Finding a real estate digital marketing agency: what to ask before you sign

The contract usually settles strategy and leaves supply open

Most agency proposals for a development are long on audience, channels and reporting. They are short on one number: how many finished images and videos arrive each month. That gap shows up around week five, when the ad account has tested the brochure renders to exhaustion and the next creative round is a change order.

The questions below are written for a developer’s marketing or sales lead who is about to shortlist agencies. Seven are standard procurement. The eighth, about content supply, is the one that decides whether the campaign still looks fresh in month three.

What the market charges

Published numbers give you a range to test proposals against. According to Pick an Agency, developer campaigns run $15,000 to $50,000 or more per month once production and media are included, and most agencies bill their management fee separately from ad spend. TERAMOK, a development marketing firm that publishes its rates, lists campaign retainers of $8,000 to $25,000 per month with media passed through at no markup, and models the whole budget as a percentage of projected sellout value.

Those are two different pricing logics, and the gap between them is the reason to ask for line items. A retainer is a bundle of planning hours, account management, media fees and some amount of creative. Your job is to find the creative line.

Eight questions to ask before you sign

#	Question	What a good answer sounds like	Red flag
1	Who runs my account day to day?	A named person, with hours per week	“Our team”
2	What do you report against?	Cost per qualified lead, appointment and reservation	Impressions and clicks only
3	How many finished assets does the retainer include per month?	A number, split into images, short video and long video	“As needed”
4	Who owns the assets and the ad accounts?	You, with no time limit	Agency-held accounts
5	What does a 90-day pilot measure?	KPIs, baselines and an evaluation method in writing	No pilot offered
6	How fast does a new asset batch arrive?	A turnaround in working days	A quote per request
7	What happens at exit?	Handover of files, accounts and audiences	A 12-month lock
8	How do you market a building that does not exist yet?	A plan built on renders, with a stage-by-stage calendar	Waiting for site photography

Questions 2, 4, 5 and 7 are standard hygiene, and any serious agency will answer them. Pick an Agency’s guidance on the same subject recommends a 90-day pilot with defined KPIs and baselines instead of an open-ended retainer. Take that advice literally and put the pilot into the contract.

Why question three matters more than the rest

A development in sales needs a steady stream of new creative. Paid social fatigues fast, the sales calendar has events, and each construction milestone is a reason to post. Twenty to thirty finished assets a quarter is a modest target; many retainers are scoped for a fraction of that, because production is the expensive part of the agency’s own cost base.

When the answer to question three is a small number, the agency has three options. It can recycle the brochure renders, which depresses results. It can bill for extra production, which inflates the real cost. Or it can subcontract a shoot that a building under construction cannot support. None of the three is a strategy problem, and none gets fixed by a better media buyer.

Question eight, with a real example

An agency that has only ever sold finished product will ask for photography. A development agency should say what it does with renders. Ask to see it.

The Metro.ee starter pack is a concrete benchmark. The developer’s residential project in Tallinn was already in sales with its renders done. From one exterior render we produced ten lifestyle images across four seasons and four short clips, with no shoot and no new 3D. That is fourteen finished assets from a single file, and the developer’s agency, if it had one, would simply receive them as creative to test.

The Qatar waterfront residences campaign sits at the other end of the budget range: a virtual presenter film of one minute twenty-five seconds in English, plus ten lifestyle scenes covering the terrace, the lounge and the pool. Neither project involved a crew. Both are built from renders the developer had already paid for.

Use this as a yardstick. If a proposal for a comparable project lists three social posts a month, you know where the volume gap is.

How classic checklists differ from this one

Checklists on CGI-studio blogs, and on directory sites, mostly cover credentials, portfolio review and cost per lead. They are useful for procurement and they stop at the moment of signature. They treat creative as something the agency will somehow have. For a developer working from renders, creative is the constraint, so this list puts it in the contract.

AI-generated campaign content changes the arithmetic on that constraint. Classic CGI gives you the hero views of the building; classic renders take three to five working days per view. Lifestyle imagery generated from those renders adds the people, the weather and the seasons around them, in batches measured in days, not shoots. The two are complementary, and a good agency should be happy to brief both.

Splitting the work between the agency and a studio

A workable division for most launches:

1. Agency: strategy, audience targeting, media buying, reporting against reservations.
2. Studio: the assets. A virtual presenter film, a story film, lifestyle images and seasonal packs, all produced from the developer’s own renders.
3. Developer: approvals, sales follow-up and the brief. Our process locks the script and shot list before production, so the agency reviews finished material, not production risk.

Put the asset cadence in the agency brief as an input rather than a deliverable: “you will receive N images and M clips a month; plan the calendar around them.” That removes the most common source of friction in month three.

What to do this week

Shortlist three agencies. Send each the same one-page brief: unit count, price band, launch date and the renders you already own. Ask all eight questions in writing and compare question three first. If you want a baseline for what a render-based asset supply costs, the packages page lists the entry point, and if you have a set of renders and a launch date, send them over and we will scope a batch against your real calendar.