The Next-Gen Brand Lab
Meta, Google and channel choice
Should I advertise on 99acres, MagicBricks or Housing.com?
Last updated 2026-09-09
Portals capture buyers already searching for property, which makes their intent high and their volume capped by however many people are looking in your catchment this month. They are a reasonable complement to paid social and a poor replacement for it, because they cannot create demand — only compete for demand that exists. The characteristic problem is that your listing sits beside every competitor in the same locality, so you compete on price and photographs on a page you do not control.
What portals are good at
High-intent capture at predictable cost, and reaching buyers who start their search on a portal rather than on a search engine — which in India is a substantial share.
They are also useful early, before a project has any brand recognition, because the buyer is browsing a category rather than looking for you specifically.
The two structural problems
- You are listed beside your competitors. A portal page is a comparison surface by design. If your project is not the best value on that page, the page is working against you.
- You do not own the relationship or the data. Leads arrive through the portal's system, on their terms, and the audience you build there is not portable. Contrast an ad account where the pixel, the audiences and the spend history stay yours.
Portal leads also tend to be shared or resold depending on the package, which places some of them close to the resold-lead problem — cheap, non-exclusive, and already being called by others.
The sensible split
Portals for capture, paid social for creation, search for defence. If you only have budget for one, the answer depends on whether people are already searching for property in your catchment at the volume you need — which is a Phase 0 question, not a general one.
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