Prepared for realestate.ae
Built for realestate.ae following our first call and the follow-up session with you and your team at your office. This is not a capabilities deck. Every section is written against what you are running today, the sequence you described for building the secondary listing base, and the fact that your own team can build a large part of the infrastructure themselves.
We covered a lot in the room and your team asked the right questions. This document exists so none of it depends on anyone's memory of the meeting, and so your CTO, your marketing manager and your media buyer can each go back to the part that concerns them. The technical scope sits in Working together. The channel and creative logic sits in The plan. The commercials sit in Investment. Nothing important has been held back for a follow-up call.
You are eight transactions in across the last couple of months against a cost base built for far more, and you are not sure whether it is the market, the summer or the campaigns. Here is the honest answer: we can see enough in the live account to say the campaigns are not built to produce a buyer conversation, whatever the market is doing.
Instant forms will always give you a cheap cost per lead and a large lead count. That is exactly why they are dangerous. The cost per lead looks excellent on the report and the sales floor knows the truth within a week. Worse, the platform learns from what you feed it. Every fake or dead lead you accept teaches Meta to find more people who behave the same way, so quality degrades month on month even when nothing else changes. The fix is not better targeting. It is deliberate friction at the point of conversion.
You described exactly this on Universities.org: a media buyer made a change, the message loosened, and within a week the leads were people looking for jobs rather than places. India and Pakistan are genuinely strong markets for Dubai off-plan, but they are also the markets where a loose message attracts the highest volume of people with no capacity to transact. For those audiences we deliberately raise the qualification bar with budget confirmation, a stated minimum entry point and timeline questions before the form completes. Fewer leads, and the ones that arrive are actual buyers.
You have 16 brokers and told us five or six are genuinely producing. Better leads only convert if they reach a broker who picks up. A lead contacted more than five minutes after opting in is dramatically less likely to convert, and that window is the one part of the chain that sits on your side of the line. This is why we build broker scoring alongside lead scoring: response speed, CRM compliance and conversion to the next step are measured, and leads are routed towards the brokers who actually work them. We would rather tell you this now than explain it in month three.
Your strategy is clear and we agree with it. Build the secondary listing base, populate the site, then launch the brand at scale and take share from the portals. The only thing we would add is sequencing. The business is loss-making today, so the first track has to pay for the other two. Here is how we would order it.
Meta is where we start because it produces data fastest, but it is rarely where a campaign finishes. We currently run Meta, Google, YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat across our client base and we move budget based on what the audience actually responds to, not on what is conventional. Two live examples of why this matters: one Dubai brokerage with a predominantly Arab-speaking team now runs around 80% of its spend on Snapchat, because that is where Emiratis and GCC Arabs actually are. Another, targeting French-speaking buyers, gets its best performance from YouTube rather than Meta. Your audience split across the GCC and the subcontinent means the right allocation for realestate.ae is very likely not the one you are running today. We will not know for certain until we have four weeks of data, and we would rather find out than assume.
You raised this directly, and it bites hardest on track 2. The rules are workable but they are firm. We can state a commission rate, name a flat fee, describe a service level, publish transaction data and make comparative statements about the service. We cannot promise a sale price, guarantee a return, or make a claim about money the homeowner will receive. So an offer like a reduced or waived commission on the first tranche of listings is workable as a stated price. A message built on what a seller will earn is not. We design every script and every page against this constraint from the first draft rather than discovering it at review, and anything genuinely borderline goes to your compliance side before it runs.
You told us a previous agency refused to acknowledge the conflict in the region and wrote as though it was not happening, and that when you pushed they asked you to write the message yourself. We would not do that. When sentiment is the barrier, ignoring it is how the ad gets scrolled past, because the buyer is already thinking about it and the silence reads as either naivety or avoidance. The stronger position is to name the hesitation and answer it with transaction volumes, payment plan structures and what the market has actually done, rather than pretending the buyer has no reservations. That is a creative decision we take responsibility for, not one we hand back to you.
We do not split budget equally and hope. Each track carries a floor of AED 10,000 to 15,000 per month, because below that the platform cannot exit the learning phase and the data is not worth reading. Above the floor, allocation shifts monthly on performance. If track 2 is producing listing agreements at a cost that justifies it, budget moves there. If a particular off-plan project or a particular audience is carrying the account, we weight into it. You can start with one track, two or all three. We would recommend starting with two so that revenue and supply build in parallel, but that is your call and the retainer covers all three regardless.
The difference between this and what you are running is not the targeting. It is what happens between the click and the call. Every person who reaches one of your brokers has already confirmed budget, timeline and intent, in their own typing, on a page you own.
Lead scoring decides which leads matter. Broker scoring decides who gets them. We measure three things on your team: speed of first response, compliance in updating the CRM and completing touchpoints, and conversion to the next step and eventually to deals. Brokers who work leads properly receive more of them. Brokers who do not, receive fewer. With five or six of your sixteen genuinely producing today, this is the mechanism that changes behaviour without you having to police it personally, and it means the leads you are paying for land with the people most likely to close them.
You built your own CRM after finding Bitrix24 unworkable, and your team is comfortable in it. We are not going to ask you to move. Everything we build is configured inside your platform: scoring logic, routing rules, pipeline triggers, nurture sequences. Where a direct API or webhook connection exists we build natively. Where it does not, we bridge through Make.com. Landing pages sit on your subdomains, automations sit in your CRM, and all of it stays yours. If we stopped working together tomorrow, nothing switches off and nothing needs to be handed back.
Every deal you have closed has come from your brokers' own Instagram accounts. That is not a failure, it is evidence that your organic works and your people can close. The problem is isolated to paid. So this is not a proposal to replace your marketing team. It is a proposal to fix one channel while they keep building the others, with both sides saying the same thing.
Every time we run a shoot we produce far more usable footage than the ads require. Long-form cuts, vertical variants, broker pieces to camera, B-roll of units and communities. Your organic team gets first use of all of it. That means the content calendar your marketing manager is currently trying to fill gets fed by production you are already paying for, your brokers get professionally shot material for the personal accounts that are actually closing your deals, and paid and organic stop looking like two different companies. This is the clearest practical reason to have one team on production rather than splitting it.
You have your own developers and you build fast. We are not going to argue for building things twice. Under Option B in the Investment section, your team builds the infrastructure and we specify it. Concretely, that means we provide:
Whichever option is chosen, we retain approval on the qualifying pages and the scoring logic, because those two components determine whether the guarantee is achievable. Everything else is genuinely open to your team building it.
Weekly performance reporting on spend, lead volume, qualified rate and cost per qualified lead. Monthly review covering the same data plus pipeline movement, broker response times and closings attributed to campaign. Because everything is tracked from ad through to CRM stage, the question of whether a deal came from marketing or from a broker's own network stops being a matter of opinion. You will be able to see the qualified percentage against the 20% contractual minimum at any point, not just at the 90-day mark.
A UAE brokerage running off-plan and secondary with a mixed international buyer base and a broker team close to yours in size. They came to us from an agency that optimised for the lowest possible cost per lead. Their reports looked excellent and their sales floor was drowning. Figures below compare their previous setup with month three of ours.
Plotted on a logarithmic scale so all four measures fit on one axis. Lead volume falls deliberately. Everything that determines revenue rises.
We would rather say this now than have it come as a surprise. Month one is the most expensive and the least productive month of any engagement. The platform is still learning who your buyers are, the qualifying pages are still being adjusted on real response data, and the nurture sequences have not had time to mature a single lead. By month three the cost per qualified lead has typically dropped while the qualified conversations have risen, partly because the algorithm has stopped guessing and partly because leads from month one are now coming back as hot. This is also why the initial term is three months. Judging this at week six would give both of us a false reading.
A brokerage running 100 or more agents has to feed the floor, and volume becomes the objective whether it should be or not. You do not have that constraint. With 16 brokers and five or six genuinely producing, you can afford to run a system where quality beats volume, because your capacity problem is not empty diaries, it is conversations worth having. The businesses that get the most out of what we build are the ones your size, for exactly this reason.
We do not publish client dashboards or share named client data, and we would extend you the same discretion. What we showed your team in person was the real thing: live landing pages, live ad creative in four languages, the actual instant form behaviour inside Meta. The figures above reflect performance patterns across our UAE client base at a comparable scale. We are happy to go deeper on any of it with your media buyer directly.
The monthly retainer is identical in both. The only thing that changes is the one-time setup fee, because your CTO and development team are capable of building the infrastructure themselves and we are not going to charge you for work you can do internally.
Option B is not a discount and we would ask you not to read it as one. It is a different division of labour. Your team is capable of building this, your CTO would rather own it, and charging you AED 15,000 to build something you can build yourselves would be difficult to justify. What we do not move on is the specification and the sign-off, because the qualifying pages and the scoring logic are the two components that determine whether the 20% guarantee is achievable. If those are built to a different structure, we cannot stand behind the number. The trade-off is time: under Option B your launch date depends on your own development schedule rather than ours.
Up to AED 50,000 per month in combined ad spend, the retainer is fixed at AED 20,000. Above that it is calculated at 50% of monthly spend. Here is the actual reason, because it is not an arbitrary line.
Creative burns out at a rate proportional to spend. At AED 15,000 a month on a single project, six to eight video variations from one shoot will hold performance for four to six weeks before frequency climbs and cost per qualified lead starts drifting upwards. At AED 60,000 across four or five projects, that same cycle compresses to under two weeks, which in practice means three to four shoots a month instead of one, twenty-five to thirty variations in rotation instead of eight, a separate qualifying page per project, more audiences to build and monitor, and daily rather than weekly optimisation across more platforms. The retainer moves because the production and management load moves with it, not because the ad account got bigger. It is reviewed monthly, agreed with you in advance, and never applied retrospectively.
| Monthly ad spend | Monthly retainer |
|---|---|
| Up to AED 50,000 | AED 20,000 |
| AED 60,000 | AED 30,000 |
| AED 80,000 | AED 40,000 |
| AED 100,000 | AED 50,000 |
This is what tends to happen, not what we ask for. We have no interest in you spending more than the data justifies, and we would rather hold a budget flat for a month than scale into something we cannot yet explain.
Ad spend is paid by you directly to Meta, Google and any other platform. It never passes through us and we take no margin on it.
You are currently paying Property Finder AED 20,000 to 25,000 a month and have put AED 180,000 through them across five months with nothing attributable coming back. The retainer above is roughly the same monthly figure, except that it buys campaigns on channels you control, creative you keep, infrastructure that stays on your domain, and a contractual commitment to lead quality. The comparison is not us against your marketing budget. It is us against a portal invoice you cannot audit.
| Item | Position |
|---|---|
| Initial term | 3 months, running from campaign launch date rather than signature date |
| During initial term | Terminable only for material breach, on 30 days notice |
| After initial term | Rolling, 30 days notice either side |
| Invoicing | Monthly on the same calendar date. First invoice covers setup plus month one retainer |
| Ad spend | Paid by you directly to the platforms. Never passes through us |
| Ownership | Pages, automations, creative and data remain yours |
The initial term is fixed because the system needs time to be dialled in. Month one is spent teaching the platform, refining the pages and filling the nurture sequences.
Written into the agreement. Measured on the qualification criteria we agree with you at onboarding, visible in your own CRM throughout, not reported to you by us at the end.
Your team has already been through the detail with us in person, so this is deliberately short. Three steps between here and campaigns going live.
You told us this is a starting point, that if realestate.ae works the group follows, and that what you are actually building is something your name stays attached to. We are not going to pretend a marketing retainer carries that weight. What we will say is that the first thing that has to happen is the business stops losing money, and that is a narrower problem than the one you are carrying. Fix paid, get the producing brokers into more real conversations, and the rest of the plan gets funded by the plan itself. That is the part we can take off your desk.