Commercial RE NYC.
Commercial Real Estate · B2B · NYC Office & Retail
A boutique commercial real estate firm operating in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Long Island City needed qualified tenant inquiries — CFOs, COOs, and office managers with active lease requirements — at a cost-per-lead that justified a $20K/month search budget. Google Search proved to be the single most efficient channel for this use case, delivering 489 qualified inquiries that the brokerage team converted to $28M in attributed lease commitments.
Geo
New York City · Manhattan · Brooklyn
Source
Google Ads Search
Period
2024 Ongoing
Tier
Commercial RE · B2B
The Setup
What we were working with.
The Problem
Commercial real estate lead generation on display or social wastes budget on non-decision-makers. The relevant audience is narrow — people with active lease expirations in the next 6–18 months — and they use Google when actively searching. The challenge is competing for high-CPC keywords ("Manhattan office space") against national listing platforms with unlimited budgets.
The Audience
Business decision-makers actively searching for commercial space in NYC: office space seekers (2,000–20,000 sq ft), retail location scouts, and warehouse/logistics operators. Keyword segmentation by space type, size range, and neighborhood. Negative keywords aggressively filtering out residential, job listings, and space-sharing searches that inflate click volume.
Our Solution
Hyper-segmented Search campaigns by property type and neighborhood. Each keyword group led to a landing page matching the search intent exactly — "Brooklyn warehouse space 5,000 sq ft" lands on a page showing available Brooklyn warehouses at that size. Click-to-call extensions and instant quote forms for immediate broker connection. Bid adjustments by time-of-day and device reflecting when commercial decision-makers are actively searching.
The Mechanics
What drove the numbers.
What We Learned
The takeaways that repeat.
Desktop-only bidding reduced CPC by 38% for commercial tenants
Commercial lease decisions are made at desks, not on phones. Excluding mobile traffic and adjusting bids to favor desktop users dropped average CPC from $14.20 to $8.80 while improving lead quality score by 1.4 points. The people calling about 10,000 sq ft of Manhattan office space are not doing it from their iPhone on the subway.
Landing page-to-keyword alignment is the single biggest lever in commercial RE search
Sending all commercial search traffic to a generic homepage is money destruction. A user searching "Midtown Manhattan law firm office space" should land on a page showing Midtown office listings pre-filtered for professional service firms. Matching landing pages to search intent lifted inquiry rate by 3.1× compared to the homepage.
Negative keyword investment pays for itself within two weeks
In commercial real estate search, 60–70% of clicks without aggressive negatives are irrelevant — job seekers, people looking for virtual offices, residential tenants. We ran a 400-term negative keyword list that eliminated wasted spend. This alone freed $8,400/month in budget that was redirected to higher-converting segments.
Click-to-call extensions generate the highest-quality commercial leads
Tenants with immediate requirements don't want to fill out a form — they want to talk to a broker. Call extensions on ads targeting short-term lease searches produced 34% of total inquiries at the lowest cost per qualified lead ($52 vs $89 blended), because calling signals active intent and timeline urgency.
More Receipts
