How much should an estate agent spend on Facebook ads?

Your first week of Facebook ads is not about leads. It is about finding out which offer the homeowners in your patch respond to. So keep it small enough that you would not lose sleep if it brought nothing: £5 a day for a week is £35, and £10 a day is £70.

As Meta puts it, “you decide how much you want to spend”. There is no contract and no minimum term, and Facebook bills your own ad account, so the money goes straight on the ads. Pick one offer, put it in front of one area, and leave it alone long enough to learn something. Changing the ad every day tells you nothing.

A daily budget is a target for the week, not a fixed amount every day. Meta's own help pages say that on days with better opportunities it may spend up to 75% over your daily budget, and less on other days. What it will not do is go over 175% of the daily budget in any one day, or more than seven times the daily budget in a week that runs Sunday to Saturday.

So a £10 daily budget can spend £17.50 on a Tuesday and £4 on a Thursday, but never more than £70 across the week. Budget by the week, and do not panic when one day looks high.

The average UK home was worth £273,000 in August 2026, according to HM Land Registry. Put your own fee against that: at 1%, one instruction on an average home is £2,730, which is a lot of £5 days. Your own patch and your own fee will move that number, so work it out with yours.

The catch is that a lead is not an instruction. Between the two sit a phone call, a valuation and a decision, and most of the result is decided there rather than in Ads Manager. Know your own numbers: how many leads become valuations, and how many valuations become instructions. That tells you what you can afford to pay for a lead.

Take some round numbers, made up for the sake of the sum. If one lead in ten books a valuation, and one valuation in three becomes an instruction, you need thirty leads for each instruction. At £5 a lead that is £150 of ads for one instruction; at £20 a lead it is £600. Either way, set it against what that instruction earns you, and you know how much room you have.

For a sense of what is possible, the best campaign we ran as an agency brought in 421 leads at £1.05 each, sending homeowners to an instant valuation tool. That was one campaign in one area, and individual results vary.

The budget matters less than what you put it behind. Homeowners stop for something they want: to know what their home is worth, or what is happening to prices on their side of town. An ad that sends them to an instant valuation tool asks them for a name and a number in return for something they were curious about anyway.

Property ads work too, mostly with buyers, and some of those buyers have a home of their own to sell. We cover the different kinds of ad, and what each brings in, on our Facebook ads for estate agents page.

After the first week, look at three things: how many leads came in, what each one cost, and how many turned into a valuation once you rang them. Ring every one within minutes of it arriving, or the test tells you more about your follow-up than your ad.

If an ad is bringing in valuations, raise its budget a step at a time rather than doubling it overnight, and keep watching what each valuation costs. If a week brings nothing, change the offer or the picture before you change the budget: more money behind an ad homeowners ignore buys more of being ignored. Give every ad an end date, because ads wear out as the same people see them again and again.

On the Ultimate plan, the Ad Launcher sets this up for you: pick an offer, then a daily budget of £5, £10 or £20 (or anything from £2 to £50), and run it for three to fourteen days, or up to thirty for valuation and market report ads. Facebook bills your own ad account for what you spend.