Performance Marketing
2026-10-14 · 10 min read
Sapun Lamichhane
Founder & CEO of Arcetis
Scroll through any Nepal real estate Facebook group and the pattern repeats: the same plot of land posted by three different brokers (dalal), vague descriptions like "prime location" with no address, a phone number, and little else. It works often enough to keep the habit alive, but it is inefficient - most of these posts reach almost no one outside the broker's existing network, and buyers have learned to distrust listed prices and sizes because exaggeration is so common in the category.
The businesses that stand out are not doing anything exotic. They are targeting the right audience instead of posting into the void, using real photos and video instead of recycled ones, and giving buyers somewhere to go beyond a Messenger inbox that may or may not get answered.
This pattern persists partly because the barrier to entry in Nepali real estate marketing is so low - anyone with a phone can post a listing to a Facebook group, so there is little incentive to invest in anything more sophisticated when the free version is always available. The brokers who do invest a bit more effort tend to stand out disproportionately, precisely because the bar set by everyone else is so low.
“A thousand people liking a photo of your land plot means nothing - the only number that matters is how many called about that specific parcel.”
Boosting a post to "everyone in Nepal" is close to the least efficient way to spend money on real estate. A land parcel in Pokhara's Lakeside area is only relevant to people within a realistic radius, or to a specific diaspora audience if it is being marketed for investment from abroad. Setting a location radius, narrowing by relevant interests, and running separate ad sets for different budget tiers (a 4 aana plot versus a finished 3-storey house) consistently outperforms one generic boosted post, often at a similar or lower total spend.
Lead-generation ad formats that collect a name and phone number directly inside Facebook tend to produce more responses than ads that simply link out, though the trade-off is lead quality - some of those leads are curious browsers, not buyers. Routing serious interest to WhatsApp for a human conversation, rather than trying to close a land sale entirely inside a chat window, remains the more realistic path in Nepal.
Search terms like "land for sale pokhara," "flat for rent kathmandu baneshwor," or "apartment kathmandu under 1 crore" represent people actively looking, not just scrolling - commercial intent that is usually worth paying for even at a premium cost per click. Real estate keywords in Nepal's more active markets can run anywhere from roughly NPR 15 to 50 per click depending on location and competition, and management fees scale with the size of the ad budget being run, consistent with Google Ads management generally.
The honest caveat: Google Ads works best for standardized, repeatable listings - rentals, pre-built flats, plotted housing developments - and less well for a single one-off land parcel, where the total addressable audience searching at the right moment in the right week is simply small.
It is also worth running separate campaigns by intent rather than one blended campaign - someone searching "flat for rent" has a different budget and urgency than someone searching "apartment for sale," and blending them into one ad group usually wastes spend showing the wrong offer to the wrong searcher.
A short walkthrough video or a basic drone shot of a plot of land costs very little to produce today and still dramatically outperforms static photos in this category in Nepal, mostly because so few competitors bother. For buyers who have been burned before by photos that did not match reality on-site, video builds a kind of trust a text description cannot.
This does not require a cinematic production. A steady phone video narrated honestly - including the rough parts, like a narrow access road or an unfinished boundary wall - builds more credibility than a heavily filtered photo set, and it pre-qualifies buyers who show up already knowing what they are getting.
For land specifically, a short video showing the actual boundary markers, road access, and surrounding plots addresses the single most common source of buyer anxiety in Nepali land transactions - that the plot being shown in photos is not the plot actually being sold, or that its boundaries have been misrepresented. Addressing this proactively on video, rather than waiting for a buyer to ask, shortens the path to a serious site visit.
Most real estate businesses and individual brokers in Nepal operate entirely out of a Facebook page, with no website at all. That means every listing, every lead, and every bit of accumulated reputation lives on a platform the business does not control and cannot export. A simple listing website with a map, filters by budget and location, and a lead form costs in the same range as a standard custom website - roughly NPR 1,50,000-5,00,000 depending on complexity - and it becomes an asset that keeps working in Google search long after a Facebook post has scrolled out of view.
This matters more for established agencies and developers than for an individual broker moving a handful of parcels a year, where the cost may not be justified yet. The decision point is usually volume: once a business is managing more than a handful of active listings at a time, a proper website starts paying for itself in organic search traffic alone.
A real estate business taking marketing seriously in 2026 might reasonably budget NPR 20,000-30,000/month in management fees for Facebook and Google ads combined, plus a media spend that flexes with how many listings are active, plus a one-time or amortized website cost if volume justifies it. The ad spend should always be tracked separately from the management fee - the two get confused constantly in this market.
Arcetis, a Pokhara-headquartered, Verified Google and Shopify Partner agency, builds this kind of combined ads-plus-website setup for Nepali businesses, with engagements scoped to what a given business actually needs rather than a fixed package. Clients retain full ownership of their ad accounts, website, and data - which matters especially in real estate, where a business's listing history is itself valuable.
It is also worth tracking which channel actually produces site visits and closed deals, not just inquiries, since real estate has an unusually large gap between initial interest and an actual transaction. A broker who tracks this over a few months typically finds that one channel - often Google Ads for standardized listings, or referrals driven by earlier video content - outperforms the others by a wide margin, and budget should shift toward whichever that turns out to be.
Media spend can start from a few thousand rupees a month for testing and scale up significantly for active agencies, while management fees for a single-channel setup typically run NPR 15,000-30,000 per month. The two should always be tracked as separate line items.
Not always. For someone moving a handful of parcels a year, a well-run Facebook presence may be enough. Once a broker or agency is managing many active listings at once, a website with search and filtering starts to pay for itself through organic traffic a Facebook post cannot generate.
Lead-generation ad forms tend to produce more volume but lower average quality than a direct message starting with a specific question about a specific listing. A quick phone qualification call - confirming budget range and timeline - before investing more time remains the most reliable filter in the Nepali market.