The client
Preston Baker is an independent estate agency operating across Yorkshire, competing against corporate-backed groups consolidating the region and the gravitational pull of the property portals on Google. Estate agency economics are unforgiving: the money isn't in clicks, or even enquiries. It's in instructions — the board outside the house.
The problem
The account I adopted had the problem I see everywhere: it was optimising toward a "conversion" that lumped everyone together. A curious homeowner idly asking "what's my house worth" counted the same as a genuine vendor three weeks from choosing an agent. The dashboard couldn't tell them apart — so neither could the budget.
That's the tyre-kicker tax. You pay it in wasted spend, and you pay it again in valuers' diaries full of appointments that were never going to become instructions.
What we built
Not a campaign. A funnel — measured end to end.
- Own the moment of intent. The "how much is my house worth" search is the highest-intent second in a vendor's journey. We built the paid search around capturing it and feeding it into the valuation tool.
- Honest conversion definitions. We stopped counting every form-fill as a win and separated casual curiosity from genuine selling intent — so the machine optimised toward vendors, not volume.
- Follow the money, not the click. Every stage tracked: search → valuation → market appraisal → instruction → board outside the house. Spend decisions made on what an instruction costs, not what a click costs.
The results
Reach up 249%. The cost of a valuation enquiry cut to less than a fifth of what it had been. And the part no dashboard shows: a decisive shift in who was enquiring — budget moved away from casual "what's my house worth" curiosity and toward genuine vendors on their journey to actually selling, feeding the branches productive conversations instead of dead ends.
"When Russell took over our paid search, he didn't just make it cheaper — he made it honest. Reach went up 249%, and the cost of a valuation enquiry dropped to less than a fifth of what it had been. But the real change was in the quality: we stopped paying for tyre-kickers who just wanted a number, and started having productive conversations with genuine sellers. That let us move budget to true potential clients on their journey to actually selling their property — measured all the way from the 'how much is my house worth' search to the board outside the house. I'd recommend him to any agent who wants to know what their marketing really earns."
Ian Preston · Founder, Preston BakerThe point
An estate agency doesn't need more traffic. It needs more instructions, at a cost per instruction that makes sense against the average fee. Everything in this account — every keyword, every conversion action, every pound — answers to that one number.
That's the whole method. Money in the till, applied to property.
Ian Preston founded Preston Baker and now helps estate agency owners transform their businesses at ianpreston.co.uk. Compulsion is Russell Anson's independent paid-search consultancy — 18 years in, pointed at the only metric that matters. compulsion.agency