business is now cited in 12 of 40 tracked AI prompts, up from 3.
04
AI assistants started sending referral visits within 6 weeks, and those visitors convert 21% better than 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 SEO and GEO.
Weeks 3 to 6
Build and launch
SEO and GEO 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 Christchurch 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.