Portal listings capture buyers who are already searching; paid social interrupts people who weren’t. A campaign that only uses one is leaving enquiry on the table. Here’s how to split a $6,000 budget between the two with a model you can defend to a vendor.
Two different jobs, not two competing channels
realestate.com.au and Domain are demand-capture tools. A buyer has typed a suburb and a bedroom count into a search bar — your job is to be the best-presented result in that list, at the right listing tier (Standard, Feature, Premiere, or Domain’s equivalents). Paid social is demand-generation. Nobody searched for your listing on Instagram; you’re interrupting a scroll with a property they didn’t know existed. Confusing the two leads agents to either overspend on portal upgrades expecting them to “find” buyers who don’t exist yet, or to run social ads with no portal presence to send the enquiry to.
The practical rule: portal spend should scale with how many active buyers are already searching that category (a two-bedroom apartment in a high-turnover suburb has a deep buyer pool; a five-bedroom acreage property twenty minutes out of town does not). Social spend should scale with how much of the buyer pool you need to create — the more niche the property, the more of your budget shifts to social to manufacture interest rather than wait for it.