Just like all other markets, real estate is going digital.

Today, 50% of buyers find their homes online. At the same time, 48% of real estate agencies consider it a challenge to implement technology.

If the internet were a real estate market, Facebook would be its second largest property.

Given this, real estate advertising on Facebook has a bright future.

Why Is Facebook the Best Platform for Real Estate?

According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), Facebook is the most popular social media platform among realtors, brokers, and sales agents, followed by LinkedIn and Instagram.

More than 97% of real estate professionals use Facebook for their marketing needs. Let’s find out why.

Gather Your Community Under One Roof

Facebook is the largest advertising platform after Google for promoting your real estate business.

You can engage with your current audience on Facebook as well as find people who want to buy, sell, rent, and lease property among the platform’s more than 2 billion monthly active users.

Tell Everyone About Important Things

Thanks to your Page, you can inform your clients of everything they need to know about your company.

Posts from your News Feed can take various forms:

• Short publications to share news and updates
• Live streaming videos from your office or properties you’re offering
• Event invites
• Special offers

You can share news and updates, encourage people to call you or start a chat in Messenger, tag other companies in your posts, and even offer a job.

Get Feedback to Improve Your Real Estate Business

Facebook ads for real estate work effectively if a company has lots of positive reviews.

After seeing your ads, people will probably visit your Page and read feedback from past clients.

Aside from reviews, your Page is full of other vital information.

Any comment, share, impression, and review left by your clients may lead to closing a deal.

Regularly monitoring feedback from Facebook users helps you to achieve better results for your agency. Let’s give an example.

Say a client can’t reach you on your website. Luckily, she can reach you on Facebook.

By the way, responding to comments isn’t the only way to boost your customer support on Facebook.

Provide Clients with Professional Customer Support

Facebook offers live chat functionality so businesses can communicate with users in private.

Users can ask any question and share feedback in Messenger.

To improve the user experience, you can also create a Messenger chatbot.

Chatbots respond immediately. They can give direct answers to some of your clients’ inquiries and win extra time for your customer support staff when they’re busy.

Promote Properties to Any Customer Group

The abundance of targeting options for your Facebook ads allows you to reach the audience you need. You can segment people by location, age, interests, behavior, and other characteristics.

Thanks to the Custom Audience feature, you can use Facebook to connect with homeowners, leaseholders, buyers, and renters you’ve already engaged with on your website, in your mobile app, and offline.

All you need to do is upload a list with names, emails, phone numbers, etc. After that, Facebook will find these people’s profiles and display your ads to them.

Use Instruments to Optimize Your Ads and Ad Campaigns

There are lots of official tools to help you get the most out of Facebook ads for real estate.

For example, Facebook Pixel allows you to track conversions from your website and create different audiences from existing clients.

Audience Insights, Insights to Go, and Cross Border Insights Finder are three different platforms for monitoring the interests and behavior of Facebook users. These platforms allow any real estate specialist to create an audience template and use it for future ad campaigns.

Creative Hub and Mobile Studio can teach beginners to make Facebook ads from scratch.

Your developers can go to Facebook for Developers and install different APIs to optimize your ads as well as AI-powered and other tools to produce your ads more effectively.

Display Ads Across The Facebook Ad Network

Facebook advertising for realtors, brokers, and agents isn’t all about Facebook.

Facebook offers placements on Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network.

You can run your real estate ads across the entire ad network automatically or edit placements by hand.

Both options have their pros and cons. Test different strategies and launch ad campaigns not only on Facebook.

6 Tips to Create Facebook Ads for Real Estate and Succeed

Now let’s move on to recommendations that will help your real estate business flourish.

Run Lead Ads to Get High-Quality Leads

Facebook Lead Ads are instant forms that pop up after users click or tap them.

A Lead Ad form allows you to collect users’ names, emails, phone numbers, and other personal data without leaving Facebook.

Aside from getting contact information from leads, you can also ask custom questions in your forms.

There are four types of custom questions:

• Short answer – A perfect option for asking simple questions and getting free-form answers
• Conditional answers – A set of questions in which each question depends on the previous answer
• Appointment scheduling – Allows you to arrange meetings with your potential clients
• Multiple choice – Lets leads choose from a set of possible answers

When it comes to real estate and Facebook ads for lead generation, there are lots of ways for a broker or sales agent to get new leads.

Homesnap, a mobile app for real estate agents, ran a year-long ad campaign on Facebook to promote Keller Williams Capital Properties and get a higher ROI.

Throughout 2017, their Lead Ads helped Homesnap attract 184 leads, get over $31,000 in commission, and achieve a sevenfold increase in ROI.

You can invite leads to take a home tour, offer them a property brochure, and ask about their needs and requirements.

Create Lookalike Audiences to Get Even More Leads

If searching for new leads on Facebook is one of your major priorities, you should create one or several Lookalike Audiences.

Remember the Custom Audiences we mentioned above?

Lookalike Audiences are a type of Custom Audience that allows you to find leads who are similar to the people in any Custom Audience you’ve created.

This lead generation method works great if the source for your Lookalike Audience has high-quality leads that are interested in your services.

Also, note that the quality of your leads from a Lookalike Audience directly depends on its size. The larger your Lookalike Audience, the less similarity it will have with your source audience.

Find The Right Audience with Detailed Targeting

Speaking of audiences, detailed targeting is a crucial option you should pay attention to when creating Facebook ads for real estate buyers.

Detailed targeting allows you to find clients using three major criteria: demographics, interests, and behavior. Each of these criteria includes dozens of options. The more options you choose, the bigger the audience you’ll create for your ads.

You can play with different tags and build different combinations to attract different groups of users. For example, you can choose people who are away from their families, have recently moved, and who like Pages related to housing.

A perfect example of a detailed targeting filter when running Facebook ads for real estate sellers is people who like Zillow or Trulia.

There are millions of users on Facebook who have liked Pages related to these two companies, both of which are popular in the US real estate market. Probably some of them are looking for a new home right now.

Launch Dynamic Ads for Real Estate

Dynamic Ads are Image, Carousel, and Collection Ads generated automatically from an ad template to promote hundreds of items from a real estate inventory at the same time.

Facebook delivers Dynamic Ads to users who have visited your website, used your app, or engaged with your business elsewhere on the internet, as well as to potential clients from a broad audience who may have an interest in the properties you offer.

To set up Dynamic Ads, all you need to do is:

• install the Facebook Pixel or SDK on your website
• upload home listings to Facebook
• create an ad template to generate your ads
• launch an ad campaign in Ads Manager.

You should launch Dynamic Ads for Real Estate, which is one of three special types of Dynamic Ads along with Travel and Automotive. Automated Facebook ads for real estate agents are optimized for the industry.

Compared to standard Dynamic Ads, they have unique options to present your properties with as much detail as possible and target clients across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network with relevant property recommendations.

Promote a Few Properties Simultaneously with Carousel Ads

Carousel Ads is an ad format that allows you to display up to 10 images or videos in a single post.

Every card in a Carousel ad has its own image, headline, link, and button. This gives you great options for demonstrating:

• One property. Show the benefits of one property by adding images of all rooms.
• A few properties. Showcase different properties from the same area.

In fact, these are only two examples of what you can do with Carousel Ads. We bet you’ll find more ways of using them.

Boost Conversions with Artificial Intelligence and Video Ads

Photography has been helping real estate professionals for a long time.

What could help sell a property better than photos? Videos, of course!

Video is one of today’s hottest digital trends, and is expected to account for 82% of global internet traffic by 2022.

More and more companies across all markets are embracing this trend and using videos for their ads. There are a few reasons for that.

First, an average user watches at least a few minutes of video every day.

Additionally, video content isn’t hard to produce anymore, especially for real estate agencies.

At Softcube, we see this every day. Our artificial intelligence engine crawls real estate listings to get all necessary data about a property, watches footage of the property, chooses the best scenes, adds visuals and text, and compiles the result into a high-quality video ad:

Thanks to human-free technology, video production has become faster and cheaper, making it possible to quickly create top-notch video ads at scale.

10 Best Real Estate Facebook Ad Examples

Now it’s time for some inspiration. Let’s check out the real estate Facebook ad examples made by the biggest players in the market.

Zillow

Zillow is one of the biggest real estate databases in the United States. To simplify the home search process for buyers and renters, the company offers an official mobile app.

Take a look at this eight-second Facebook video ad with a link to the Zillow app.

The ad has an Install Now button to download the app from the App Store. The video is made according to the canons of Facebook: it’s short, colorful, and informative.

Trulia

Acquired by Zillow in 2015, Trulia is another real estate website for agents, home sellers, buyers, and renters.

This example ad contains simple text with a call to action, an atmospheric photo, a property address, and a Learn More button, which leads to the official website.

Realtor

For people looking for or selling a home, it’s important to know who they’ll be working with. Promoting realtors and agents is a popular trend among giants such as realtor.com.

The ad you see above has a Learn More button, which leads to the profile of Bernadette Gingrass, a local real estate professional.

This example shows that you can use Facebook to connect potential clients who live or want to live in a particular area with your agents working in that area.

Homesnap

This ad example from Homesnap is an alternative to the ad from realtor.com.

The post includes a specific offer from agent Mark Rebert. There’s a Learn More button and a phone number to contact Mark and ask about a home tour.

Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC

A home isn’t just about the number of rooms or location; it’s about the atmosphere.

This is what Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC is trying to say in their Facebook image ad.

If you want to drive Facebook users to your website with your ads, the message is very important.

Keller Williams Realty, Inc.

Aside from promoting properties, you can attract potential clients with the results you’ve achieved.

Keller Williams Realty, Inc. launched a Facebook ad to share their Q1 2019 performance report, which includes information on profit and growth and the number of referrals.

The company came up with inspiring text, designed an original image, and added a Learn More button leading to the report.

Gulf Sotheby’s International Realty

Gulf Sotheby’s International Realty created a Carousel Ad to advertise a few properties in Dubai in a single ad. In fact, Carousels are more than ads.

They’re galleries that give publishers more opportunities than traditional Facebook image ads.

Every card in this ad has an image with text, a property description, and a Learn More button.

Redfin

Redfin promoted a new listing using a text description with a CTA, a photo of the property, its address, and the current price.

After users tap the Open Link button, they can view all properties listed by the brokerage firm.

RE/MAX

Sometimes, a simple sentence and a high-quality photo are enough to get people interested.

RE/MAX, one of the oldest teams of real estate agents in the US, offers users to go to their website and view spaces in some of their latest homes.

National Association of Realtors

Here’s one last example of great Facebook advertising for realtors.

NAR calls professionals to take advantage of its C2EX Endorsement program to boost the efficiency of their work.

Facebook doesn’t recommend placing text on ad images. But there can be exceptions. The example above shows how you can integrate a slogan and a logo so they look organic.

Find the Right Home for Your Facebook Ads

Real estate and Facebook ads fit each other well.

The world’s top social media network offers amazing opportunities to brokers, realtors, agents, and other real estate professionals.

There are various ad types, targeting options, placements, and tools that can be effective for achieving different marketing objectives on Facebook and beyond.

If you’d like to get better results using video ads, start by testing Softcube artificial intelligence platform.

All the best with your real estate business!