Stop paying for valuations from owners who will not move for two years.

About $2.5k£2k a month in ad spend, on top of the fee. Under that a management fee eats the budget before a click is bought, so we say no and sell you an hour of consulting at $140£110/hr instead. If your patch is small, that hour is usually better spent on your profile and your reviews than on a thin campaign. A cheaper agency takes the retainer and lets you find out in month six.

Not all of it, but a lot. An owner who is years away searches differently from one who has already decided to sell, and those searches are exactly what the negative keyword list is for. The ad copy does the rest of the filtering, because saying what you actually do puts off the people who only wanted a number. Then the tracking counts the instruction, not the form fill, so the keywords filling your diary with curiosity get cut instead of praised.

Vendors, first and mostly. Buyers find your listings through the portals anyway, so paying twice for them is the easiest money to waste. The fee sits in the instruction, so that is where the spend goes, and the ad copy is written for the owner deciding who to list with. If you run lettings too, that is a separate campaign with its own budget and its own cost per enquiry, never mixed into the sales numbers.

Ads catch the search at the end of that, when the owner has decided to move and is choosing who to ring. The deciding happens earlier, over your reviews, your sold boards and whatever your name pulls up, so ads work best when that groundwork is already there. That is the difference between the two plans below: management on its own runs the paid side, and the bundle adds local search, reviews and the pages that get you quoted in AI answers. On a call we will tell you which one your patch actually needs.

Ask them one question: what did an instruction cost us last month? If the answer comes back in clicks or impressions, they were selling you traffic. Most inherited accounts fail on the same three things: broad match with no negative list, tracking that counts form fills instead of booked valuations, and nobody touching the account between reports. Audits put waste on a neglected account at 20-40%, against about 10% on a tight one, and those three are where it goes.

You own all of it. The account is in your name, your card is on it, ad spend goes straight to Google and is never marked up, and the tracking sits in your own containers, so you can check the spend any day of the week. It is month to month, so if the cost per booked valuation is not moving the right way by day 30, you hear it from us first and we tell you to pause rather than spend another month finding out. If we part ways the account keeps running and nothing has to be rebuilt.