10 Creative Real Estate Ad Ideas (With Free Examples)

Real estate advertising is a complicated industry. On the one hand, demand will always exist because one of the core human needs is shelter, and real estate is how people find that shelter. On the other hand, because of that continual demand, it often feels like everyone and their mother is brokering real estate, and you have to compete with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of others in the same space.

Of course, you can’t not advertise. Whether it’s organic blog posts, paid ads on MLS sites, or direct marketing, real estate ads are a critical part of the ecosystem. So, let’s go through some of the ideas you might be able to take and use to dominate your region and outshine the competition.

1: The Visual Walkthrough Carousel

Carousel ads are powerful on social media because they give viewers the option to tab through a handful of different photos. With a little bit of templated graphic design, you can take the 5-10 most compelling photos from a given listing and frame them alongside key points of information.

For example:

• An exterior shot with maximum curb appeal, with a caption talking about local schools.
• A comfortable shot of a den, with a caption promoting the newly installed central air.
• A shot of the updated bathroom, alongside a caption with key info like square footage and bed/baths.

It doesn’t take much to use a system like Canva to build a template that gives you space for your brokerage logo, the key details relevant to every image, like the address and your contact information, and space for the image and caption. Once you have that template, you can easily whip up a compelling set of images for any home you’re brokering.

Don’t forget to add small elements that reflect your brand ethos, the kind of audience you’re trying to reach, and other personal details. Your choice of color, whether you use curling flourishes or straight, clean lines, and your choice of font can all impact how well different people view your ads.

2: The Informational List

Another compelling option is one that can be repurposed in a variety of ways: the informational list. This is more generic information made up of the answers to questions you’re commonly asked. These can be extremely generic, like “what is the process for applying for a home loan?” or “what does a first-time home buyer need to know?” It can also be narrower and more specific.

For example, you can create a “Top 5 Etiquette Tips for Attending an Open House” document. You can then use this in a bunch of different ways.

• Expand the list to ten and publish it as an organic blog post on your website to attract visitors.
• Attach photos of listings in your area to each tip to illustrate how they work and publish it as a carousel ad.
• Make a short video going through each of them with a demonstration and publish it as an Instagram reel.

A clever strategy to wrap it up is to use a CTA like “come practice your open house etiquette” with the information for an upcoming open house you’re hosting.

3: The Announcement Card

A quick and easy option for advertising is to create images that use a compelling, generally exterior shot of the house that’s just about to hit the market.

Use large font for a “JUST LISTED” announcement, and pack that bad boy with all of the relevant information:

• Pricing
• Square footage
• Beds/baths
• Location
• Open house date
• Property size

The best part is, if you format it properly, this ad can work in several ways. Have it printed out as a postcard mailer and deliver it to people in the area. Run it as an ad with geofencing so it only shows to people likely to be searching for a home in that area. Build a deck out of several of them and run varying ads with multiple listings. One format can work for many different ads this way.

4: The Generic Brokerage Ad

One of the more difficult parts of running real estate advertising is the fact that your inventory is, quite likely, churning very quickly. It’s a pain to spend hours building out individual cards for homes hitting the market, only for them to all sell before you’ve had the ads running for more than a few days. While this isn’t a problem per se, it’s a hassle, and it means your ad inventory is constantly out of date.

One of the best solutions to this problem is a stable of backup ads that are all much more generic. You can think of them as “filler” ads, though they shouldn’t be actual filler. You want them to be useful and promotional but reflective more of your brokerage than of the homes in your inventory.

Simple ads can be surprisingly complex when you’re trying to make them generic and evergreen. When all you have is a logo, a sentence that represents part of your ethos, and a simple call to action, you have to make sure each one of those elements is optimized properly.

Make sure to consider all of the elements of your design. What colors and textures do you use? What font choices do you make? What are the concepts and feelings you want to evoke with this simple advertisement? There’s a lot that goes into even the simplest ads when you get down to the theory and psychology behind user behavior, so make sure to pin down at least the core elements you want to convey.

5: The Guide eBook

Another relatively simple option is the guidebook. Develop an informational packet that can help your target audience in some way. It doesn’t need to be super long – five to ten pages is often enough – but it should be valuable enough to help your audience achieve their goals.

Ideas might include:

• A walk-through of the home buying process for first-time home buyers.
• A guidebook on how to sell a home FSBO.
• A list of commonly-overlooked details to watch for in an open house.

The goal is to have something compelling and valuable, which you can then run other ads to promote.

One thing to note here is that there are services that allow you to buy or just take an eBook, put your own logo and contact information on it, and circulate it. These aren’t terribly effective – they’re usually very generic, and they don’t match your brand voice or tone. If anyone else in your area is also using the same service, it reflects even worse on you.

6: The Success Map

This one is an interesting twist and focuses more on promoting your own brand than it does on any specific home in your inventory. Take a recognizable map of your local area (usually something that pares it down to major roads and a couple of landmarks) and flag all of the properties you’ve helped sell in the area. If the stats reflect favorably on you, you can include elements like the prices, the days spent on the market, or whether or not they sold for over the asking price.

The goal isn’t to have a perfectly accurate map but rather to show how much business you do in the area. It’s a form of social proof; people are more likely to trust a real estate broker, both on the buyer’s end and the seller’s end, if that broker has a strong recent history of success. Sellers want to sell quickly and for as much as possible; buyers want to buy the home that best suits their needs. Tailor the map to the information that your audience finds most compelling and that makes you look the best.

7: The Gimmick Walkthrough

Depending on the kind of real estate broker you are, you may be able to take advantage of one of the more interesting kinds of gimmick walk-throughs that are trending more often today on YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok.

For example:

• A picture tour where every picture has a dressed-up skeleton somewhere in the shot.
• A picture tour where each picture makes it look like you have very tiny hands.
• A super-fast video tour incorporating a lot of humor ( like this guy’s videos)
• Mock “house hunters” style ads, such as the “I sell mud pies, and my husband is a bespoke dog haberdasher; our budget is $300,000” memes.

These are all ideas that have been done before, but they all showcase something a little off-beat and creative that helps you stand out from the traditionally stodgy and inflexible idea of real estate marketing. You don’t need to be the picture of high-class luxury; if you’re working with and selling to real people, you can be down to earth and touch base with them in a way that fits their humor.

It’s interesting to see these develop as more and more younger people get into industries traditionally dominated by older people, and bring their novel ways of doing things to the forefront.

8: A Great Blog

Alright, it’s hard to call a blog an advertisement in the traditional sense, but it’s really true. Organic marketing is still a huge part of successful modern marketing. Real estate blog posts should be compelling, interesting, and informative, and you should strive to make sure they’re as unique as possible. Don’t just write the most generic “how to buy a home” guides with some regional keywords attached; those aren’t compelling, and besides, the bigger agencies in your area have probably already covered them.

Instead, talk to real people, get their questions, and answer those questions in blog posts. The more you can tie your content to real examples from around your area, the better off you’ll be. Sure, you won’t be topping the Google search results for “real estate agent,” but you can get a lot more regional attention and sharing on regional social media if you’re tied closely to your area. You don’t need to be number one for generic terms if you’re the name people think of as a good broker nearby.

If you’re unsure what you should be writing about, Topicfinder is a great tool to help you out. By adding the URLs of a few of your primary competitors, you can see what they’ve been covering and find topics you can cover that can undercut, overtake, or circumvent their marketing with your own. Give it a try!

9: An Ongoing Email Digest

People who are shopping for a home tend to fall into a few categories. Some of them are long-term shoppers, who want to move eventually but don’t have time pressure forcing them to make a decision right away. Others have a narrow window and need to make a quick decision. Still others are investors looking for properties they can turn into short-term rentals or add to a landlord portfolio.

Often, as a broker, you cater to one of these groups more than to others because it’s what you know. You can build a mailing list that caters to these people and helps provide them with weekly (or even daily) updates on the homes in the area where they’re shopping.

The downside to newsletter marketing is that it’s not as visible or sharable as other kinds of marketing. On the other hand, it’s the only form of marketing that isn’t reliant on some kind of social algorithm or search ranking, and that counts for a lot.

10: Client Testimonials

One way you can make use of a listing that has already sold is to solicit a testimonial from the people you’ve worked with and use that as part of your marketing. You can then showcase these testimonials over images of the homes you’ve helped to sell and use those to attract the attention of other people who fit the same mold and who would love to work with you.

Social proof can be one of the most powerful forms of advertising because we live in a world where it’s hard to trust the things around you. Working with a business always feels like a gamble, and it can be difficult to tell if the people you’re working with are on your side or not. By sharing that social proof from past clients, you can help assure future clients that you’re right there with them.

Hopefully, some of these ideas resonate with you, and you can incorporate them into your marketing. Let me know if you have more specific questions or want to talk about specific ideas!

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