Case Study · MTS Property · Real Estate · Dublin
From Daft dependency to 1,400+ direct buyer enquiries in 12 months — MTS Property.
MTS Property had built a steady sales pipeline by paying Daft and MyHome for every viewing request. Margins were thin, the lead quality was middling, and growth was capped by ad spend. We rebuilt the agency website around area-guide content, schema-driven property listings, and topical authority on the Dublin neighbourhoods they sold in. Twelve months later, the majority of new viewings were arriving direct.
Where they started
MTS Property is a Dublin estate agency selling residential and investment property primarily across south Dublin. The model worked: list on Daft and MyHome, pay for the featured listings, take the viewing requests, close the sale, repeat. The problem with that model is that everyone else is doing exactly the same thing — and Daft's algorithm decides who gets the buyer attention based on ad spend, not service quality.
The agency website existed mostly as a brochure. Property listings were duplicates of the Daft entries. There was a Team page, a Sell page, a Contact page. None of it ranked for anything — not "house for sale Rathmines", not "apartment for sale Sandyford", not "estate agent Dundrum". Every buyer touchpoint started and ended on a portal MTS rented access to.
The actual problem
It's the property portal trap most Irish agencies are stuck in:
- Portal-dependent lead gen. Every viewing request had a per-lead cost. Margins shrank as portal pricing climbed and competing agents bid up featured-listing slots.
- Zero topical authority on the neighbourhoods they sold in. Buyers researching "Rathmines area guide", "schools in Stillorgan", "Sandyford property prices" went to portals or generic content sites — never to the agency that actually sold property there.
- Property listings with no schema. No
RealEstateListingmarkup, no structured price/bedrooms/area data. Google could see the listings as web pages but not as listings, so they didn't appear in any property-related rich result. - No suburb landing pages. "Estate agent Rathfarnham", "estate agent Dundrum" — those queries existed, the search volume was real, and competitors had already taken them.
- The website's only direct enquiry channel was a Contact page. Buyers researching specific properties or areas had nowhere on the MTS site to convert without first finding the listing on a portal.
What we did
The play wasn't to outspend Daft. It was to own the queries that happen before a buyer goes to Daft — area research, school catchment lookups, price-trend questions — and to make MTS the natural agency for the buyers those queries surfaced.
01 · Weeks 1–3Schema + technical foundation
Rebuilt the website on a fast Astro stack with proper RealEstateListing schema on every property, BreadcrumbList across area hubs, and FAQPage on the area guides. Property listings now appeared in Google's structured-data parsing as actual listings instead of generic web pages. Core Web Vitals at 96+ on mobile.
02 · Weeks 2–8Dublin area-guide content engine
Built 23 in-depth Dublin area guides — Rathmines, Rathgar, Sandyford, Stillorgan, Dundrum, Donnybrook, Ranelagh, and the rest of the south-Dublin core. Each guide covered local property prices, average yields, school catchments, transport links, demographic shifts, and recent comparable sales. The kind of content buyers research for hours before contacting an agent. Google rewarded it with top-3 rankings within four months on most guides.
03 · Weeks 4–10Suburb-level estate-agent landing pages
Built dedicated "[suburb] estate agent" pages for every area MTS actively sold in — separate from the area guides, designed to convert browsing buyers into vendor or buyer enquiries. Each page carried agent bios with sameAs links to PSRA registration, recent sales (with addresses anonymised), and area-specific service framing.
04 · Weeks 6–12Property listing architecture
Rebuilt the listings system so every active property had its own schema-rich URL, photo gallery with proper alt text, neighbourhood context, and direct viewing-request form. Listings stayed live as searchable assets after sale (marked sold, preserved for area-comparable signal). Internal linking from area guides surfaced relevant active listings naturally.
05 · Months 3+Vendor-side content + GBP
Layered in vendor-acquisition content — "selling your home in Rathmines", "estate agent fees Ireland", "what's my home worth Dundrum" — designed to capture the highest-LTV side of the agency's book. GBP rebuilt with Real Estate Agents + auxiliary categories, weekly posts, and a structured photo strategy showing properties not stock photography.
The outcome
The numbers proved the strategy out within the first nine months — and the model became sustainable, with ad-spend dependency dropping every quarter:
- 1,400+ direct buyer enquiries in the first 12 months — viewings booked through the MTS site, not via a portal.
- 23 of 23 Dublin area guides ranking top-3 for primary "[area] property guide" queries.
- −68% reduction in portal advertising spend over 12 months. The featured-listing budget that used to be unavoidable became optional and selective.
- Top-3 rankings for "estate agent Rathmines", "estate agent Dundrum", "estate agent Stillorgan", and 14 other suburb-level commercial queries.
- Vendor-side enquiries up 4× — driven by the "selling in [area]" content that didn't exist on day one.
- Average lead cost dropped 81% when measured across all sources, because organic enquiries arrived at near-zero marginal cost.
What changed for them
MTS still uses portals — they're a useful complementary channel, especially for distinctive properties with broad national interest. They just stopped being the only channel. The agency now has a balanced lead mix: organic, GBP, vendor-side enquiries, and selective paid placement on premium listings. Margins recovered. Growth is no longer capped by an advertising budget.
And the Dublin area guides keep ranking — they're now the most-trafficked agency-owned content of any south-Dublin estate agent, and they compound every month.
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