As someone who has collaborated with some of the real estate industry's most prominent brokerages over the last decade, I have come to have a deep understanding of the absolute necessity for brokerages to maximize the value of the money they spend on marketing initiatives. Real estate industry-wide surveys have shown again and again that the #1 challenge facing brokerages in 2025 is profitability. 

It is no secret that Broker-Owners are facing shrinking margins, as their profits are squeezed from every angle, be it rent-inflation, agents striking better commission rate deals, or the general rising cost of doing business. So, as companies are faced with the very real reality that they need to make cuts in their organization, oftentimes marketing expenses are looked at as the first thing to cut. "Do we really need SEO?" "Are we getting a good return on what we're spending on our website?" "Are our agents even using the CRM we're paying thousands of dollars for?" These are all totally valid questions to ask. Many times, brokerages enter the marketplace looking for cheaper tools so they can save even just 10% on their marketing/technology spend. The belief is that you can find something comparable that maybe does a little less, and save a thousand dollars here or there off the bottom line. However, my honest advice to real estate brokerages looking at making a change to those budgets is first to ask yourselves these questions:

1. Do I understand how much traffic is coming to my website this year compared to last year?
2. Do I understand how many leads are being generated on my website, and the source of those leads? (Direct, Organic, Paid) 
3. Do I understand how many of those leads are leading to closed transactions in my business? 
4. Is my current online strategy already profitable, and I just don't realize it? 

We are fortunate at Delta Media Group® to have access to an immense amount of data showing how more than 25 Real-Trends top 500-ranked brokerages are performing online. And we also have access to hundreds of brokerages of all sizes, in all areas of the country, and can gauge how Google and the search engines are ranking our websites at scale. Along with our Google analytics we can analyze the on-site performance of how many average sessions of traffic it takes to generate a lead, and thanks to integrated transaction data from Skyslope, Dotloop, PropertyBase, and other services we're able to see how many leads generated from your website actually lead to a closed transaction. 

Utilizing this data, we can start to see large trends. In 2024, we saw that our clients on average closed a transaction on roughly 2.75% of online-generated leads. And across these websites, our clients typically saw one lead generated for every 117 sessions of traffic on their website. Finally, in this time frame, we saw an average of 12 leads generated for each agent in our platform throughout 2024. This does not take into account any sort of paid lead generation strategies. 

I have delivered hundreds, if not thousands, of consultations over the last decade to real estate brokerages of all sizes. One of the questions I routinely ask the companies I am meeting with is: "Do you know roughly how many leads your website is generating currently?" To which I am often answered: "I have no idea" or "not enough." Suppose I asked what percentage of your web leads are generated from organic traffic channels (Google/Yahoo/Search Engines). I don't believe I have ever had a single company tell me they knew what that percentage was. 

Suppose you're looking to adjust your online marketing strategy to save a little money on the bottom line. In that case, you really need to understand the massive impact that can be had on your business from what you think is something as minor as changing website providers. I'll repeat what I mentioned above — one of the key data points to understand is: "What percentage of online leads are being generated from organic traffic to my website?" This stat alone will show you how well your website is actually performing in the search engines. 

These are real data points for two of our brokerage clients:

Brokerage A — 1,100 agents: (1 year picture) 

• Total traffic to website: 666,852 Total Visits 
• Previous year traffic to website: 371,801 total visits 
• Total organic traffic to website: 378,759 organic visits
• Previous year organic traffic to website: 195,267 visits 
• Total leads generated online: 12,047
• Previous year leads generated: 9,290

Overall, traffic increased 79%, with organic traffic increasing by 94%. This then increased the number of leads the brokerage received by 30%. Most importantly, organic traffic represented 54% of all traffic to their website, and 56% of all leads generated for this company originated from search traffic. 

This brokerage was absolutely crushing it online, and the SEO results were evident. Unfortunately, they decided to switch website providers as they didn't prioritize the leads that were coming through their website. Their final day live on our platform, they had over 22,000 pages of content indexed in Google's search engine. Within 60 days of switching to their new provider, they had just 3,600 pages in Google's live index. They were virtually invisible in search, and that would have a very real and tangible impact on their website performance. 

Brokerage B — 300 agents: (Q1/Q2/Q3 YOY Comparison)

• Total traffic to website: 84,273 total visits 
• Previous year traffic to website: 72,443 visits
• Total organic traffic to website: 41,293 visits
• Previous year organic traffic: 32,599 visits
• Total leads generated online: 1,416 
• Previous year total leads generated: 1,121  
• Traffic up 16.3% 

Ultimately, organic traffic increased by 26% year over year, also increasing the number of leads by 26%. For this firm, organic traffic represented more than 49% of all traffic to their website, and more than 60% of all website-generated leads were a result of organic traffic. 

We have even more data available for this firm, which we were able to track their transaction data from lead -> close. In 2023 alone, this firm closed 131 deals that originated from their website, which represented over $107,000,000 in total volume of closed business from the web. On a 70/30 split with an agent, that's roughly $963,000 in company dollars they earned that year as a direct result of business that originated from their website that led to a closed transaction online. Even assuming a more conservative 80/20 split in this scenario would result in $642,000 in company dollars. 

In this example, the brokerage was spending roughly $80,000 per year in online web services to generate a roughly 8x return on investment. Similar to the first brokerage in this article, they did not see the value in maintaining good SEO, and they switched to a new provider who did not believe SEO was a viable strategy to grow their business online. As expected, they took an immediate hit to their visibility online and caused near-irreparable damage to their domain authority. 

The chart below visually tells a story of this company's website rankings. Prior to coming on board with Delta, their average ranking for relevant keywords for their business was an average rank of 11. With Google, ranking 1-10 is what constitutes "page 1" of Google. The vast majority of consumers (more than 90%) will never scroll past the first page of results. Over two years, we were able to build the domain authority and rankings in the search engines as high as an average rank of 3. Rank 3 means you are on page one of Google, immediately visible with no scrolling needed. Being Page 1 in the top 3 results is as good a ranking as you can have. 

In the graph, you can see there is an immediate slide that occurred when the switch off of our platform to a WordPress environment was made. Within 60 days, their average rank went from Rank 3 to Rank 13. With the small decision to switch website providers, this brokerage wiped out 2 years of SEO efforts, and made their website invisible online by moving to page 2 of Google. 60% of the leads being generated on their site had been coming from Google, and now that channel was effectively cut off.

All of this is to reinforce that as a business owner, or as someone in the position with the authority to make these kinds of decisions that you absolutely must understand how your website is performing online. You need your vendor to provide you with tangible analytics and data so that you can be empowered to decide on whether making a change to your online strategy is actually warranted, or if budget cuts need to be made elsewhere. 

Delta Media Group provides free consultations to brokerages of any size looking to understand their website ROI better. If you're interested in setting up a consultation about your brokerage's online business strategies, don't hesitate to reach out!