Growth Marketing for Marketplaces & PropTech

Marketplaces and PropTech are having a genuine moment. The global PropTech market sits around $44 billion entering 2026, growing double digits, with AI now nearly universal among top real-estate players and funding flowing back toward platforms that can prove durable distribution. But the same forces lifting the category make growth harder: more competition for attention, and customer acquisition costs that have risen roughly 40% since 2023 and about 60% over the past five years. The growth-first era of subsidizing everything is quietly ending; efficient, well-targeted acquisition is the new requirement.

For marketplaces, that pressure lands on top of an already hard problem — liquidity. You are acquiring two audiences with different economics, and the platform only works when both sides show up. For PropTech specifically, a real-estate market reshaped by changes to how agent commissions are set and disclosed has made everyone in the transaction more cost-sensitive. The operators who win are the ones who acquire efficiently, balance both sides deliberately, and retain the users they earn. Here are the five questions we hear most.

How do you grow both sides of a two-sided marketplace?

The central challenge of a marketplace is that supply and demand are worthless apart and valuable together, so you cannot just pour budget into whichever side is easier to acquire. The work is identifying which side is the binding constraint on liquidity in a given market, weighting acquisition toward unlocking it, and rebalancing as conditions change. We ran exactly this for eCommission, a real-estate fintech marketplace, where disciplined two-sided acquisition produced a 74% lower cost per conversion and a 1,089% increase in ROAS. Our paid media and customer acquisition and retention teams treat liquidity, not raw volume, as the goal.

With CAC rising everywhere, how do you keep acquisition efficient?

Rising costs mean efficiency is now the whole game. We compress CAC through several levers at once: sharper audience targeting, first-party data signals — which have been linked to materially lower acquisition costs — high-velocity creative testing to surface cheaper-converting ads, and continuous landing-page optimization so more of the traffic you pay for actually converts. Video and social-proof formats in particular have been driving meaningfully lower CAC than static creative. For eCommission, this full-funnel approach cut cost per conversion 74% in a cost-sensitive real-estate market. Our paid media and conversion optimization practices own that work.

Why is creative velocity the difference between scaling and stalling?

Because in 2026 the brands maintaining or improving ROAS are doing it through creative testing volume, not bigger budgets — commonly 10 to 20 fresh variations a week. Ad fatigue is fast, and genuine winners are rare, so you need a creative engine that produces and tests constantly to keep finding them. Our creative strategy team built 100 ad variants in 72 hours for Champify and hit a 9% top-of-funnel click-through rate — and that same velocity, applied to consumer marketplaces and apps, is what keeps performance compounding instead of decaying. AI is woven into how we produce at that pace, supported by proprietary in-house tools, without sacrificing quality.

How do you allocate budget between supply and demand?

With economics and attribution, not gut feel. We model the acquisition cost and lifetime value of each side, pinpoint the audience whose addition unlocks the next unit of liquidity, and concentrate spend there — then re-weight as the marketplace matures and the constraint moves. That requires clean measurement of where conversions and value actually come from, which is why our customer acquisition and retention work sits on top of rigorous attribution and a fast, well-instrumented site from our web development team. The eCommission outcome — 74% lower cost per conversion, 1,089% ROAS — came from making those allocation calls deliberately rather than spreading budget evenly.

How do you retain users and grow LTV, not just buy traffic?

Acquisition without retention is a leaking bucket — and since healthy marketplace economics generally need an LTV:CAC ratio above 3:1, retention is where the model is actually won. We build lifecycle programs, re-engagement flows, and loyalty mechanics that turn first-time users into repeat participants and lift lifetime value over time. We bring consumer-side retention discipline to marketplaces, where keeping users engaged matters as much as winning them. Folded into a broader customer acquisition and retention engagement and supported by conversion optimization, this is how marketplaces stop refilling the top of the funnel just to stay even — and start compounding.