How much should estate agents spend on Google Ads in 2026?

'How much should we spend on Google Ads?' is the most common paid search question we get from estate agents. The honest answer is: it depends on your patch, your conversion rate and what you're trying to defend. But there is a defensible framework, with real numbers from real UK estate agent accounts, and that's what this guide walks through. By the end you'll know roughly what to budget, where to put it, and how to spot when an agency is wasting your money.

Start with the three jobs Google Ads has to do

Most estate agents conflate three different campaign types into one 'Google Ads budget' and then can't work out what's working. The first step is to separate them, because they have very different economics.

The three campaign types

1. Brand defence — bidding on your own brand name. Cheap, defensive, mandatory if a competitor is targeting your brand. Typically 5–15% of total spend.
2. Competitor conquesting — bidding on the other agents in your patch. Expensive per click, but high intent. 10–20% of total spend if you choose to run it.
3. Non-brand high-intent — '[town] estate agents', '[town] property valuation', 'sell my house [town]'. The growth engine. 65–80% of total spend.

What to actually budget

Across the accounts we run for UK estate agents in 2026, the patterns are consistent enough to share publicly. Below are the bands we see by branch count and patch competitiveness.

Defensible monthly budgets

• Single-branch independent in a mid-competition patch (e.g. a county town): £1,200–£2,500/month total spend.
• Single-branch independent in a high-competition patch (e.g. London, Brighton, Manchester city centre): £2,500–£5,000/month total spend.
• 3–5 branch regional brand: £4,500–£9,000/month total spend.
• 10+ branch corporate network: £12,000–£40,000/month total spend, depending on patch overlap.
• Add a separate landlord acquisition campaign on top, typically £750–£2,000/month per branch.

Cost per valuation benchmarks

The number that matters is cost per valuation, not cost per click. Across our estate-agent accounts in 2026, here's what good looks like.

What to expect from a well-run account

• Brand defence: £4–£12 cost per valuation enquiry.
• Non-brand high-intent (sales): £40–£90 cost per valuation enquiry in mid-competition patches; £80–£180 in central London / prime areas.
• Landlord acquisition: £60–£140 cost per landlord enquiry, with the higher end common in BTL-saturated postcodes.
• If your current account is delivering valuation enquiries at 3–5x these numbers, the account is broken — not the channel.

The keywords that actually work

After running paid search for estate agents for over a decade, the keyword pattern is very stable. The high-converters are almost always close-to-purchase, location-specific and short. The wasters are almost always informational long-tail.

Bid on these

• 'estate agents [town]' / '[town] estate agents' — the bread and butter, exact match.
• 'sell my house [town]' / 'how to sell house [town]' — high-intent vendor terms.
• 'free property valuation [town]' / '[town] house valuation' — the highest-converting category.
• 'letting agents [town]' and '[town] property management' — the landlord equivalents.
• Competitor brand terms in your patch — controversial but works, provided you don't impersonate the competitor in the ad copy.

Don't bid on these (or bid carefully)

• 'estate agent' or 'property' on their own — too broad, too expensive, almost no intent.
• 'house prices [town]' — informational, very rarely converts to valuation.
• 'how much is my house worth' (without a location) — looks high-intent but converts at 5–10x your normal CPL.
• Anything with 'free', 'cheap' or 'low fee' — attracts the lowest-quality landlord and vendor enquiries.

What a good account structure looks like

Bad accounts have 200 keywords in one ad group, broad match enabled by default and conversion tracking pointing at the wrong event. Good accounts look like the opposite.

The structure we use

1. Single-theme ad groups — one for valuations, one for general agent terms, one for landlord, one for each town if you cover multiple patches.
2. Match-type discipline — exact and phrase only on commercial terms; broad match reserved for landlord / informational where we want discovery.
3. Aggressive negative keyword list — 'free', 'jobs', 'salary', 'wikipedia', portal brands ('rightmove', 'zoopla'), and any irrelevant locality.
4. Conversion tracking on the right event — valuation form submission, calendar booking or phone call > 60 seconds — never page views.
5. Smart bidding (Maximise Conversions or Target CPA) only after you have 30+ conversions in the account; manual CPC before that.

Performance Max — friend or foe?

Google has been pushing every advertiser toward Performance Max since 2023. For estate agents in 2026, the verdict is mixed. PMax can find net-new enquiries you'd miss in a pure search campaign, especially via YouTube and Display, but it will also cannibalise your brand and high-intent search if you let it. The recipe that works for our estate-agent clients is: keep search campaigns running for brand and high-intent non-brand, add a tightly-controlled PMax campaign for incremental discovery only, and exclude brand search terms from the PMax campaign at the account level.

How to know if your agency is wasting your money

If you're already running paid search and you suspect it's not working, here are the five questions to ask your agency. Honest answers to all five mean the account is in good hands. Vague answers to two or more mean you have a problem.

The five-question audit

1. What was our cost per valuation enquiry last month, by campaign?
2. How many of last month's valuation enquiries became instructions, and what's the cost per instruction?
3. What's our impression share for our top 10 commercial keywords, and what's stopping us hitting 100%?
4. What did we change in the account this month and what was the measured impact?
5. Show me the search-terms report — what wasted spend did we cut, and what new keywords did we add as negatives?

The bottom line

Estate-agent Google Ads is one of the most defensible paid channels in the business — if the account is structured properly, tracked properly and reported against instructions rather than clicks. A well-run account at £2,500/month for a single-branch independent should pay for itself two-to-three times over inside a quarter. If yours isn't, the account is the problem, not the channel. We offer a free Google Ads audit for any UK estate agent — drop us a line if you'd like an honest second opinion.