Ask around and you will be told something between one and three percent of project value. Some people will say five for a launch.
These figures are not wrong exactly. They are a description of what other developers have spent, which is a different thing from what your project needs.
The number that matters comes from the other direction.
Why is a percentage of revenue the wrong starting point?
Because it treats marketing as a fixed cost of doing business rather than a purchase of a specific quantity of buyers.
Two projects with identical values can need completely different budgets. One is in a location people already search for, at a price that is obviously fair, from a developer with four completed projects nearby. The other is in an area nobody associates with residential, at a price that needs explaining, from a name buyers have not heard.
The second project needs to buy attention, credibility and comprehension. The first mostly needs to be findable. Same percentage, wildly different jobs.
What should decide the number then?
Work backwards from inventory.
How many units. How many bookings do you need this quarter. How many site visits produce a booking. How many enquiries produce a site visit.
Multiply back up and you have the number of enquiries you need. Multiply that by a realistic cost per enquiry for your bracket and city, and you have a media budget that is attached to something real.
Now compare that to the percentage figure. If they are close, fine. If your calculated number is far higher, you have learned something important before spending rather than after.
What if the calculated number is unaffordable?
Then you have three honest options and one dishonest one.
Reduce the ask. Fewer bookings this quarter, longer timeline, lower burn.
Improve the conversion rates rather than buying more volume. If your site visit to booking rate is one in ten and the market norm is one in five, fixing that halves the budget you need. That is a sales and product conversation, not a media one.
Change the offer so each enquiry is worth more or easier to get. A genuine launch price with a genuine end date changes the economics of every ad you run.
The dishonest option is to spend a third of the calculated number and expect a third of the result. It does not work that way, and it is the most common thing I see.
Why does an underfunded campaign fail so badly?
Because it does not buy enough outcomes to be readable.
If you need twenty site visits before the numbers stop jumping around, and your budget produces six, you cannot tell whether the campaign works or whether you got an unlucky fortnight. You will make a decision on it anyway, because there is a meeting, and that decision is a coin toss dressed as analysis.
A budget too small to interpret is worse than no budget, because it costs money and produces a false conclusion that you then act on for a year.
The floor is not a percentage. It is whatever produces enough outcomes to be readable inside a month.
How should the budget be split across the project?
Unevenly, and front loaded around real events.
Launches, price changes, possession milestones and festival periods do more per rupee than a flat monthly spend, because they give the advertising something to say. A campaign running at a constant level all year is mostly announcing that the project continues to exist.
I would rather see three concentrated pushes with quiet periods between them than twelve identical months. The quiet periods are also when you fix the things the pushes revealed.
What about the money that is not media?
This is the part that gets missed in every budget I have reviewed.
The project website. Photography and renders. The video. The brochure. The CRM and the tracking. Someone to answer the phone within the hour.
If all of that is treated as an afterthought funded from whatever is left, the media budget ends up pointing at a page that does not convert, handled by a process that does not follow up. You have bought traffic and then thrown it away.
As a rough shape, expect the non media portion to be a meaningful fraction of the total for a first campaign, and much smaller for the second, because most of it is built once.
What would I do first?
Do the backwards calculation before any conversation about creative.
It takes an hour, it needs four numbers from your sales team, and it will tell you whether the campaign you are planning has any chance of doing what is being asked of it.
Most project budgets I have seen were decided before anyone did that arithmetic.
We do the inventory calculation before quoting on media, because a budget that cannot reach the target is not a cheaper campaign, it is a wasted one. Tell us what you are working on.
