Industries · Real estate
Marketing for real estate in Dubai, where the portals own the listings.
Your listings sit on Bayut and Property Finder, so the portals rank for every property search and your own site gets nothing. Here is what we look at first, and what we would build instead.
Concede the listing searches. Win the questions.
- Sites
- From AED 3,500
- SEO
- From AED 1,000 / month
- Portal leads
- Not resold
01The problem
You are competing with your own inventory.
A buyer searching for a two-bedroom in a named community reaches a portal, because that is where the inventory is aggregated and the portal has a page for every permutation of area, bedroom count and price band. Your listings are on that page. So are four other brokerages’ listings for the same unit type in the same tower.
The enquiry that follows is a portal lead, priced by the portal and delivered to whoever else bought it. You are paying to be one of several replies to a buyer who has already been contacted twice before you call.
Meanwhile the questions a buyer actually asks before enquiring are largely unanswered. What the service charges are like in a specific tower and what they cover. Whether an off-plan payment plan means anything once handover slips. What a community is like to live in rather than to photograph. Which RERA designations matter to a buyer and which are noise.
Those searches are not head terms and the portals do not serve them well, because a listing template cannot answer a question that is not about a listing. That is the gap, and it is the only part of this market where a brokerage site can win outright.
02What we check first
Which searches you could realistically win.
Before anything is built, the question is which terms are winnable against whoever currently ranks for them. For a brokerage that usually means conceding the listing searches and looking at three other kinds:
- 01Area and community guides
- Comparisons a buyer makes before choosing where to look, which no listing page answers because a listing already assumes the choice.
- 02Building-specific pages
- A named tower, its layouts, its service charges, what the building is like once you live in it. Specific enough that the portals have no equivalent page.
- 03Off-plan payment plans and handover
- How a plan is structured, what happens when a handover date moves, what the milestones actually commit you to. Researched heavily and answered badly.
03The approach
Concede the listings. Build what the portals cannot.
Conceding is the strategic move, not the defeatist one. The listing searches are held by platforms your own inventory feeds, and outranking them would require competing against the syndication you depend on. Every hour spent there is an hour not spent on searches with no incumbent.
So the site becomes the thing the portals are structurally unable to be: honest about a community rather than promotional, specific about a building rather than generic, and willing to say when service charges make a yield look better on paper than it is. Written by people who deal in it, not spun from a listing description.
Paid spend then routes to those pages rather than to a generic lead form. A buyer who arrives on a page answering the question they searched is a different prospect from one who lands on a contact form, and the cost per enquiry reflects it.
04What we’d measure
Two numbers, both in your own accounts.
Enquiries arriving direct rather than through a portal — the count of people who found you and contacted you without a platform in between. That is the number the work is for.
And what each of those cost, set against what a portal lead costs you. You already know the second figure. The comparison is the whole argument, and it is checkable in accounts that are in your name rather than in a report we write.
05From the checklist
Four checks decide most brokerage outcomes.
Which of the twenty matter most here.
The full audit is published on the work page, all twenty checks in five groups. These four decide most brokerage outcomes:
Pages competing with each other for the same term
Brokerages generate near-identical pages per listing and per area, and they split their own ranking between them.
Thin or duplicated service and location pages
An area page assembled from a listing feed says nothing a portal has not already said better.
Form submissions and calls recorded as events
Most enquiries here are calls. If calls are not events, the campaign that produced them is invisible.
Search terms report — what you are actually paying for
Property search is full of adjacent intent: jobs, rentals when you sell, a competing developer’s name. Without a maintained negative list you buy all of it.
Four checks decide most brokerage outcomes.
06Websites for brokerages
Real estate web design in Dubai, specifically.
A brokerage site has three requirements a generic site does not. Listing integration that survives a feed change rather than breaking silently. Lead capture that records which campaign and which page produced the enquiry, so the call that arrives can be traced back to what paid for it. And area or building pages built as pages in their own right, capable of ranking without a listing attached to them.
From AED 3,500 per project with tracking and conversion setup included — the same rate and the same inclusions as any other build. The full process is on the web design and development page.
07Out of scope
What we turn down.
Not offered:
Guaranteed listing rankingsNobody can guarantee a position held by the platform your inventory is syndicated to. A guarantee here is a sales device.
Not offered:
Buying portal leads on your behalfThey are someone else’s product at someone else’s price. If you want them, buy them directly rather than through a margin.
Not offered:
A claim to beat Bayut at its own searchWe will tell you which searches are winnable and which are not, before you pay for either. The second list is longer.
08Questions
The things people actually ask.
Can you get our listings above Bayut and Property Finder?
For the listing searches themselves, no, and we would not take the work on that basis. Those results are held by the portals your listings are syndicated to, and competing with them on their own terms means competing with your own inventory. The winnable searches are the ones the portals do not answer well — a specific tower, a specific community, a specific question about buying there.
What does a brokerage website need that a normal site doesn’t?
Listing integration that does not break when the feed changes, lead capture that records which campaign and which page produced the enquiry, and area or building pages that can rank on their own. Most brokerage sites have the first and none of the second, so nobody can say which marketing produced which deal.
Is it worth having a website when we list on the portals?
It is worth having one that does something the portals do not. A site that only repeats your listings competes with the portals at what they are best at. A site that answers what a buyer asks before they enquire — what a building is actually like, what the service charges mean, how a payment plan works — earns enquiries the portals never see.
Do you buy portal leads for us?
No. Portal leads are a product we have no control over and no visibility into, and reselling them would mean charging you a margin on someone else’s pricing. If portal leads work for you, buy them directly. Our work is the demand that arrives without them.
How do you measure whether it is working?
Enquiries that arrive direct rather than through a portal, and what each one cost compared with what a portal lead costs you. Both numbers come from your own accounts — Analytics, Search Console, Google Ads — which are in your name, so you can check them without asking us.
How long before it works?
Three to six months for organic movement, which is the same answer we give everyone because it is a property of how Google works rather than of your sector. Paid campaigns can produce enquiries sooner once tracking is correct. The website work in between is what makes either of them convert.
Do you work with off-plan as well as secondary?
Both, and they need different pages. Off-plan buyers are researching payment plans, handover timelines and developer track record. Secondary buyers are researching a specific building, its service charges and what living there is actually like. One page cannot serve both, and most brokerage sites try.
What does it cost?
A brokerage site starts at AED 3,500 with tracking and conversion setup included. SEO is AED 1,000 a month with a three-month initial commitment. Google Ads is AED 1,000 a month or 10% of spend, whichever is greater, with no markup on media. Every rate is published.