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How did McCarthy & Stone real estate generate real leads

10 December 2019

This UK retirement community developer used Facebook real estate ads to increase qualified leads—resulting in 4.3X more sales leads compared to the previous year.


Retiring in comfort


As the UK’s leading developer and manager of retirement communities, McCarthy & Stone has been building award-winning apartments for over 40 years. Established in 1977 and with homes found for more than 50,000 people McCarthy & Stone have resounding success.  Property development is the foundation of its business, but as the needs of the homeowners have changed, McCarthy & Stone has created other services to help customers enjoy retirement.

Reaching more retiree


Already seeing success with awareness campaigns on Facebook, McCarthy & Stone wanted to move further along the customer journey and concentrate on generating leads from its ads.

Building the perfect plan 


Awear of the reach Facebook ads have in 2017 McCarthy & Stone began experimenting and was able to successfully drive awareness with carousel and photo ads, so the team wanted to turn the focus into driving sales leads. They also wanted to test other ad formats and targeting options to see what worked best.
To ensure that it generated leads that would turn into sales  McCarthy & Stone decided to target campaigns to men and women living in the UK who were 55 years of age or older. The company also retargeted ads to people who visited its website, since this indicated that they might be interested. Using real estate ads (formerly known as dynamic ads for real estate), the company automatically served up the inventory people had looked at on its website within the ads.

Drawing from previous campaigns


Based on past experience, the company knew what ad creative was most appealing to its customers. McCarthy & Stone ran ads showing photos of the exteriors of its apartments since they drive higher click-through rates than ads with computer-generated images.

Constructing a successful campaign


Using Facebook real estate ads, McCarthy & Stone was able to drive more leads than ever before. Between June–November 2019, it achieved the following results:

  • 4.3X more sales lead compared to the previous year

  • 2X lower cost per lead for prospecting campaigns using real estate ads

  • 2X lower cost per lead for retargeting campaigns using real estate ads


This post was originally from Facebook. To learn more about McCarthy & Stone visit there website.