When premium demand met media inflation: How real estate marketing adapted in 2025

The year 2025 turned out to be a study in contrasts for India's real estate sector. While premium housing grew 4% year-over-year, expanding market share from 52% to 62% during January-September, overall sales declined 12% to 202,756 units across major cities, according to JLL Research. Yet it wasn't these numbers alone that defined the year. It was the unconventional ways brands responded to these market dynamics that created an interesting chapter in Indian real estate marketing. 

For example, the House of Abhinandan Lodha (HoABL) integrated with Zepto, allowing prospective buyers to explore land offerings on a quick commerce platform. Instagram evolved from an engagement tool into a full-funnel discovery ecosystem where buyers completed entire research journeys before stepping into sales offices. Digital costs surged, with real estate CPCs increasing 35% year-over-year, forcing brands in this category to rethink their channel mix and content strategy.

For marketers navigating this landscape, 2025 demanded precision. They had to compress performance windows without sacrificing quality, speak to an increasingly digital-first buyer base, and extract efficiency from every rupee while media inflation climbed. The choices brands made this year offer a blueprint for what's ahead.

From Q-Com to long-form video: Where brands placed their bets

One thing is clear from investment priorities in 2025: traditional playbooks were insufficient. For Magicbricks, the defining campaign wasn't about square footage or amenities. "If I had to single out one campaign that truly shifted the momentum for us in 2025, it would unquestionably be Pata Badlo. Life Badlo," says Prasun Kumar, Chief Marketing Officer at Magicbricks. "It wasn't just a communication exercise. It became a powerful proof point of how migration shapes opportunity, income, and long-term wealth creation in India."

The campaign highlighted migration's financial impact with data-backed insights: moving to Tier I cities offered up to 1.95x higher salary growth, while real estate appreciation in markets like Noida, Greater Noida, and Gurugram between 2020 and 2025 had transformed mobility into a wealth multiplier. Kumar claims that the narrative resonated both emotionally and financially, driving measurable business outcomes, including website traffic uplift and stronger supply acquisition as partners sought alignment with consumer-led storytelling.

HoABL took a different route, investing in high-impact experiential marketing. The Zepto integration, which allowed land exploration on a quick commerce platform, generated over 8,000 enquiries for Vrindavan land offerings priced at Rs 1.4 crore. "The Zepto campaign alone generated over 8,000 enquiries for our Vrindavan land offerings, with a strong concentration of interest coming from Delhi-NCR," says Saurabh Jain, Chief Marketing Officer at HoABL.

The paramotor display in Nagpur and the Guinness World Record activation for the largest floral mosaic in Vrindavan combined spectacle with substance. "When a high-impact idea is backed by verified titles, ready-to-build design and architecture, and a seamless digital journey, it doesn't remain a one-time campaign. It translates into real, measurable business outcomes."

For House of Hiranandani, 2025 marked a decisive shift toward AI-enabled personalisation across the entire organisation. Structured training programs rolled out across teams from IT and legal to design and operations, ensuring smooth AI adoption. 

Within marketing, AI was applied across the customer funnel. To name a few, chatbots and voicebots enabled instant responses during the awareness stage, AI-driven systems handled complex queries during the evaluation, and personalised video responses blended with human warmth during the consideration stage. Yet technology formed only part of the story. 

“Personalisation extended well beyond digital interfaces. Customer experience remained central to our philosophy, with curated, on-ground engagements designed to appeal to all senses. Every detail, from materials and finishes to customer flow, was carefully planned to reflect our brand values and deliver a refined, premium experience,” notes Prashin Jhobalia, CMO, House of Hiranandani.

Personalisation extended to on-ground experiences with curated food menus based on visitor preferences, signature brand fragrances, live music performances, and dedicated kids' engagement activities during site visits.

Rustomjee Group adopted an approach rooted in depth over dispersion. "In 2025, our approach was rooted in depth, not dispersion," says Rushabh Shah, Chief Marketing Officer at Rustomjee Group. "We resisted the temptation to chase scale for its own sake and instead focused on building genuine engagement and lasting belief in the brand. Every touchpoint was designed to reflect who we are, what we stand for, and why Rustomjee remains synonymous with trust and quality."

The brand moved the conversation from features and amenities to the lives homes enable and the communities it nurtures. Where content was concerned, cost-effectiveness became a priority metric. For Magicbricks, MBTV emerged as “one of the most cost-effective and high-engagement content ecosystems." 

Kumar notes. "Long-form, utility-led videos helped audiences understand projects, neighbourhoods, and trends in a format that built trust and delivered clarity." This approach was paired with deeper first-party data intelligence to personalise content distribution, sharpen targeting, and understand intent patterns with greater precision.

With this, brands like Oberoi Realty focused on strengthening long-term brand value through digital-first, experience-led initiatives that delivered relevance, consistency, and depth of engagement, according to Sarina Menezes, Senior VP Marketing and Corporate Communications, Oberoi Realty.

"As homebuyers became increasingly aspirational and experience-driven, our storytelling evolved beyond product-led communication to integrated brand narratives centred on thoughtful design, sustainability, community, and luxurious living," Menezes shares. "These narratives were expressed through immersive curated on-ground experiences and integrated digital platforms, ensuring a consistent and meaningful brand presence across physical and digital touchpoints in the various micro-markets."

Rising CPCs and navigating media inflation

Amid this, 2025 had a defining pressure point: cost inflation across digital channels. Google Ads CPCs rose nearly 13% year over year across multiple verticals, with real estate experiencing a 35% increase. Close to 60% of searches ended without a click due to zero-click features and AI-led overviews, meaning a growing share of consumer attention never reached publisher sites. 

"CPC inflation is really a case of more brands competing for progressively shrinking real estate on the search platforms," explains HoABL’s Jain. "When more brands deploy automated bidding tools to compete for the same high-intent keywords, the outcome is inevitable: cost per click continues to rise."

The response required more than incremental adjustments. The brand shifted from a purely performance-led model to a more holistic approach focused on brand campaigns and SEO. The goal was to strengthen the top of the funnel and own critical organic search moments. This pivot wasn't unique to one player.

For Magicbricks, rising CPCs and higher media costs pushed the organisation to lean more heavily on optimisation frameworks, automation tools, and AI-driven solutions. "Rising CPCs and higher media costs certainly created pressure on performance outcomes this year," Kumar says. "The focus shifted from simply scaling spends to improving the quality of targeting, creative deployment, and real-time decision-making.” 

He shares that with media inflation, the outcomes from performance channels are harder to achieve, forcing brands to work smarter rather than simply invest more.

Yet beneath the cost pressures lay a more fundamental behavioural shift that compounded the challenge. Instagram evolved from a supporting channel to a central driver of interest and intent. 

"One of the most interesting shifts in 2025 was the solidification of Instagram as not just an engagement-led platform but a business-driving ecosystem in its own right," Kumar observes. "Users increasingly completed entire discovery journeys on Instagram, from exploring projects to learning about interiors, neighbourhoods, and even adjacent Magicbricks businesses."

With 426.6 million Indians using Instagram in 2025, the platform's role as a discovery engine became impossible to ignore. Research from the Journal of Promotion Management documented how Instagram functions as a real estate marketing practice in India, with buyers evaluating para-property elements, agent ethos, and convenience before moving to formal inquiries. For brands, this meant channel mix had to shift. Instagram would continue as a primary engine for early-stage discovery and brand affinity, demanding storytelling that felt native, intuitive, and aligned with how consumers now explore homes.

The emergence of this discovery infrastructure created both opportunity and complexity. Younger buyers, particularly Gen Z and millennials, formed an understanding of developments' aesthetic, ethos, and setting through platform-appropriate visual communication before committing to site visits. For luxury developers working with rare land parcels and long-term legacy projects, adapting to this digital-first mindset became essential to remain relevant. Properties with video marketing received 403% more inquiries compared to those without, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Oberoi Realty's Menezes mentions that the brand invested in digital media, experiential marketing, traditional channels, and PR-led storytelling, with "digital playing a more strategic role in driving engagement and personalisation."

She continues, "Looking ahead, our brand marketing efforts will continue to focus on long-term equity creation, supported by data-led insights, immersive content formats, and disciplined storytelling.”

The lessons shaping 2026

The biggest lesson from 2025 centred on a shift in how brands needed to engage buyers. "If I were to summarise 2025 in one line, it would be this: The market rewarded brands that behaved like partners, not sellers," Jain reflects. "Buyers began spending far more time validating processes, understanding documentation and evaluating future liveability, rather than reacting to urgency-driven messaging. This meant our communication had to evolve to match the consumer's pace: go deeper, educate more, and address questions even before they were asked."

This included introducing virtual site visits where customers experienced projects through video conference walkthroughs, viewing finished development, amenities, and common areas in detail. 

Housing sentiment data from HSI JAS 2025 showed overall confidence rebounding to 142, with cities like Chennai, Noida/Greater Noida, and Kolkata leading the recovery. What stood out was how younger buyers drove a significant part of this sentiment revival, showing a stronger appetite for compact, ready-to-move homes and mid-market properties in the Rs 75 lakh to Rs 1.5 crore range. 

"A major shift this year was the growing seriousness with which new-age buyers, especially Gen Z and young millennials, approached real estate," Kumar notes. "Younger buyers showed a more pragmatic, research-led mindset, where Gen Z sees real estate not just as an aspirational milestone but as a stable investment asset."

Their increased interest in informed, data-backed decisions pushed brands to rethink storytelling, making it more practical, clarity-driven, and reflective of a cohort that wants both emotional fulfilment and financial security from their first property. This demographic shift also influenced channel behaviour. Women now contribute over 22% of all residential transactions in urban India, marking a 14% year-over-year growth, highlighting another evolving buyer profile that demands tailored engagement strategies.

Keeping in line with this, House of Hiranandani’s Jhobalia comments, “In 2025, our marketing investments were strategically balanced across digital, brand-led and experiential platforms. Looking ahead to 2026, our focus is on deeper personalisation, responsible AI adoption and consistent storytelling, leveraging technology not as a replacement for human connection, but as a powerful tool to create meaningful experiences and long-term brand value.”

For Kumar at Magicbricks, 2025 challenged a long-held belief about automation's limitations. He believed that automation could never truly replace the depth and nuance of human judgment in marketing. However, 2025 challenged that assumption. He says, "The strides AI made this year showed that automation can take over a significant portion of execution, optimisation, and even certain layers of creative development. What has changed for me is not the belief in human value but the understanding that we must find the balance between machine efficiency and human perspective."

Looking ahead to 2026, the leaders agree that deepening this human-machine balance while maintaining clarity and authenticity is essential. "As we move into 2026, our agenda is clear: to keep strengthening belief through trust, experience, and clarity," Shah states. "Marketing must now do more than generate awareness. It must simplify choices, deepen conviction, and create meaningful impact that endures well beyond the transaction."

The emphasis also remains on quality over volume as performance marketing transforms. Jain explains that rising acquisition costs and changing discovery patterns mean that brands can no longer rely solely on clicks or last-touch conversions. 

The year ahead promises continued evolution. Buyers will look beyond inspiration, actively seeking ease of purchase, premium offerings, transparent policies, and trustworthy developers. Education is emerging as the real driver of conversion, helping buyers understand location readiness, infrastructure, legal processes, and long-term value creation. 

What 2025 demonstrated conclusively is that media inflation, AI adoption, and fragmented discovery journeys aren't temporary disruptions but permanent features of the landscape. And for brands that want to keep winning consumer attention in 2026, clarity, authenticity, and consistent delivery matter more than volume, in a marketplace overflowing with messages.