Real estate, local lead generation, Berlin
Google Ads for a real estate broker: local lead generation for property sales, built from zero
Case study by Jan Wischniewsky
Capital Concept is an owner-run real estate brokerage in Berlin that wanted more enquiries for two things: owners who want to sell, and buyers for the properties already listed. There was no setup to start from, no campaigns, no conversion tracking, no CRM, no landing pages. We built all of it in parallel: local Search and Performance Max campaigns with tight geo targeting, tracking that counts enquiries, lead forms and phone calls, Propstack as CRM so every lead has a status, and landing pages that speak to sellers and buyers. The hard part in real estate is not getting clicks, it is keeping out the rental traffic that costs money and never closes. The whole setup is tuned to that filter.
- Real estate
- Berlin
- Google Search
- Performance Max
- Local targeting
- Conversion tracking
- CRM setup
- Landing pages
20+
Enquiries per month, from zero
45 €
Cost per enquiry
6 months
Running
1
CRM as source of truth
From zero to 20+ enquiries per month at around 45 € per enquiry, with rental traffic filtered out before it costs money. The project is ongoing: the owner marks every lead in Propstack, and that data goes back into the campaigns every week.
Challenge
A small, owner-run brokerage with listings but no digital acquisition. No campaigns had ever run, so there was no data to start from. No conversion tracking, no CRM, no way to tell which enquiry came from where or what happened to it afterwards. Landing pages did not exist, only the listing pages.
Real estate adds its own problem: most search demand around "apartment Berlin" comes from people looking to rent. For a broker who earns on sales, every rental enquiry is wasted budget and wasted time for the owner, who handles every enquiry himself. The setup had to filter that out from the first day, not after three months of data.
Approach
With nothing to inherit, the order was: define what counts as a lead (enquiry form, lead form, phone call), build the tracking for it, set up Propstack so the owner can mark every lead as seller, buyer or rental, and write landing pages that say "we sell" clearly enough that renters leave before they click. Campaigns went live in parallel, Search first with sales-intent keywords and a heavy negative list for rental terms, then Performance Max on top once the first conversion data existed. Budget sits at the sweet spot between spend and conversion volume, not at the maximum the account could absorb.
What I did
- Defined lead events and built conversion tracking for enquiry forms, lead forms and phone calls in Google Tag Manager
- Set up Propstack as CRM with the owner, so every lead gets a status (seller, buyer, rental, closed) that feeds back into the campaigns
- Built landing pages for sellers and buyers, separate from the listing pages, with a clear sales-only message
- Launched local Search campaigns with tight geo targeting around the broker's districts, sales-intent keywords and a shared negative list for rental terms
- Added Performance Max with a full asset library (headlines, descriptions, images, videos) once conversion data was in place
- Weekly review with the owner: which leads closed, which came from where, what to change
Project scope
- Role
- Hands-on execution, Skalor
- Services
- Conversion tracking, CRM setup, Landing pages, Google Search, Performance Max, Asset production, Ongoing optimisation
- Website
- cap-con.de
“I handle sales myself, so every enquiry costs me time. Jan built tracking, CRM and the campaigns from nothing, and since then the people reaching me actually want to sell or buy. I can see in the CRM where every enquiry comes from, and that is exactly what I wanted.”
Learnings
- In real estate, the negative keyword list is the campaign. Filtering rental intent decides whether the budget reaches sellers or disappears.
- Long decision cycles mean the first three months are about building data, not about results. Tracking and CRM from day one is what makes month six possible.
- Budget follows the sweet spot, not the ceiling. More spend did not mean more sales enquiries, better targeting did.
Tools
- Google Ads
- Google Tag Manager
- GA4
- Propstack