A building in lease-up has a problem no keyword list can solve: nobody knows its name. The community has a sign, a website and a leasing office that opens in a few months, and the renters who will fill it are still scrolling YouTube and Gmail with no idea it exists. Demand Gen is Google's campaign for that moment. Its video and photo ads reach renters in their feeds weeks before they type a single apartment search.
This chapter covers why a lease-up needs that kind of reach, the daily budget Google asks Demand Gen to have and what it means for owner and renter leads, the vacancy math that pays for it, the order to launch things in, and what the housing rules still allow in a video campaign. Owner campaigns appear only briefly, because the budget rule settles their case quickly.
Nobody Searches a New Building's Name Yet. Demand Gen Shows It to Renters Before They Know It Exists.
A stabilized community gets searches for its own name every day: residents, referrals, renters who saw it on a listing site. A brand-new building gets none, because nobody has heard of it. The Search campaign can still bid on bedroom-and-neighborhood searches, but it can't create demand for a place renters don't know to look for.
Per Google's Demand Gen page, a lease-up's ad can turn up between a renter's YouTube Shorts, in the Discover feed on their phone, inside Gmail, on Maps, or on a site in the Display Network. The ads lead with pictures and video, so a renter sees the pool, the kitchen and the view before reading a word.
Apartment marketers treat this as the job of a lease-up. One multifamily agency put it this way in 2025: "if you're doing a lease off [lease-up] that's a new build, new brand, entirely new, you're going to need some of that top of funnel." Another said that in a lease-up, "you start collecting leads. I mean, maybe 3 4 months before your doors even open." That same agency pairs the early leads with "heavy lead nurturing," and for good reason: a renter who tapped a video in March may not need to move until June, so someone has to keep in touch until the model unit is ready to tour.
Google's page lists what the campaign needs to run in all those places: landscape, square and portrait images (1.91:1, 1:1 and 4:5), a logo, headlines and descriptions, and video in horizontal, square or vertical shapes. Shoot the lease-up's photos and video in all three shapes at once, because a pool shot framed for a wide Gmail card loses half the pool in a vertical Shorts frame. Early on, before the model unit opens, renderings may be all you have; swap in real footage as soon as you can walk a camera through a finished apartment.
Google Wants a Daily Budget of 10 Times the Target Cost per Lead. A $300 Owner Lead Means $3,000 a Day.
Demand Gen learns by spending, and Google is specific about how much. Google's performance guide asks for at least ten target-CPAs of budget every day, and it blames a skimpy daily budget, more than anything else, when a fresh Demand Gen launch falls short. Its own example: a $100 daily budget with a $10 bid caps the campaign at about 10 conversions a day. Google also treats steady spending above roughly 80% of the daily budget as a sign the campaign is starved for money, so a lease-up that maxes out its budget every day is one to raise, not to praise.
Run that rule on a property management account:
- An owner lead at the roughly $300 one agency quotes (Chapter 7) means a daily budget of about $3,000, which is $90,000 a month.
- A renter lead at about $60, the top of what apartment agencies say they aim for (Chapter 7), means $600 a day.
- A lease-up budget of $8,000 a month, the example one multifamily agency gave (we read it as monthly), is about $263 a day, enough for a target cost per lead near $26 by Google's rule.
The owner case ends there. Few property managers would spend $90,000 a month to find owners, and Demand Gen would have nothing to learn from at a few owner leads a month anyway. Owners find a manager through search, referrals and the Business Profile, which Chapter 12 covers, and that's where the owner budget belongs. The leasing case is closer: a single community's budget supports a modest target, and a management company running several lease-ups can pool them.
An Empty Two-Bedroom in Lease-Up Costs $4,000 to $5,000 a Month. That's What Pays for the Video Ads.
A lease-up is the one time a community spends heavily on purpose. One multifamily agency explained why: "every two-bedroom unit that you don't have full is $5,000 or $4,000 that you're not getting that month," because the owner still owes the debt on the building. The same agency gave the example of a lease-up budget of, say, $8,000 that "you can probably bring it down to three" once the building reaches its occupancy target; we read that as $8,000 a month falling to about $3,000. Those are one agency's numbers, but the logic holds anywhere: the cost of an empty unit dwarfs the cost of the ads that fill it.
The math flips once the building is full. The agency that starts collecting leads months early describes a stabilized community as "more retention focused," with the marketing shifting toward search visibility and reputation. That's the moment to turn Demand Gen down with the rest of the budget and keep Search and the community-name campaign running for the renters who replace move-outs.
The volume is what makes Demand Gen worth testing. Another multifamily agency uses a simple rule of thumb: "One lease, three tours, 10 leads." On that math, a 200-unit building in lease-up needs roughly 2,000 leads and 600 tours to lease every unit; a 120-unit building needs about 1,200 leads and 360 tours. That's a lot to ask of bedroom-and-neighborhood searches in one part of town, which is where reach beyond search comes in.
Search Ads and Listing Sites Bring In the First 30 Tour Requests a Month. Demand Gen Comes After.
Demand Gen still bids toward a conversion, so it needs one it can learn from. We hold it to the same gate as Performance Max: about 30 quality conversions a month, with the tour request from Chapter 1 as the goal. Google's setup page adds its own patience rule, to let a campaign collect around 50 conversions in its learning period before changing the bidding. At about 30 tour requests a month, 50 takes roughly seven weeks, so plan on leaving the bids alone for most of the first two months.
So the lease-up runs in order. From the day the community starts collecting leads, Search runs on the bedroom-and-neighborhood searches from Chapter 6 and a campaign for the community's own name, ready for the first renters who look it up. Listing sites and the community's own website bring in their share. Once tour requests reach about 30 a month across those sources, Demand Gen joins, learning from real tours instead of guesses. If the lease-up has a pre-leasing period, that's often enough time to get there before the doors open.
Demand Gen can also bring back renters who already looked. The agency behind the one-lease, three-tours rule makes the same point about retargeting on Facebook and Instagram: "you have to do Google really well first, and then I think you can, you know, potentially retarget and bring the pro- prospects back." Demand Gen does that job on Google's own channels: a video shown to people who opened the floor plans page and left is a cheap second look, and remarketing stays allowed under the housing rules as long as the list isn't built from age, family or ZIP signals, as Chapter 9 explained.
When tours are flowing, add the signed leases too. Uploading lead-to-lease results, as Chapter 10 described, teaches Demand Gen which renters actually signed.
Housing Rules Block Age, Gender and ZIP Targeting on Apartment Video Ads. Lookalikes of Past Renters Are Still Allowed.
The housing label from Chapter 9 covers video and display ads, not just text. Demand Gen's audience builder offers detailed demographics and lets you narrow by age and gender, and in a leasing campaign those menus stay untouched. A Demand Gen campaign for apartments runs with every age and gender switched on, no parental or marital audiences and no ZIP codes, and it targets by city, county or a radius of at least 1 km.
Lookalike segments are a different matter. We searched Google's housing pages and its lookalike page for a housing restriction on them and found none, and the housing FAQ lists "Similar segments," the older version of lookalikes, among the targeting it doesn't restrict. A leasing campaign can use them. In Demand Gen, a lookalike starts from your own list, and Google is changing how it works during 2026: the list becomes a suggestion for Google's models rather than a strict boundary, and the campaign can reach renters who sit outside the list's close matches.
Build the seed list from past tour requesters, or residents who signed recently. Never build it from a list filtered by age, family status or ZIP code, because Google's housing FAQ restricts lists built from those signals, and fair housing law cares about the outcome either way. Use the real tour video from Chapter 10, keep the people and words in it within the rules Chapter 14 covers, and the campaign starts from renters who already chose a place like yours.
For the same budget rule in another local business, see how an urgent care clinic sizes a Demand Gen budget.
Next: The Business Profile and Maps
Chapter 12 covers the Google Business Profile, where owners and renters both find a manager on Maps, and why Local Services Ads have no category for property managers. Earlier chapters cover tracking, bidding by hand, Google's housing rules and Performance Max for leasing. The full list is on the Google Ads for Property Management guide home, and our Google Ads management page explains how we'd plan a lease-up.
