With cooling inflation and falling interest rates, the real estate market is poised to bounce back from a challenging year. The market might look different than just a few years ago, however, as changes in where people can afford to live, where people want to live and work, and what people value in their communities continues to evolve.
As a result, how the industry needs to market itself is changing faster than kitchen backsplash trends. While we won’t try to predict any design trends, we do have five key real estate marketing predictions for 2025. We spoke with over a dozen of our real estate industry customers and analyzed insights from real estate industry call data to learn why 2025 will be the year of trying new marketing channels, adopting new tools, or using AI to unlock new opportunities.
Keep reading to see our predictions to help you shore up the foundation of your 2025 marketing strategy.
Prediction 1: Updating your marketing to address the shifting demographics of your audience
In a volatile industry like real estate, staying up-to-date with marketing trends is crucial. As real estate and rent prices fluctuate, it can dramatically change the demographics of your target audience. Consider how, in just one year, the average age of a homebuyer went from 49 to 56, while the average age of first-time homebuyers went from 35 to 38.
One CallRail customer at a company selling affordable homes shared their experience: “Most of our buyers have been renters for their entire lives (including previous family generations) and do not even know they are able to afford to purchase a house, such as using our lender incentives, credit recovery programs, etc.”
In 2025, real estate marketers will need to stay attuned to their key demographics. In our analysis of industry call data, we found that top searches include “searching for apartments,” “senior or assisted living,” and “searching for apartments near me (near X).” Marketers will need to track, test, and experiment to keep their messaging relevant to rapidly changing audiences.
Prediction 2: The dual pressures of rising costs and increased competition will push marketing leaders to focus on ROI more than ever
While real estate prices may be inching back down to earth, marketing leaders are still feeling the sting of inflation. In a survey of several of our real estate industry customers, the top challenges included rising operating costs and greater competition.
With budgets stretched thin and cutthroat competition leaving little margin for error, marketing leaders will be laser-focused on maximizing the ROI of every marketing dollar spent. Marketing leaders will need the data infrastructure in place to identify low-performing campaigns and confidently decide whether to fix or nix them. Similarly, technology that improves marketing efficiency, like automation and artificial intelligence (AI), will be top-of-mind for many.
With Call Tracking insights, marketers can track which channels drive the most inbound prospect calls. Among CallRail customers in the real estate industry, our data shows that Organic Search, Google Ads, and Google My Business are driving the most calls. Having access to insights like these can help real estate companies and realtors determine where to best spend precious marketing resources. Plus, AI-powered automations can use conversations to automatically qualify leads or quickly provide lead scoring based on high-value keywords, helping you quickly turn prospects into leads.
Whether it’s CallRail or another solution, marketing leaders will likely be looking for a lift from new technologies to help keep costs down and stay in front of the competition.
Prediction 3: Paid digital channels will be the top area for marketing investment in 2025
For real estate marketers, the digital (marketing) revolution remains alive and well. Among the CallRail real estate customers surveyed, one-to-many digital channels like pay-per-click (PPC) and paid social media ads topped the list for areas they planned to invest in for 2025.
Building brand awareness and generating new leads cost-effectively is especially challenging in the real estate industry. As one CallRail customer in the real estate industry explained their marketing challenge, “Home purchase is a one-time purchase. There is a lot of competition. Getting our homes for sale in front of buyers is the biggest challenge.”
The unique dynamic of the consumer real estate market makes paid digital channels an attractive, cost-effective way to reach the right audience at scale. As real estate marketers rely more on paid digital channels, tools like Call Tracking and Form Tracking will help attribute lead sources in a multi-touch marketing funnel.
With insights into which campaigns and keywords are driving qualified leads via phone and forms, marketing leaders can more confidently refine their paid digital campaigns to maximize ROI. According to our own research, most qualified leads are driven by Google Ads, organic search, and direct referral, respectively.
Prediction 4: Generative AI will play a bigger role for inbound and outbound marketing strategies
Many real estate companies are small businesses — which can be great for staying connected to the communities they serve — but often means that there are fewer marketing resources available. With the arrival of generative AI technology, we expect many real estate companies will test and invest in AI-powered marketing tools to help them do more and be more efficient.
Among the customers we surveyed, we found that there is strong interest in AI’s potential for marketing. In particular, copy and content generation capabilities were most sought after, followed closely by lead follow-up capabilities.
Generative AI is often thought of as a robust tool for outbound marketing—creating the blogs, social media posts, and paid ad copy that attract customers to your site and ultimately cause them to convert. But generative AI can also be used for inbound marketing efforts, where your marketing actively reaches out to prospective customers.
However you bring in new leads, at some point you’ll need to talk with them — but in our analysis we found that nearly 1 in 10 (9%) of real estate industry calls are missed. CallRail provides tools like automated responses and advanced call flows to ensure missed calls don’t turn into missed opportunities. But with AI, you can go a step further to more efficiently convert more calls into customers. With Convert Assist from CallRail, for example, you can get an automatically created to-do list and a customized email draft to help you quickly follow up on every call.
Prediction 5: Real estate marketers will test new channels to survive the long sales cycles
New year, new channels for real estate marketers. In our survey of real estate industry customers, they indicated they plan to test new channels like SMS (the most common answer), followed by social media and video, respectively.
As real estate marketers try to find a cost-effective way to build brand awareness while nurturing potential clients through long sales cycles, experimenting with new channels and generating new types of content will be important in the year to come.
With AI-powered tools like Premium Conversation Intelligence, real estate marketers can uncover insights from the conversations they’re already having with customers to identify trending ideas and keywords for paid search or content generation ideas. That way, even when you’re testing new forms of content or new channels, you can be confident that you’re delivering the best message for your audience.
Open the door to better marketing in 2025 with CallRail
The new year is filled with opportunity. Whether you’re building the fundamentals of your tech stack with Call Tracking or looking for a simple way to leverage AI for faster follow-ups and conversions, 2025 is the year to check out what CallRail has to offer.
Get started with a free 14-day trial today.
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