Short answer
A portal lead and a campaign lead are not the same product. The portal sells the same enquiry to several builders, so you are buying a race. Your own Google and Meta campaigns produce an exclusive lead that you can retarget and that keeps working after the subscription ends. Compare the two on cost per booked site visit, never on cost per lead, because the portal almost always wins the cheaper number and loses the useful one.
LenoreTech Real Estate Team · Jaipur · September 2026 · Figures from the Rajasthan RERA public register (22 September 2026) and live campaign accounts
You are buying two different things
When you buy a lead package from a property portal, you are buying attention that has already been sold. The same buyer who enquired on your listing has usually enquired on three or four others on the same screen. Your salesperson is now in a race they did not agree to enter, and the buyer is comparing you on price before they have heard anything else about the project.
When you run your own campaign, the enquiry arrives from a landing page that only talks about your project. Nobody else bought that lead. You can retarget that person for months, you can send them construction progress, and you keep the data when you stop spending.
Neither is automatically better. They are different products with different economics, and the mistake is comparing them on a number that only describes one of them.
The number that settles it
Cost per lead is the number portals compete on, and it is the number that misleads builders most often. A shared lead is cheaper for a reason. What you actually care about is how much it costs to get one qualified buyer standing on your site.
| What you measure | What it tells you | Why it misleads |
|---|
| Cost per lead | How cheaply you bought a phone number | Falls when quality falls, and shared leads are always cheaper |
| Qualified lead rate | How many were real buyers in your band | Needs an agreed definition before you can compare anything |
| Cost per booked site visit | The real cost of pipeline | Slow to read in the first three weeks, which is why people skip it |
| Site visit to booking rate | Whether the product and price work | Marketing cannot fix a price that is wrong for the corridor |
Track the same four numbers for both sources, in the same CRM, for the same thirty days. That is the whole test.
A reference point from a live account: on the Jaipur campaign we run for Sankalp Builders, Google Search delivered leads at about Rs 91 with an 18%+ conversion rate on the landing page, and the programme has produced 19,000+ leads and 1,600+ scheduled site visits. Your numbers will differ by corridor, price band and competition, so use this as a shape, not a promise.
Where portals genuinely win
We are not against portals, and builders who drop them entirely usually regret it. They earn their place in three situations.
- Cold discovery. Buyers who do not know your brand and are browsing inventory. Search ads only reach people already typing something specific.
- Resale and ready inventory. Portal audiences skew toward people who want to see many options side by side, which suits finished stock.
- Low operational effort. A listing takes an hour. A campaign takes a landing page, tracking, creative and someone watching it weekly.
Where your own campaigns win
- The lead is yours alone. No race, and the first conversation is about the project rather than about who called first.
- You can retarget. Everyone who visited the page or watched half a video can be followed for months at a low cost. Portals give you a number, not an audience.
- It compounds. Search rankings and a retargeting pool keep producing after the spend stops. A subscription stops the day it lapses.
- You own the data. Which corridor, which configuration, which creative. That informs the next launch.
The mix we usually run
For a single project in Jaipur, the pattern that has worked is Google Search for people already looking, Meta lead forms and video to build demand in the corridor, retargeting to close the people who watched or visited, and a portal listing kept running as a discovery layer rather than as the main channel. How we structure the paid side.
The budget split matters less than the tracking. If every source lands in one CRM with its origin tagged, you will know within a quarter which one deserves more.
Run the test yourself in thirty days
- Agree what "qualified" means with your sales head before day one. Budget band, timeline, corridor. Write it down.
- Tag every lead with its source in one CRM. If portal leads arrive by email and campaign leads arrive in a sheet, the test is already broken.
- Log site visits against the lead, not against the salesperson. This is the step most builders skip and it is the step that produces the answer.
- Do not change anything else for thirty days. No new offer, no price change, no new salesperson on one source.
- Compare cost per booked visit. Divide total spend on each source by the number of visits it produced.
Most builders are surprised twice: the portal is worse per visit than they assumed, and their own campaigns are worse than the agency claimed. Both are useful to know. Model the numbers before you spend.
What to do with the answer
If portals produce visits at a similar cost, keep both and stop worrying. If your own campaigns win clearly, move budget gradually rather than cancelling the subscription in one month, because discovery traffic takes time to replace. If neither produces visits at a sensible cost, the problem is usually not the channel at all: it is response time, price band, or the landing experience. That is the part we usually fix first.
