How buyers actually search
Three distinct groups, and treating them as one is the usual mistake. Serious buyers search by locality and specification: the area plus “apartment”, plus a budget, plus “land for sale”. Researchers are eighteen months out, reading about prices and areas, and will not respond to a site-visit offer. Browsers click property advertisements out of curiosity and fill in forms with no intention of buying, and they are the majority of paid-lead volume.
Meanwhile the decision involves a family, often over months, and frequently a diaspora buyer purchasing from abroad on the advice of relatives here. That combination is why response speed and long follow-up matter more in this category than creative.
Which channels earn their place
- Project and locality pages. One per project with specification, price, floor plans, location detail and progress photographs, plus locality pages about the areas themselves, which is where the researchers are and where almost nobody publishes: real estate SEO.
- Google Ads for locality and specification searches, which capture the serious group at the moment of intent: Google Ads for real estate.
- Meta Ads for project launches and site visits, with lead forms that qualify rather than maximise volume: Facebook and Instagram Ads for real estate.
- Diaspora targeting, since a meaningful share of Nepali property purchases involve a buyer working abroad. That is a separate audience, in a different time zone, needing different creative and a video walkthrough rather than a site visit.
- Video walkthroughs. The single most effective asset in this category, for both local and overseas buyers, and the one most developers do not produce.
- Automation for the long cycle. Instant acknowledgement, routing to the right sales person, and nurture over months: automation for real estate.
Qualification is the whole game
A property lead form that asks only for a name and number will fill up, and the sales team will spend the month calling people who wanted to look at pictures. Adding two or three questions, budget range, timeline and whether they are buying to live in or to invest, reduces volume substantially and increases site visits.
That trade is worth making explicitly, because the reported cost per lead will rise and the cost per site visit will fall. If nobody agrees that in advance, the qualification gets removed the first time the lead count drops.
How an engagement runs
- Agree the measure. Site visits, or qualified leads defined by budget and timeline, rather than raw enquiries. Everything else follows from this.
- Tracking and routing. Calls, forms and WhatsApp tracked; leads routed to a named sales person with a response-time expectation, because speed decides more outcomes than targeting does.
- Project and locality pages built with real specification, pricing guidance and progress photographs.
- Video walkthroughs for each project, used across paid social and sent directly to diaspora enquiries.
- Paid campaigns split by group: search for serious buyers, social for launches and site visits, separate campaigns for diaspora audiences.
- Nurture sequences so a buyer who is six months away is still yours when they are ready.
- Reporting on site visits and bookings by source, with cost per site visit as the headline number.
What I see most often
- Lead forms with no qualification, producing volume the sales team cannot use.
- No pricing anywhere, in a category where budget is the first filter a buyer applies.
- Renders instead of progress photographs, which experienced buyers discount.
- No locality content, so the eighteen-month researcher never encounters the developer.
- Leads called two days later, by which time three competitors have responded.
- Diaspora enquiries handled with the same script as local ones, ignoring the time zone and the fact that they cannot visit.
Full stack for this industry
See real estate SEO, Google Ads for real estate, Facebook and Instagram Ads for real estate and automation for real estate.