Where housebuilders should spend their marketing budget in 2027

Most housebuilders set next year's marketing budget between now and Christmas, and 2027's will be set in an odd market. Fewer developments are launching than at any point in over a decade. A new government equity loan for first-time buyers of new builds is due to be confirmed at the Budget on 28 October. And a growing share of buyers now meet a development first in an AI answer rather than on a search results page.

The short version: keep the portals, but pay for them by the reservation rather than by habit. Put more into the pages you own and the show home, where enquiries turn into reservations. Treat AI search as a content job, not a new ad line. Measure every channel by cost per reservation, not by clicks. And add every free channel you can before you buy more of the paid ones.

Below is the evidence for each line, a starting split, and the rules every piece of new homes marketing now has to meet.

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The market you are budgeting for

Rightmove's half-year results for 2026 describe the market plainly. Developers "are seeing conditions among the most difficult experienced since the global financial crisis", and new developments are "coming to market at their lowest in over a decade". The number of developments advertised on Rightmove fell to 2,766 at the end of June 2026, down 4% since December and 6% on a year earlier.

Fewer outlets means each one has to sell more of its plots from fewer launches, and the marketing on each development has to work harder. It also means the cost of each portal subscription is spread across fewer sites in your own accounts.

The one clear tailwind is policy. On 26 September the government announced Your First Home, an equity loan scheme in England expected to support 2.5% deposits backed by 20% government equity loans, for first-time buyers purchasing a new build "from a developer signed up to the scheme". It will have a household income cap and local price caps, and developers will be expected to contribute when they sign up. The detail, including the timetable, comes at the Budget on 28 October 2026.

For a 2027 plan, that means two things. Keep a slice of budget unallocated until the scheme's rules are published, and be ready to market eligible plots to first-time buyers the week it opens. We keep a plain-English summary of the scheme on our Your First Home page for buyers.

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Start with the plot, not the channel

The most useful number in a new homes marketing plan is the cost per reservation by channel. Not the cost per click, not the cost per enquiry: the cost of each reservation that came from that channel and stuck.

To get it you need two things most sales teams already hold but rarely join up:

1. Where each reservation started. Ask at reservation, and record it against the plot. "Saw it on a portal" and "drove past the board" are both answers worth recording.
2. What each channel cost per development. Including the sales team's time where a channel needs it.

A worked example, with the assumptions stated. Rightmove's average revenue per New Homes advertiser was £2,247 a month in the first half of 2026, up 7% on a year earlier. Rightmove counts its New Homes members by development, so that is roughly £26,964 a year per development across all products. Take a development selling 40 plots a year. If half of its reservations start on Rightmove, the portal cost per Rightmove-sourced reservation is about £1,348. If a quarter start there, it is about £2,696.

Neither figure is good or bad on its own. The point is that you cannot compare a portal against paid social, a door drop or a better development page until you have the same number for each.

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A starting split for 2027

There is no reliable published benchmark for how housebuilders divide their marketing spend, and any article that gives you one to the decimal place is guessing. What follows is a starting split we would defend for a typical private-sale development, as a share of its marketing budget. Move money between lines every quarter as your cost per reservation comes in.

Two notes on the table. The show home build and furnishing usually sit in build cost; the line above covers its marketing, such as events and longer opening hours, plus extra staff at peak times. And the AI line is mostly time and content rather than media spend, which is why it is small.

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Property portals

Portals remain the single biggest source of buyers looking for a home right now, and it would be wrong to plan 2027 without them. Rightmove reports a 90% share of time spent on UK property portals (Comscore) or 75% (SimilarWeb and Sensor Tower), and says over 85% of its traffic arrives direct or from organic search. Developers are buying more from it, not less: 36% of developments on Rightmove took its top "Ascend" package at the end of June 2026, up from 28% in December.

The case for spending less is cost per reservation, not reach. Prices have risen faster than build volumes, and the subscription is per development, so a slow-selling site pays the same as a fast one. Before renewing in 2027:

• Rank developments by portal cost per reservation. The developments in the last stages of selling, or in towns where most buyers come through the show home, are the first candidates for a lower package.
• Check what the portal's lead products deliver. Rightmove says over 50% of its new homes leads either book an appointment or share their availability. Check your own figure against that.
• Add the free portals. Every free listing that brings even a handful of reservations a year lowers your blended cost per reservation. We have made the case for a second, cheaper portal for estate agents, and it applies to developers too.

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Your website and development pages

Every other channel sends buyers somewhere, and for most it is your own development page. It is the line most often underfunded, because it does not feel like media spend.

A development page that turns visits into enquiries does a few things well:

• Shows every plot with its price and status. Buyers choose a plot, not a development. A page that lists "2, 3 and 4 bedroom homes from £265,000" makes them ring to find out what is left.
• Has a site plan they can use on a phone. Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 report found UK adults spent an average of 4 hours 30 minutes online a day in May 2025, with smartphones accounting for around three-quarters of that time. A plan that only works as a PDF on a desktop loses buyers.
• Makes the enquiry specific. An enquiry that names the plot and what the buyer wants (a question, the brochure, a visit) is faster for the sales team to answer and easier to track.
• States the full price and what it includes. See the section on the rules below.

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Paid search

Paid search on your development and town names is cheap insurance: buyers who type your development's name are already interested, and if you do not appear, a portal or a reseller will. Beyond brand terms, it gets expensive quickly, and generic "new homes in [town]" terms compete with every portal and agent.

What has changed is the results page. Ofcom says around 30% of keyword search queries in the UK now show an AI Overview, and 53% of UK adults say they often see AI summaries. A Pew Research Center study of US users in March 2025 found people clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, against 15% when one did not, and clicked a link inside the summary on just 1% of visits. US behaviour is not UK behaviour, but the direction is clear: fewer organic clicks on informational searches, which makes brand-term paid search and a strong development page more valuable, and generic informational content less so.

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Social media

Social is where buyers who are not yet searching first hear about a development. Ofcom's 2025 figures show UK adults spending an average of 51 minutes a day on YouTube, 43 minutes on Facebook and Messenger, and 20 minutes on Instagram, with Facebook slightly weighted towards over-35s and YouTube and Instagram skewed strongly towards 18 to 34-year-olds. That age split matters for 2027: if Your First Home goes ahead as announced, first-time buyers become a bigger share of new build demand, and they skew young.

Judge social on show home visits and enquiries, not on reach or engagement. Short video of the plots themselves (the light in the kitchen at 4pm, the walk to the station) tends to do more than brand films. Paid social's targeting is local and cheap to test, so it suits a monthly test-and-cut rhythm.

Influencer and partner posts promoting your development in return for payment, gifts or other incentives need to be clearly labelled as ads under the CMA's guidance on social media endorsements. What triggers the label is the commercial relationship, not whether anyone appears on camera.

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AI search visibility

This is the newest line, and the easiest to overspend on. The honest picture today: AI assistants send very little direct traffic to property sites. Rightmove says less than 0.5% of its traffic in the first half of 2026 was referred from large language models. But buyers increasingly read an AI answer before they click anything, and whether your development is named in that answer depends on what the AI can find and trust.

Google is clear that there is no special trick. Its guidance for site owners says "there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary". In practice that means:

• Put the facts on a page an AI can read. Plot prices, availability, house types, the show home's opening times and the address, as text on a public page, not only inside a PDF brochure or an image.
• Be present on the sites AI tools already cite. AI answers about "new homes in [town]" draw on portals, local news and property data sites as well as your own site. Being listed on more of them is the cheapest form of AI visibility there is.
• Ask the questions yourself. Once a month, ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google what new homes are for sale in each of your towns, and note whether your developments appear. That is your measurement.

None of this needs a large media line. It needs someone to own it.

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Show homes and the sales office

A show home is where an enquiry becomes a reservation, and it is the most expensive asset in the plan. In a slower market its marketing budget is the line we would protect hardest, but the spend should follow the visits:

• Open when buyers can come. Track enquiries and visit requests by day and time, and set hours to match. A show home closed on the evenings and days buyers ask for is paying rent on an empty room.
• Make visit requests easy. Let buyers ask to visit from the development page and every plot page, and call them back the same day.
• Use launch events carefully. They work, but the rules on incentives have tightened (see below).

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Print, signage and local outreach

Print is not dead for new homes. It is local, and new homes marketing is local. Site hoardings and directional boards still catch passing trade, and door drops reach the people most likely to move a few streets: renters nearby, growing families, older owners downsizing.

The measured case for door drops is modest but real. JICMAIL's figures for the second quarter of 2026 show a door drop is interacted with 3.1 times on average and stays in the home for 6 days, and 9.5% of all mail items prompted a website visit. A door drop carrying a QR code was 87% more likely than the average mail item to prompt one. So put a QR code on every drop, point it at the development page rather than your home page, and give each drop its own link so you can count it.

Local outreach costs little more than time: the nearest estate agents (who often hold buyers with a home to sell), large local employers and the local paper.

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The rules every line now has to meet

Two sets of rules shape what any of this marketing can say, and both have teeth.

The New Homes Quality Code (version 2, March 2026) requires that all sales and marketing material, including photography, CGI or video, is not misleading, and that it is clear and fair, in plain language. It bans high-pressure selling, including suggesting other buyers are interested or that the price will soon rise when that is not true. For time-bound events such as launch weekends, buyers must be given seven days to consider, with the incentive held open for them. It also bans "drip pricing" of elements buyers would reasonably expect to be included.

Consumer law now carries direct fines. Since April 2025, under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, the CMA can decide breaches itself and fine a business up to 10% of its global turnover, and the Act bans drip pricing and fake reviews outright.

For a marketing plan, that means CGIs labelled as CGIs, prices that include what buyers would expect them to include, no "only two left" unless it is true, and reviews you can stand behind.

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Where Home.co.uk fits

We should be clear about our interest: Home.co.uk is a property portal, and we are opening it to housebuilders. Here is what it offers and where it fits in the plan above.

It is free to claim. Claiming your company and listing your developments and plots on Home.co.uk costs nothing. Paid packages are optional. That puts it in the "add every free channel first" part of the plan: it costs your team some time, not a line of budget.

Every plot gets its own page. Each published plot has a page with its price, bedrooms, house type and status (available, reserved or sold), linked from the development and its site plan. Plots can be added one at a time or pasted from a spreadsheet, and changing a plot's status takes one tap. Buyers who choose a plot before they call are easier to sell to, and these are pages a search engine or an AI assistant can read.

The site plan is clickable. Upload the site plan from your brochure and place each plot on it. Buyers tap a plot to see its price, bedrooms and status, and the plan opens zoomed on your plots so it works on a phone. You can mark up to eight places on the plan, such as the show home or the play area, for buyers to step through.

Enquiries name the plot. A buyer can ask a question, ask for the brochure or ask to visit the show home, from the development or any plot. Each enquiry goes to the sales contact you name for that development and says which plot the buyer means and what they want. Show home visit requests come with the day and time of day the buyer prefers, for your team to confirm.

You can see what is working. Each development shows its enquiries by type, its page views week by week, and the plots that have been listed longest without an enquiry. That is the data the cost-per-reservation approach above needs.

It has been around since 1995. Home.co.uk has gathered UK property listings and market data for three decades, and publishes the monthly Home Asking Price Index with editions back to 2006. That history is part of why AI tools already cite Home.co.uk when answering UK property questions. We publish a plain-text guide to the site for AI assistants to read, and there is a Home app inside ChatGPT that searches the same listings. A development and its plots on Home.co.uk are on pages those tools already use.

Published developments appear in the new builds search. They show as their own cards at the top of the new builds search for the place a buyer searches, ahead of the homes for sale.

What it is not: our traffic is not Rightmove's, and we will not pretend it is. Nothing on Home.co.uk asks you to leave another portal. The case is simple: a free listing with plot-level pages, a site plan buyers can use and enquiries that name the plot lowers your cost per reservation the moment it brings in a single sale.

You can read more, and claim your company once sign-up is open, in our guide for housebuilders.

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Frequently asked questions

How much should a housebuilder spend on marketing?

There is no reliable published benchmark. Work it out per development from the bottom up: the number of plots you need to sell in the year, the cost per reservation of each channel you use, and what you can afford per plot sold. Revisit it quarterly as the real cost per reservation comes in.

Should housebuilders still advertise on Rightmove in 2027?

For most developments, yes. Rightmove reports a 75% to 90% share of time spent on UK property portals. The question for 2027 is which package each development needs, judged by its cost per reservation, and whether free portals can carry some of the load.

Does AI search change how new homes should be marketed?

It changes where buyers first meet a development more than where they enquire. Rightmove says less than 0.5% of its traffic came from AI assistants in early 2026, but Ofcom says 53% of UK adults often see AI summaries in search. Put plot prices and availability on public pages AI tools can read, along with show home hours, and be listed on the sites they cite.

What is the Your First Home scheme?

A government equity loan scheme for first-time buyers of new build homes in England, announced on 26 September 2026. It is expected to support 2.5% deposits with 20% government equity loans, for homes bought from developers signed up to the scheme. The detail is due at the Budget on 28 October 2026.

Is listing new homes on Home.co.uk free?

Yes. Claiming your company and listing your developments and plots is free. Paid packages are optional.