Top 10 Creative Real Estate Ads That Work (2022 Update)

Real estate ads can be tough to craft. We see them every day, and we know they play a key role in the real estate industry, but how do you make sure your ads stand out from the rest?

Many of the ads that have surfaced online over the last few years have been incredibly successful, but others have failed spectacularly. Can you tell the difference between an ad that will convert over the long term and one that will fizzle out in just a few (days)?

After scouring the web for days, we've compiled a list of 10 examples of the best real estate advertising strategies that have proven successful at converting customers. In this post, we'll look at why they're so compelling and how you can integrate them into your own campaigns!

Why are Real Estate Ads Important?

On the surface the answer is obvious: to get new clients, make more money, morph into a business unicorn and ride off into the sunset of your dream life.

But let's hold up a minute. The most essential step in this vision is the biggest one of all: getting new clients.  If you don't clearly define your ideal buyer profile, how do you know who you're communicating with? If you're unsure what potential leads search for on the internet, how will you effectively reach them with your message?

Compare a gorgeous ad that fails to reach the right audience with an average-looking advert seen by 50 percent of potential customers ready to make a purchase: which do you think makes more sales?

Where you choose to advertise your real estate business and who you advertise to is equally - if not more - important than how or what you're selling.

There are plenty of real estate marketing strategies, like SEO for Real Estate, that will get your business directly in front of a specific audience actively searching for your services. We recently compared the effectiveness of SEO and Google Ads in the real estate industry. So as you gather ideas for your campaign, consider who you're advertising to and how you plan to reach them with your message.

Best Real Estate Advertising Questions to Ask Before you Begin

Reflection is valuable when planning your advertising strategy for the upcoming years. Contemplate these questions to get the best results from your ad campaign. 

Which Stage of Buying Are Your Prospects in?

Ads are a means to build brand awareness, generate interest, drive traffic to your website, and ultimately get new customers. They are not a one-size-fits-all cop-out for targeting all of your target markets in one hit.

Understanding which phase of purchasing your clients are at will determine how you can effectively communicate with them. Are they looking for their first home? Scouring the market for a lucrative investment property? Searching for a retirement retreat?  

Many realtors' potential leads include several, or all, of the above. A diverse audience is not a bad thing: it just means you need to use your creativity to generate ads that speak directly to each group.

Is Your Real Estate Ad Performance Measurable?

Defining and reaching your ideal buyer persona is becoming a game of tact as marketing and advertising companies evolve deeper into niches and targeted messaging. To stay ahead in business, real estate agents must match messaging strategies to the paradigm shifts sweeping the industry.

Real estate agents can automate online advertising, target potential leads more frequently and with greater precision, and gain valuable market insights based on the responses and engagement those advertisements receive.

Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Tiktok offer tools for businesses to track and measure their advertising performance. You can measure engagement, check what works and what doesn't, and improve your strategy accordingly. This tracking is insular, meaning it only compares a business's success against its past performance.

Other strategies like SEO and Google Ads Pay Per Click (PPC) use Google's algorithms to target audiences from the point that they begin their search online. These tools offer critical market and performance insights. You can even see how your real estate advertising performs compared to other businesses in your area.

Are You Advertising for the Short Term or Long Term?

Social media advertising and PPC are effective advertising mechanisms over the short term. They perform well for business launches and one-time real estate listings that come up for a short period. However, they require that you consistently make new ads for each event and each consumer market you serve.

Google Adwords and social media ads are increasingly expensive in competitive markets like real estate. So what do you do when you want to achieve long-term business growth?

Would you like to see your business on the front page of Google? SEO for Real Estate is the most potent strategy out there to attract new leads over the long term because it gets your message and your business in front of potential clients as soon as they begin searching for your services using Google.

The better your website performs, the better it will rank, which means you'll see a consistent stream of leads for years to come. You spend less of your valuable time creating advertising material and it takes little investment.

If you like making ads and want to continue throughout 2022, here's our take on what the best real estate ads look like, why they're powerful, and how you can use these strategies in your campaign.

Best Features of effective Real Estate Ads

1. Address Customer Pain Points

A home is the beating heart of any family. Many home buyers search for a new property when they plan a family, want to expand their family, and when their family is transitioning into a new phase of their lives.

Finding a property that will accommodate a family's needs now and in the future is a significant pain point for real estate prospects.

Real estate agent Vakil Housing uses the phrase "Keep Your Whole Family Together," which addresses challenges many clients experience and acknowledges concerns about finding the right home. With this approach, you better connect to your leads and offer realistic solutions to their problems.

Consider why your clients would buy or sell a property. What are their interests and aspirations? What key features can you point out in listings that will connect you to them and help you solve their frustrations?

Addressing pain points creates interest in your offering because your services are profoundly relevant to your client's lives.

2. Target a Specific Audience

We've mentioned this before: if your message is not getting in front of the right audience, then you're missing out on critical growth opportunities. Targeting is a way to establish yourself as an expert within a specific niche.

Nikki Nail at MD Homes has identified that her target audience is first-home buyers, so she appeals to this group by speaking to them directly.

This ad has a supportive value proposition and a strong call-to-action to clients, asking them to reach out and discuss their goals and concerns with her. Nikki shows empathy, demonstrating that she cares deeply about the success of her client's journey.

She strategically uses hashtags that target first home buyers. Social media also offers paid advertising to disseminate messages to specific demographics and localities.

Google Ads and paid real estate Facebook ads can be used to target audiences, but there are alternative ways to get your message directly in front of customers who are ready to take action, such as SEO (which also has a longer and stronger impact). If you want to achieve profound and enduring business growth with your real estate ads, target your audiences with precision using SEO for Real Estate.

3. Use Satisfied Customer Testimonials

Nothing communicates how effective your services are more than somebody who has used your services! So why not attract more leads with social proof?

Allow happy clients to shout from social media's proverbial rooftops, as this Harcourts’ agent did. It highlights your brand's credibility to prospects who haven't experienced your over-and-above service.

Generally, people relate to others who share the same challenges as them. In fact, many buyers and sellers go directly to the testimonials during the decision-making process. Terms like "listened," "acted on our wishes," and "smooth, quick sale" are highly effective at painting your business (and your approach) as a dedicated and responsive realtor to assist them with their buying journey.

Testimonials build brand awareness and trustworthiness, as well as show that you are an active, helpful member of your community. It can also be used as a tool to break down any resistance that prospective clients may have about engaging in your services.

4. Virtual Property Tours

In response to the social distancing and lockdown constraints during the global pandemic, virtual property tours have taken the real estate industry by storm! Not to mention keeping the market afloat to some extent.

Virtual property tours are videos where you guide prospects through a home on the market, highlighting features to capture interest in the property.

The tour of this stunning luxury home in Florida not only provides convenience for those unable to make an open home, or who cannot easily access the property (for example because they live out of state).

They encourage a wider range of prospects because watching a ten-minute video demands significantly less energy and time than attending an open house. With virtual tours, you can go into detail about the features and characters of each home.

Video tours can be live-streamed from an open house, or you can prepare the video in advance for those who cannot attend. Optionally, you can reuse the video for promotional content.

The real-time, in-person feel of virtual tours creates trust and brand awareness for your business because people can get to know you.

Note that social media videos often disengage the sound, so it's a good idea to create captions of your dialogue and visual cues for specific features in the property you want to highlight.

5. Carousel Ad Format

The carousel ad format is one of the greatest gifts to online real estate advertising. As we see in this Berkshire Hathaway ad, you can select several stunning, well-lit images to showcase a home to prospective buyers.

In this real estate ad, they've decided to reveal multiple aspects of one property which captures the viewers attention and imagination as it gives leads a multidimensional perspective on the house.

The carousel form can also display multiple different property listings if you prefer that angle.

Because the visual appeal is what generates the most interest, make sure you select high-quality, beautiful images with good lighting to paint the property in the right light.

6. Drone Footage

Aerial visuals are spectacular. For those looking to buy a new property, drone footage highlights a beautiful home exterior, the expanse and condition of the plot it rests on, as well as the surrounding neighborhood.

This can be particularly effective if the location features landscapes, parks, or recreational areas because it showcases the kind of lifestyle that awaits potential buyers right at their new doorstep.

Residence in Phuket has strategically used aerial footage to portray the luscious lagoons in a quaint residential setting, which ignites the imagination as interested candidates envision what their future could look like when they live there.

Hiring a drone company to create footage of a property and its surrounding areas will be more costly than taking photos and videos yourself. But the high-quality video and photography adds a compelling edge to your effective real estate ads.

Videography shared on social media tends to enhance the organic reach of the ads more than static images and text because of social media algorithms and trends.

7. Think Outside the Box

The human brain is drawn to unique and irregular images. This concept can be integrated into your real estate marketing campaign to capture attention as Vernon Ubico has done in this example.

By offering a carousel viewing of the floor plan and plot size of a property, as well as the interior and exterior of the home, consumers are privy to additional insights regarding the layout of the home and the property's scope.

Floor plans are unusual visual elements to include in real estate ads, which is what makes them eye-catching.

Consider that floor plans are not mutually exclusive with "thinking outside the box." On the contrary, there are many ways to spark interest by communicating valuable information from a less common perspective. All you need is a little imagination!

8. Get into the Luxury Home Market

Luxury real estate advertising differs from selling regular properties. It's essential to understand the psychology and conviction of high-end buyers. The lifestyle and the property's unique story are what captivates your audience's attention.

NGU Real Estate has used the word "luxury" in their listing to indicate the nature of the property, complemented with high-quality, sophisticated images that display the sumptuous interior.

Phrases like "Most Exclusive Penthouse," and "The One" appeal to the type of buyers NGU Real Estate wants to attract. In other words, it's clear that this property is not suitable for a regular young family looking to enter the real estate market.

Luxury real estate ads can boost your business by catapulting you into a new buyer demographic, and with a higher price bracket comes a greater emphasis on polished, clean ads.

9. Focus on Your State or Area

Buying a new house is more far-reaching than simply choosing a property. It also represents finding a new home, which appeals to the sensory experiences we may have, the new scenery in our entourage, and the people who live there.

Bennett Real Estate Company has nailed these elements on so many levels. In this video, they glorify Southwest Georgia as a region, portraying its propriety as a "home."

The team also establishes their brand as an active and community-engaged business and family in the area, which emanates trustworthiness. This has a more subtle undertone and adds depth to the message they communicate: Southwest Georgia can be your home too.

Sell your region, not just the real estate there. Provide beautiful images and information about why the place is so great! You're already a credible source of information if you live there and truly believe it's the greatest spot in the world to be. Not to mention that nurturing people is a powerful advertising tool.

10. Provide Valuable Content

When you offer advice and tips to prospects, you show that you want to help them achieve their goals. Lori Lukeman from Keller Williams Real Estate has used this concept by sharing some tips on how to increase the value of your property.

This is a more general approach because it appeals to anybody looking to sell their home, rather than a particular style of house, or in a specific region.

By showing that she cares, Lori creates excellent brand awareness and connection with her prospects. She demonstrates empathy by nurturing leads through their journey.

The other great thing about content is that you can find blogs and articles about almost anything these days. If you have the time to write something up yourself, you also inaugurate yourself as an expert and build credibility, which is great for business.

What to Avoid in Your Real Estate Ads

Now we've taken a look at some top tips for how we can improve the quality and effectiveness of real estate ads in 2022. But it wouldn't be a complete article unless we covered an example of what to avoid doing to make your ads extra powerful.

Here we can see an ad created by Sage Real Estate. After reading the property description, the home for sale sounds like a great spot, but there are a few things Sage could do to improve its click-through rate.

There are No Supporting Images

But with a beautiful open-plan layout, incredible city views, and two massive patios, why are there no images to support this property ad?

Nowadays, people's time and attention are fleeting. Attractive images grab people's attention immediately, and the information is easier to process than a block of text.

There is No Text Flow

One large block of text is not easy to scan. If you are only using text for your real estate ads, consider using the following to highlight features and direct the attention of your readers:

• Bullet lists: Important information that has been bulleted is easier for readers to process
• Capitalize important information: Important words and property features will stand out when they are capitalized
• Use emojis: To communicate moods and create visual interest in your text, throw a few emojis in the mix.

No Audience Targeting

Sage has not specified the buyer profile who may be interested in this property, nor have they included any indicators such as a price range. They have included a CTA, though it does not emphasize a value proposition or create a compelling case to explore the possibilities of the property.

Remember that people's attention is fleeting. The easier it is for your targeted audience to understand who the ad is meant for, the more information your ad communicates, and the greater the ad's value proposition, the more likely you are to experience success.

Final Thoughts 

In 2022, real estate agents have access to so many different avenues to create compelling ads for realtors, regardless of who you are, your specialty markets, and the audience you serve.

If you choose to opt for Google Ads or social media advertising, you can mix and match these approaches to ensure your short-term marketing campaigns remain a cut above the rest.

Or, if you don't have time consistently available to create new ads for your business, make use of SEO for Real Estate. It's the best strategy for real estate professionals to secure long-lasting growth with a consistent stream of ready-to-buy clients in 2022 and for years beyond.

Ensure your business and your messages reach the right audiences with creative real estate ads. This will enable you to stay relevant and keep your business thriving as you chart new territories in the year ahead!