Here is the most useful sentence I can give you about search advertising this year, and almost nobody in this business knows it.
Google will still let you draw a circle one kilometre wide. Meta makes you draw fifteen miles.
Both platforms put housing in a restricted category after the fair housing settlements. Everybody in our industry heard "you cannot target neighbourhoods any more" and stopped there. That is half right, and the missing half is worth real money to somebody working this corridor.
What Google actually says
I went and read the policy rather than the commentary, because the commentary is wrong. Google's own wording is that "radius targeting requires setting at least 1 km around any given location."
One kilometre. Just over half a mile. You can still ring a neighbourhood.
What you genuinely cannot do on Google, for housing:
ZIP codes. Gone in the United States. Radius, city and country are what remain.
Gender, age, parental status and marital status. That last one catches people out. Marital status is off the table, which quietly kills a lot of the "newlyweds and new families" segmentation that used to be standard.
Your own client list. This is the one that hurts. Advertiser-curated audiences are barred for housing: Customer Match, your own data segments, audience expansion and lookalike segments. The past-client database you have spent nine years building cannot be used to target housing ads, and it cannot be used to build a lookalike either.
Why one kilometre matters more here than almost anywhere
Think about what fifteen miles actually is on our patch.
Fifteen miles from Cherry Hill takes in most of Philadelphia, all of Camden, a good slice of Burlington County and a chunk of Delaware County. That is not a market. That is four or five markets with wildly different price points, school districts, tax pictures and buyer profiles, all inside one circle you are not allowed to make smaller.
Now do the same exercise in a Sun Belt metro where the housing stock is homogeneous for twenty miles in every direction. Fifteen miles there costs you comparatively little.
The radius floor is a much bigger tax in a dense, fragmented corridor than it is in a sprawling one. Which means the platform that still permits a one kilometre ring is disproportionately valuable to you, specifically, in a way it is not to an agent in Phoenix.
Collingswood and Camden are minutes apart and are not remotely the same sale. On search you can still speak to one of them. On social you cannot.
The other front door
Microsoft is the channel nearly every agent skips, and the arithmetic for skipping it is usually "nobody uses Bing," which has not been true for years and was never true of the people who buy houses.
Two things to know before you switch it on.
First, Microsoft has its own restriction. Their policy is that if you advertise housing services you may not use postal code to personalise, segment or profile. So the ZIP problem follows you across.
Second, and this is the bit I would be careful about: Microsoft's housing rules are considerably harder to find and read than Google's. Google publishes a specific housing policy page with the radius number in it. Microsoft's guidance is thinner. That is not a reason to avoid the channel, but it is a reason not to assume that a campaign which is compliant on Google is automatically compliant when you import it.
Because importing is exactly what everybody does. You build in Google, you press import, and you have just copied your targeting assumptions into a platform with different rules and less documentation.
What search actually costs now
WordStream's 2026 benchmarks, drawn from 13,474 US search campaigns between April 2025 and March 2026, put real estate at a median $3.22 cost per click, a 7.61% click-through rate, a 3.70% conversion rate and $102.51 per lead.
The number that should stop you is this one: real estate CPC rose 27.27% year over year, the largest increase of any industry in the study.
Search is getting more expensive faster for us than for anybody. Which is an argument for running it better, not for running away from it.
Six things I would do
Use the kilometre. If your state and your platform allow a tight ring, use a tight ring. Do not run a county-wide radius because the compliance summary you skimmed said neighbourhoods were banned.
Spend a proper afternoon on negative keywords. In this business it is most of the job. Rentals, jobs, "how to become a realtor", homes for sale by owner, the portals by name, every town you do not serve. Without that list you are paying $3.22 a click to educate people who will never instruct you.
Do not touch Performance Max or Display until you have conversion data. Those campaign types need something to optimise toward. Give them nothing and they will happily spend your money finding out.
Send clicks to a page about the thing they searched for. Not your homepage. Your homepage is about you, and at that moment they do not care about you.
Stop counting leads. Count booked appointments, and then count signed agreements. A hundred-dollar lead is only a hundred-dollar lead if it turns into something.
Run both doors, but do not assume one is a copy of the other. Different rules, different competition, different cost. Import the campaign if you like, then go through the targeting by hand.
Any road up
The industry told itself a simplified story after the fair housing settlements: you cannot target locally any more, so stop trying. That story is comfortable and it is costing this corridor specifically, because we are exactly the sort of dense patchwork market where a one kilometre ring is worth having and a fifteen mile one is nearly useless.
Go and read the actual policy. It took me twenty minutes and it changed what I would advise. That is a good return on twenty minutes.