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MBC / Group / Blog / SEO & Traffic
SEO & Traffic 9 min read Aug 25, 2026
We read the live first page of Google for “marketing for real estate brokerages” on 25 August 2026 and sorted every result by who it addresses. Sixteen of the twenty are written for an individual agent. Three are written for a brokerage.
That gap matters, because a brokerage markets to two audiences — the public, and the agents it wants to recruit and keep. Here is what the second audience is worth, using the association’s own numbers.
Matthew Montez
Founder · MBC Group
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00 Key Takeaways 01 Who page one is written for 02 Two audiences, not one 03 What the second audience is worth 04 What you buy that you should build 05 What the plan actually contains 06 What AI answers say about you 07 Where to start this quarter 08 Common questions
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Search “marketing for real estate brokerages” and you would expect results about running a brokerage. On 25 August 2026 we read the live US first page and sorted every result by who it is written for — who the page addresses in its own title and opening lines. Sixteen of twenty are addressed to an individual agent.
This is not a complaint about those pages. Most of them are good pages. It is a description of a gap: the person who owns the brokerage is asking a question that page one is mostly not answering.
00 — Key Takeaways
Sixteen of the twenty results are written for individual agents. Three are written for brokerages or broker-owners. One is a trade-association topic hub.
The clearest example: one result’s web address ends in real-estate-brokerage-marketing, and its title is “Real Estate Marketing That Works: A Strategy Guide for Agents”. The word brokerage survives in the address and disappears from the advice.
A brokerage markets to two audiences — the public, and the agents it wants to recruit and keep. Page one covers the first one sixteen times over.
NAR’s 2026 Member Profile puts a typical four-person team at 32 transaction sides and $17.5 million in median sales, against 9 sides and $2.7 million for a typical individual agent.
The same profile says 28% of the typical member’s business came from past clients last year, up from 20%. The most valuable thing a brokerage can hand an agent is a working database, not another lead source.
We pulled the live US results and sorted each one by its audience rather than its topic. Nearly every page is nominally about real estate marketing. The question is who it thinks is reading.
Who the page is written for
Count
Examples
An individual agent or realtor
16
HousingWire, Canva, The Close, Luxury Presence, Constant Contact, Marketing 360, Spectrio, iHomefinder, plus a Reddit thread and a YouTube video
A brokerage or broker-owner
Xara’s brokerage marketing guide, Breakthrough Broker, the Greater Albuquerque Association of Realtors
Neither — a topic hub
The National Association of Realtors’ marketing section
The most on-the-nose result is Constant Contact’s. Its web address ends in real-estate-brokerage-marketing. Its title, read the same day, is “Real Estate Marketing That Works: A Strategy Guide for Agents.” The body opens by describing “busy real estate agents squeezed between showings, paperwork, and client calls”, and its own FAQ asks how much a real estate agent should spend on marketing. It is a perfectly good article. It is answering a different question than the one that was typed.
That is why a broker-owner who reads page one comes away with a list of tactics for a salesperson: post more, email more, farm a neighbourhood, film a walkthrough. All sound advice for one agent. None of it is a plan for a business with a payroll, an office lease and a recruiting problem.
It is the same shape we found reading the first page for marketing for real estate agents, where a large share of the results turned out to be licensing schools rather than marketers. Real estate results are unusually crowded with pages written for somebody standing next to the person searching.
Here is the distinction the three brokerage-focused results all draw, and the other sixteen never need to. Marketing a listing sells one property. Marketing an agent sells one person. Marketing a brokerage has to attract clients and attract agents at the same time, out of the same brand and usually the same budget.
Xara’s guide — one of the three — sets it out in a plain table: brokerage marketing “promotes the brokerage brand”, “attracts clients and agents” and “supports long-term growth”, where property marketing “promotes individual listings”, “attracts buyers or tenants” and “supports a specific transaction”. That is the right split, and it is the one missing from the rest of the page.
So a brokerage running the page-one playbook is running half a plan. Every item on that list points at consumers. Nothing on it points at the recruiting audience — and for most brokerages, that is where the arithmetic actually is.
Use the association’s own figures rather than ours. NAR’s 2026 Member Profile, published in June 2026 from a survey of more than 5,000 REALTORS®, reports the following for 2025:
Measure
Typical individual agent
Typical team of about four
Transaction sides in 2025
32
Median sales volume
$2.7 million
$17.5 million
Share doing $10m or more
54% of teams
Twenty-one percent of REALTORS® were part of a team in 2025. The same report puts the median member at 57 years old with 13 years of experience, while agents in their first year make up 11% of membership, and total membership has slipped to 1,439,163 from 1,463,352 a year earlier. This is an ageing, consolidating profession in which production concentrates in fewer, more experienced hands.
Which means recruiting one producing agent is rarely a nice-to-have sitting next to lead generation. It is usually the larger number. Brokers have known this for a while: a Delta Media Group survey of brokerage leaders, reported by NAR in February 2023, found recruiting agents was the top business challenge at 62%, ahead of reduced profit margins at 48% and recruiting top producers at 42%. Three of the top four concerns were about people rather than leads. We give that survey its date because it is three years old — treat the ranking as directional, not current.
The practical consequence is that your careers page is a landing page, and most brokerages treat it as an afterthought. An agent deciding where to hang their licence researches you exactly the way a seller does: your website, your reviews, your social profiles, how your listings are presented. They are working out whether your marketing would make their life easier. If your own website looks neglected, you have answered the question before the conversation starts.
One more number from the 2026 profile deserves its own paragraph. The typical NAR member earned 28% of their business from past clients and customers last year, up from 20% the year before. Among members with more than sixteen years in the business, repeat and referral work is about half the pipeline.
Read that as a brokerage rather than as an agent and it changes what you should be buying. Repeat business is the cheapest business in the industry, and it comes from a maintained database and consistent follow-up — not from a lead source. Yet leads are what most brokerages buy on their agents’ behalf, and lead follow-up speed is what the same Delta survey found brokers struggling with.
A brokerage that gives every agent a working CRM, a monthly market email that actually goes out, and a routine for asking past clients for reviews is compounding an asset it owns. A brokerage that buys a lead feed is renting one. The gap between getting the lead and converting it is where most of the loss happens, and it is the cheaper half to fix — the same pattern we found across home services and medical practices.
Strip the tactics lists down and a brokerage-level plan has five parts. Only the first of them is well covered on page one.
Point four is worth dwelling on, because multi-office brokerages leak the most there. Each office needs its own profile and its own page targeting its own town, since distance and relevance are what decide the map pack. A single “locations” page listing six addresses competes for none of the six. We wrote the detail of that up in our guide to Google Business Profile management.
There is a newer version of this problem, and it hits the recruiting audience as hard as the consumer one. When somebody asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI answers which brokerages in a town are worth joining, the model assembles a reply out of what it can corroborate across the web — your site, your profile, your reviews, third-party listings.
If your brokerage publishes almost nothing, and your agents’ pages disagree with each other about your name, address and phone number, there is very little to corroborate and the answer gets built from whatever else is lying around. That is a recruiting problem now, not only a marketing one. Visible questions with visible answers on your own pages are what these systems actually extract, which is the whole practical content of answer engine optimization.
None of this is exotic and none of it needs a large budget. It needs somebody to own it on a calendar. It is the same conclusion we reached rebuilding a Tampa realtor’s website, where an agent with a five-star Google rating was nearly invisible in local search because the website and the Google profile did not agree with each other — and the reviews he had earned were never shown to anyone who visited the site.
Q What is the difference between brokerage marketing and real estate agent marketing?
Q Should a brokerage market to agents or to consumers?
Q How much should a real estate brokerage spend on marketing?
Q Does a multi-office brokerage need more than one Google Business Profile?
Q What is the fastest way for a brokerage to get more repeat business?
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