Click to Keys: Filled Units at 25% the Cost of a Broker for Silverstein Properties
Click to Keys: Filled Units at 25% the Cost of a Broker for Silverstein Properties
Leading Real Estate Operations
Silverstein Properties manages a diverse portfolio of luxury residential and commercial properties, including co-working spaces. Their operations balance the complexities of multifamily lease-ups alongside high-value commercial vacancies.
Across the real estate industry, many operators still rely on brokers or listing directories to fill units—channels that rarely scale cost-effectively or offer meaningful performance insights. Others have begun experimenting with digital ads, but often stop at surface-level tactics like generating form submissions or click-to-call leads, without the infrastructure to measure what actually drives signed leases.
Most leasing systems are built for lead generation—not actually filling apartments or revenue performance. Even form fills and phone calls often get lost in disconnected CRMs or go untracked entirely. Without reliable attribution, teams are flying blind and unable to scale what’s working.
The real opportunity lies in building systems that don’t just generate leads—but actually generate, capture, track, and convert demand. By linking every ad click to real-world leasing outcomes—tours, applications, signed leases, and even rent collected—operators can shift from manual guesswork to measurable growth.
This performance-driven approach doesn’t just reduce cost per lease, it empowers real estate teams to make faster, smarter decisions by aligning marketing, leasing, and data operations around shared insights and outcomes.
How can real estate operators with broad, multichannel portfolios develop scalable, data-driven marketing systems that generate high-quality leads—and turn them into signed leases?
Building a Data-Driven Leasing Ecosystem
Real estate ad programs typically focus on lead generation, but what happens next is often a mystery. Most operators rely on a patchwork of tools—ad platforms, leasing software, CRM systems, and analytics tools—that don’t talk to each other. This lack of integration creates operational drag, misaligned messaging, and ad spend that isn’t clearly tied to lease outcomes or revenue.
The outcome is a broken revenue funnel—leads don’t reliably make it to leasing teams, lead sources rarely survive the full customer journey, and reporting is incomplete or misleading. Most teams are working with only a sliver of the full picture.
To scale leasing operations effectively, operators need a performance marketing engine built on:
A system that tracks a lead from the very first digital click through to lease signing—bridging online and offline touchpoints.
Real-time conversion data fed back into ad platforms to continuously refine targeting and improve return on ad spend.
Marketing, leasing, and development teams working from shared insights to fine-tune messaging, creative, and speed-to-lead processes.
The result is a high-performance marketing infrastructure purpose-built for real estate—giving operators full control and visibility across their leasing funnel. It reduces reliance on brokers by filling units at 25% the cost, while offering greater transparency into what’s actually driving signed leases. Even operators already running Google Ads often see a 30%+ lift in performance once we rebuild their funnel, implement full-funnel tracking, and optimize campaigns with precision.
This is more than ad buying—it’s a revenue system. We make sure every qualified lead is captured, every dollar is trackable, and every campaign gets smarter over time.
This kind of system doesn’t just improve efficiency and reduce cost per lease—it clarifies what’s working at every stage of the journey and enables scalable growth across a mix of residential and commercial properties.
Take Silverstein for Example
The Challenge
As a top-tier real estate developer and operator, Silverstein Properties needed a performance marketing system that could keep pace with their expanding portfolio and aggressive leasing timelines. Their goals were to:
Increase new leases on luxury residential buildings and commercial coworking spaces.
Fill high-value residential unit and commercial coworking space vacancies with qualified tenants.
Understand exactly which channels, messages, and tactics were driving signed leases to enable more efficient, profitable marketing investments.
Key obstacles included:
A fragmented mix of platforms that made performance attribution difficult.
Limited shared visibility across marketing, leasing, development, and data teams.
Evolving data privacy regulations and platform changes disrupting traditional conversion tracking.
Critical touchpoints across the leasing journey—form fills, phone calls, virtual and in-person tours, all the way through signed leases—were disconnected and hard to track cohesively.
Growth Marketing Advisors’ (“GMA’s”) Approach
GMA partnered closely with Silverstein Properties to build a performance-driven marketing system rooted in data, continuous iteration, and deep cross-functional alignment. By focusing on four core areas—tracking infrastructure, multichannel campaigns, strategic optimization, and team integration—we transformed fragmented efforts into scalable, measurable outcomes.
We didn’t just launch ads—we rebuilt the foundation. That meant diagnosing gaps in lead capture, repairing broken attribution, and aligning data flows from the first click through to signed lease. The result was a system that gets smarter over time, enabling sharper decisions and stronger performance across every property and more scalable economics relative to brokers and previous digital marketing programs.
Our approach included:
Results
GMA delivered uncommon performance lifts through a combination of technical depth, strategic agility, and collaborative execution:
Unified data architecture powering smarter media decisions.
High-cadence testing and rapid iteration.
Custom-tailored approaches for both residential and commercial leasing needs.
Results compounded over years, not just months or quarters.
Residential:
Reduced cost per lease to 75% less than broker
Exceeded leasing projections by 25%
Scaled Google Ads program while also reducing the channel's cost per lease by 27%
Achieved a 20x return on ad spend (ROAS) across campaigns
Increased residents by 37% with the same budget
Commercial:
Reduced cost per lease by up to 67% compared to traditional broker fees
Scaled paid media while driving down acquisition costs
Achieved a 10x return on ad spend (ROAS) across campaigns
Improved lease outcomes without increasing budget or broker involvement
Quote
"GMA brought a level of strategic depth and technical expertise we struggled to find in the Real Estate space. They helped us connect marketing performance directly to leasing results, providing genuine visibility into the funnel. More than an agency, they became embedded partners—collaborating closely with our teams to boost occupancy, lower cost per lease, and scale what’s working."
- Gil Eyal, Head of Marketing & Innovation at Inspire, Silverstein Properties, Inc.
Increase in Residents with Same Budget
Lower Cost Per Lease vs. Broker
Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)
Performance Tracking & Attribution Infrastructure
To unlock full-funnel visibility, GMA acted as a strategic extension of Silverstein Properties’ IT, engineering, data, marketing, and leasing teams. We designed, advised on, and helped implement an integrated performance tracking framework that:
Connected tagging and analytics systems to capture foundational site and event-level data.
Built a centralized data warehouse to match user identities across disconnected sources.
Integrated CRM, leasing systems, and internal databases to align campaign performance with real leasing outcomes.
Implemented call tracking and click protection tools to monitor phone conversions and filter out fraudulent clicks.
Delivered centralized dashboards to visualize performance and guide decision-making.
This infrastructure enabled:
Tracking the entire journey from ad click to lease signing, across online and offline touchpoints.
Automated upload of offline lease events back into ad platforms to continuously improve optimization and targeting.
Real-time visibility into cost per lease, broken down by campaign, channel, and property.
GMA didn’t own the tech stack, but made it perform—working hand-in-hand with internal teams to transform a fragmented system into a powerful marketing engine.
Full-Funnel, Multichannel Campaigns
GMA designed and launched customized campaigns for each property, tailoring strategy based on residential vs. commercial goals and local market dynamics. Campaign channels included search, social, retargeting, programmatic display, and more.
Geo-targeting combined with audience signals to reach in-market prospects.
Dynamic channel mix adjustments based on performance insights and lease velocity.
Media execution was precision-engineered to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time across the entire leasing journey.
Strategic Iteration & Optimization
Campaigns were treated as living systems, refined through high-frequency testing and real-time market feedback. Key tactics included:
The “Retargeting Gauntlet” to keep properties top-of-mind through complex leasing cycles.
Collaboration with developers on conversion rate optimization (CRO), including improvements to lead forms, landing page layouts, speed-to-lead automation, and data privacy compliance.
GMA didn’t just drive traffic; we meticulously optimized every stage of the lead-to-lease journey.
Deep Cross-Functional Collaboration
GMA embedded itself into Silverstein’s operational rhythm, creating tight feedback loops between marketing and leasing teams:
Weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly syncs tailored to property-specific needs.
Creative and messaging adapted in real time based on leasing team input.
Agile campaign adjustments by property performance metrics.
Performance metrics shared transparently across teams to ensure alignment.
Real performance comes from alignment—when marketing, leasing, technology, and data teams operate from a shared strategy with connected systems and feedback loops, insights turn into action.