If your marketing budget is simply whatever is left after everything else has been paid, you’re probably looking at marketing the wrong way.
Another trap is thinking that advertising your clients’ properties is the same as marketing yourself.
Photography, floorplans, portals, signboards and property campaigns help sell the property. In many real estate businesses, these costs are funded partly or entirely through Vendor Paid Advertising.
Your own marketing budget has a different job. It builds your reputation, keeps you front of mind with future clients and gives homeowners reasons to choose you when they eventually need an agent.
So, how much should you invest?
Start with a percentage of your income
There is no magic number for every real estate agent or agency.
Your budget depends on your GCI or agency revenue, growth targets, existing market position and how much marketing you are prepared to do yourself.
Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey found marketing budgets averaged 7.8% of company revenue. The businesses surveyed are across multiple industries, but it provides a useful benchmark.
For real estate, I would work on approximately:
- 5–7% of GCI or revenue if you are established and maintaining your market position.
- 7–10% if you want consistent growth and a stronger local presence.
- 10–15%+ if you are launching, entering new suburbs, building a new brand or aggressively taking market share.
An agent writing $500,000 GCI and investing 8% has an annual marketing budget of $40,000.
Interestingly, a pre-Covid survey I conducted with McGrath agents, earning around $500,000 GCI, found that 67% were spending between $38,000 and $45,000 a year marketing themselves.
Different era. Almost exactly the same ballpark.
| Annual GCI/revenue | 5% | 8% | 10% |
| $250,000 | $12,500 | $20,000 | $25,000 |
| $500,000 | $25,000 | $40,000 | $50,000 |
| $750,000 | $37,500 | $60,000 | $75,000 |
| $1 million | $50,000 | $80,000 | $100,000 |
If you’re a principal of a real estate agency, calculate your percentage against your own gross business revenue, excluding pass-through vendor advertising expenditure.
$2,000: Establish the basics
For a new agent or agency, this is a bare-minimum starting point. Your aim is simply to make sure you look professional when somebody searches for you.
Marketing activities to prioritise:
Professional copywriting for your agent bio and key profiles. Your copy needs to explain why someone should choose you rather than repeat what every other agent says.
Professional profile photography. You are the product, so real, high-quality photographs will sell your expertise better than generic imagery.
Reviews. Build your presence with subscriptions to client review sites. RateMyAgent feeds into Domain and Realestate.com.au has a review option.
There are free and premium models, with the premium costing about $1100 annually, that put your agency at the top of the listing page for your suburb. A great free option is Google Reviews, which is hyper-local.
Reviews have also become increasingly important. Google confirms that review quantity and ratings can contribute to local prominence in Search and Maps. Realestate.com.au reports that 76% of sellers who use online sources use ratings and reviews to help find an agent and its platform now allows consumers to share realestate.com.au reviews to Google Business Profiles.
Referral platforms such as OpenAgent, Which Real Estate Agent and Local Agent Finder or one of the many referral sites, if you need another source of listing opportunities while establishing your own pipeline.
A basic website or landing page using platforms such as Google Sites, Squarespace, WordPress or Canva if you cannot yet invest in a professionally built real estate website.
At this level, expect to do most ongoing marketing yourself.
$5,000: Start building your profile
Once the foundations are in place, give prospects more opportunities to get to know you.
Once you’ve invested in the tactics above, add:
- A professional profile video explaining who you are, your point of difference and why clients choose you.
- Social media training for yourself or a team member so you understand how to use the platforms strategically.
- Professionally established social profiles with consistent biographies, photography, branding and contact information. Here are some do’s and don’ts to follow.
This gets you started, but marketing is not set-and-forget. You will need to invest your own time to maintain momentum.
$10,000: Improve your digital presence and reach
At this level, start investing in digital assets you control and distribution that puts them in front of prospects.
Priorities include:
- A professionally built real estate website that works on mobile devices and is optimised for search. Just be aware that there is a smorgasbord of real estate website offerings in the market. A custom-built website is a little more costly because you purchase it outright, whereas a subscription-based option is rented, so if you end the relationship with that software company, you don’t get to keep your website.
- Google and Meta advertising to put your business in front of homeowners rather than waiting for them to discover you.
- Marketing expertise. Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and other platforms have different algorithms, targeting options and campaign structures.
Think of your website as a billboard rolled up in a cardboard tube. Advertising takes it out, unrolls it and places it where people can actually see it.
Different campaigns also perform different jobs, and costs range from cents per click right up to $100 per lead.
- Awareness campaigns get your brand in front of more people.
- Traffic campaigns send prospects to your website.
- Lead campaigns encourage prospects to take action or submit their details.
If you’ve got the time, inclination and technical nous, you can teach yourself GoogleAds, Google’s official advertising interface.
$20,000: Invest in content
This level allows you to build a more substantial digital presence and remain useful to prospects before they are ready to appoint an agent.
Add:
- Educational content such as articles, neighbourhood guides, FAQs and property market insights.
- Video content that demonstrates your expertise and personality.
- Social media promotion to extend the reach of your best content.
- Email marketing to keep in touch with past clients, homeowners, landlords and prospects in your database.
Email remains one of real estate’s most valuable channels because it gives you direct access to an audience you already know.
At this level, however, you will probably still be responsible for planning topics, briefing suppliers, coordinating freelancers and approving the work.
$40,000: Build an always-on program
Now you have enough budget to become much more consistent and rely more heavily on specialists.
Your investment can include:
- Marketing strategy and planning.
- Professional copywriting and content production.
- Regular video, Vlogs and Reels.
- Google and Meta advertising with larger media budgets.
- Email and database marketing.
- Downloadable guides and property market reports.
- SEO and AI search optimisation.
- Social media marketing.
- Reporting and analysis to identify where your marketing budget produces the best results.
This is where marketing starts becoming a coordinated program rather than a collection of individual activities.
$80,000+: Outsource your marketing function
For a million-dollar agent, an $80,000 annual marketing budget represents 8% of GCI.
At this level, you can start outsourcing most of your marketing to a specialist team rather than trying to find one person who can do everything.
Your team can include marketing strategists, copywriters and editors, designers, website developers, SEO and AI search specialists and more.
The real benefit isn’t simply producing more marketing. Your budget buys back your time.
Instead of spending hours planning social posts, briefing freelancers, troubleshooting campaigns and deciding what happens next, you can concentrate on prospecting, listing, selling, managing your team and building client relationships.
Marketing in the age of AI
AI is changing how your marketing is created, discovered and distributed.
Google AI Mode is now available in Australia, while ads can appear within AI search experiences. That makes your website, content, Google presence, reviews and paid advertising increasingly interconnected.
Just as early adopters built an advantage when social media emerged, there is an opportunity for real estate professionals who understand AI search now.
But AI doesn’t replace the most valuable parts of your marketing. It cannot manufacture your reputation, local knowledge, relationships, point of view or track record.
Those are the reasons homeowners ultimately choose you.
Invest according to where you want to go
Your marketing budget shouldn’t simply reflect what you can spare today. It needs to reflect what you are trying to build and where you want to be tomorrow.
According to marketing budget software company Etropo’s Industry Benchmark Data Reports, the average real estate firm allocates 4% to 7% of gross revenue to total marketing.
As mentioned above, the global Deloitte CMO Survey found real estate operations straddle B2B (commercial leasing/developer relationships) and B2C (residential sales), with B2B service firms averaging 9% of revenue on marketing and B2C averaging 9.4% to 11.4%.
According to the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), the ideal split is 60% on brand building and 40% on sales activation.
For a real estate agent, that translates to a bigger slice of the marketing budget going toward brand-building activities, such as local market positioning and top-of-funnel awareness, and a smaller slice toward lead activation, CRM database prospecting, and digital retargeting.
However, most agents jump straight into sales activation and miss the brand-building component, which is why so many lead campaigns fail to get the right results.
If you’re maintaining a strong existing position, 5–7% of revenue might be enough. But if you’re serious about growth, 7–10% is a more realistic starting point. And, if you’re launching or aggressively pursuing market share, you will probably need to invest more.
Then decide how much you want to spend in money and how much you’re prepared to spend in your own time.
The ROI is there.
But first, you need the gumption to invest in yourself and your business.
If you are looking for help with any or all of the above, contact me and my team today for a free, one-hour consultation. We can provide all of the services above at a competitive price with the creativity you need to stand out over and above your nearest competitors.
