Why do you charge a monthly fee for the marketing?

These monthly fees are optional. And we charge this if the seller wants to have premium ads posted for their property.

What we mean by “premium ads” are those that are given special priority or special features by the online marketplaces. Some examples of these special features are the following:

1. Being placed at the top of the listings
2. Being highlighted among the other listings
3. Being featured at the front page of the marketplace
4. Being featured at the category page
5. Being shown higher on the list of relevant search results

And in the case of social media and search engine ads:

1. Being shown at the top of the results page for relevant searches
2. Appearing in the newsfeed, sidebars and other conspicuous areas of the social media app (like Facebook), to users who match the profile that we are targeting.

In online marketplaces like Property24, OLX, Lamudi, Zipmatch, Locanto and others, they usually let everyone post listings for free. Those free listings are what constitute the majority of the listings on these sites. But those free listings are not given special treatment. We have to pay for these premium features.

If a seller is in a hurry to sell, and would like their listing to be sure to stick out from the rest of the thousands of other listings, we can give their listing a boost; they will only have to cover the hard costs of these premium ads.

The hard costs of these premium ads are not anymore part of the commissions we charge for a successful sale. What’s part of the services paid with the commissions we collect, are the actual work we do, to post these ads in the right places and to have them featured properly and strategically so that the ad budget given to us by the seller is spent effectively.

Inexperience in handling paid marketing campaigns can be very costly. These premium ads can be expensive and they don’t guarantee the desired results. If you’re new to this field, you’ll have to figure out a lot of things yourself and spend a lot of time and money to find what actually works.

We have already gone through this costly trial-and-error process and our experience is what we offer as part of the commissions paid by our clients. The hard costs of the ads that we are passing to the seller, is just a tiny fraction of the cost of the trial-and-error process.