In a resort and vacation home market, I've seen PPC costs per click as high as $7.00 each click for the most competitive real estate key phrase. Of course, using better ad wording and destination pages, the savvy Realtor can do significantly better.
When costs-per-click were running between $3.00 and $4.00 in my market, I was paying an average of around $1.75 per click for positions 2 through 4 on Google for our most competitive term. That price had gradually come down from around $3.00 per click due to my better-than-average click-through ratio.
Let's talk about a really down market, when agents are leaving the business, and your income is down substantially. This situation, in mid 2008, had real estate professionals falling out of the business in droves. Cutting expenses, advertising included, is a normal activity in times of reduced business.
In mid 2008, the average cost-per-click on that same competitive key phrase was 82 cents. That's less than half, primarily due to the competition reducing their ad budgets, as well as the maximum amount they were willing to pay for a click. In the month of September 2008, I purchased 188 clicks at a cost of $154, the budget I had set. At a time when new business was very hard to come by, my site had 188 visits on the very best key phrase for my market.
I would not consider increasing my print advertising budget during a tough market, but the immediate and measurable results of real estate PPC is another matter. And yes, I did get two new buyer deals that month from those clicks.
