Case study · Luxury Real Estate
Sotheby’s International Realty’s Spain & Balearics network lists some of the most extraordinary homes in the Mediterranean. We made sure the world’s wealthiest buyers could actually find them — in their own language, on every search that mattered.
Visit spain-sothebysrealty.com ↗The brand
Sotheby’s International Realty is the name the world’s finest homes are sold under. Its Spain & Balearics network — Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza, Marbella, Barcelona and the Costa Brava — represents a portfolio of villas, fincas and frontline estates that buyers cross continents to view. But a brand built on exclusivity faces a quiet problem online: the right buyer has to find the right home, in the right language, at the exact moment they’re searching.
The challenge
The portfolio was extraordinary; the digital footprint wasn’t keeping pace. The site served one language to a buyer base spread across Germany, Russia, the UK, France, the Nordics and the Gulf. With no HREFLANG in place, Google routinely surfaced the wrong-language page — or a competitor’s — to high-intent searchers. Paid search was broad, and budget bled on tyre-kickers rather than genuine high-net-worth intent. Stunning homes were sitting one mistranslated meta tag away from the buyers who could afford them.
A €12m villa is invisible if the German buyer searching for it is shown the wrong page — or a competitor’s.
The approach
We rebuilt the site’s international architecture from the ground up: a clean HREFLANG matrix across six languages (EN, ES, DE, RU, FR, NL), pages localised rather than machine-translated, and a deep technical pass fixing canonicalisation, indexation and Core Web Vitals across thousands of property URLs. Every market now gets its own correctly-served page for every search.
Markets indexed 6We re-architected paid search around intent and wealth signals, not volume. Tight, market-specific campaigns for high-value terms — ‘luxury villa Mallorca’, ‘frontline estate Ibiza’, ‘comprar villa de lujo’ — layered with audience and geo signals that concentrate spend on genuine HNW buyers and starve the tyre-kickers. Blended ROAS moved from 2.1x to 6.1x.
ROAS 6.1xBeyond capture, we built demand. Cinematic Meta campaigns put the portfolio in front of affluent audiences across Northern Europe and the Gulf — aspirational, brand-safe and relentlessly tested. Qualified reach grew almost five-fold while staying unmistakably Sotheby’s.
Reach +480%Finally, we tightened the funnel after the click. Enquiries are now scored and routed to the right local advisor instantly, with multilingual nurture for buyers who research for months before they fly out to view. Enquiry-to-viewing conversion nearly tripled.
Lead quality +340%The results, in depth
Every channel, before and after — an audited view of where the growth actually came from.
The craft
