The Next-Gen Brand Lab
Choosing an agency
How do I choose a real estate marketing agency?
Last updated 2026-09-09
Ask five questions and weight the answers heavily. What is your written definition of a qualified lead? Who owns the ad account and pays the platform? What is your price, as a number? What did you refuse to do for a client and why? And what is your sales-ready rate, not your cost per lead? An agency that cannot answer the first three in one sentence each is selling you volume it has not defined, on money you cannot audit, at a price you cannot compare.
Why these five
Each one tests something that only shows up later, once switching is expensive.
The definition tests whether "qualified" means anything. The account ownership tests whether you will be able to verify spend or leave with your data. The price tests whether you are being scoped or sized up. The refusal tests whether the research gate is real — an agency that has never talked a client out of spending does not have one. The sales-ready rate tests whether anything past the form fill is being measured at all.
What the market currently looks like
In a scrape of the Meta Ad Library on 9 August 2026 covering 41 distinct agencies advertising to developers: none published a price, none sold a paid diagnostic, and none defined "qualified" despite most of them using the word. The consensus pitch in the category is lead volume and urgency.
That is useful when you are choosing. Any agency that answers three of the five questions above is already unusual, and the ones that cannot answer any are relying on the fact that you will not ask.
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