For / estate agents and letting agents
Advertising for estate agents and letting agents
Property advertising is the most heavily regulated thing most small businesses will ever run, and almost nobody running it knows that.
Where property actually gets browsed
Meta. Property is browsed rather than searched, and the imagery does most of the work.
That's a starting point rather than a rule. AdPlaybook scores all eight platforms against the strategy you pick and opens on the best fit, so you're changing a recommendation rather than choosing cold.
Two campaigns, not one
Category education early, direct response only on a specific property. The declaration removes the targeting you would reach for by instinct, so plan the campaign around what remains rather than discovering it at setup.
Every strategy in AdPlaybook states how it usually fails before you choose it, because the expensive mistakes here are strategic rather than typographical.
The rules that apply to you specifically
These aren't platform preferences. They're law, and the platform's category declaration only covers part of it.
Housing
- Declare the Housing Special Ad Category on Meta and the equivalent restricted category on Google.
Targeting housing ads by age, gender or postcode is unlawful discrimination under the Fair Housing Act. The declaration is what removes those options — it is not a formality, it is the mechanism. - Do not exclude any audience on the basis of a protected characteristic, including by proxy.
Proxy exclusions — an interest, a postcode, a language — are still discrimination. Intent is not the test.
This is a summary of why the controls exist, not legal advice. If you're running these ads, whoever signs them off should be qualified to.
What it does with a listing
It reads your site, works out what you sell and to whom, recommends the approach that fits, and writes the campaign. Then it checks the copy against Meta's published character limits, traces every factual claim back to a line on your own site, runs the compliance obligations above, and tells you what it could not check.