How One Real Estate Team Cut Zillow Costs & Took Control of Its Lead Pipeline

What happens when a top-producing team stops renting leads and starts owning its new business generation plan? Growth, savings, and a strategy built to scale.

A laptop showing the home page of the Denise Ramey real estate team's website
  • 316%

    increase in ad impressions

  • 597

    engaged leads in 6 months

  • 27%

    cost-per-click decrease

“We tried to do a lot of it ourselves, and we hired companies that were local thinking that it would be better to have a local company do it rather than a larger organization from outside of our market. And we were wrong.

— Lisa Kirkpatrick, director of marketing, The Denise Ramey Team

Headshot of Lisa Kirkpatrick, marketing leader on the Denise Ramey real estate team, with a five-star rating over the top

The challenge

Team leader Denise Ramey likes to keep her sales associates busy with plenty of leads. But Zillow’s price tag was becoming unsustainable. “Denise was spending over $10,000 a month on these leads,” Lisa Kirkpatrick, Ramey’s director of marketing, recalled. “It’s just a lot of money.”

The Long & Foster team tried other online lead sources, but none of them had the same traffic volume as Zillow. They even tried to generate organic leads via search-engine optimization, hiring a local SEO team to manage ads in the hopes that their specific expertise in Charlottesville, Virginia, would pay off. “They were great, but they just didn’t have the sophistication and the time and the resources” that Luxury Presence has, Kirkpatrick said.

The strategy

The team realized that in order to move its budget away from Zillow, they needed both a first-class website and an expert strategy to leverage it. “Online presence is mission critical,” Kirkpatrick said. “It’s well worth the investment.”

Luxury Presence’s bespoke campaign for The Denise Ramey Team:

  • Target 22 keywords across six locations with Google Ads
  • Secure high-intent seller leads through home valuation offers
  • Create a steady stream of blog content about Charlottesville to boost high-funnel traffic
  • Convert interest into action with community guides that highlight authority and expertise

The impact

Average monthly savings of 72.7% on ads and SEO

46.3% increase in engaged leads over 5 months

2,659 non-branded keywords ranking in the top 10

chart showing total ad impressions for the Denise Ramey real estate team's website over time
chart showing total engaged leads on the Denise Ramey real estate team's website over time
chart showing total cost for leads on the Denise Ramey real estate team's website over time
chart showing total cumulative impressions on the Denise Ramey real estate team's website over time

The results speak for themselves: More traffic. Better leads. Lower costs.

From August 2024 to June 2025, The Denise Ramey team’s ad impressions have increased 316%, while cost per click has decreased 27%. They’ve also logged simultaneous organic wins, with website traffic and the number of engaged leads on the rise.

“We have had a wonderful experience with Luxury Presence,” Kirkpatrick said. “Everybody we’ve dealt with there has been wonderful, professional, easy to work with.”

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