PATTERN NOTE
Most marketing spend goes to the wrong half of the journey.
Property developers spend close to 80% of their marketing budget on the half of the customer journey that closes the sale — and almost nothing on the half that turns a buyer into a referrer.
Vinay Raja
8 min
Walk into the marketing review of any residential property developer in Australia and look at the budget split. Estimate what's spent on the half of the customer journey before contract signing — the brochure, the lead-capture page, the sales-centre fitout, the campaign activation, the digital ad spend, the third-party portal placements. Now estimate what's spent on the half after — the customer comms during the build, the handover ceremony, the resident newsletter, the post-settlement experience, the first-year-in-residence relationship.
The split is rarely better than 80/20 in favour of the pre-sale half. Usually it's 90/10 or worse. We have walked through this audit with developers across multiple states, and the honest answer is almost always "we don't really track it that way." The budget for the post-sale half doesn't sit under marketing. It's distributed across customer service, construction comms, settlement admin, and warranty paperwork. It is no one's marketing budget, and it shows.
This is the budget logic behind the communications black hole — the silent stretch between contract signing and key handover that customers in our 2019 AVJennings customer research named in their own words. The black hole exists because the budget exists to fill the pre-sale half of the journey and not the post-sale half. Different angle. Same problem.
Why it matters
The 80/20 split is structural, not accidental. Marketing budgets are anchored to the metric that marketing is held accountable for: the lead. The metrics that matter to the business — pipeline, conversion, settlement — all live in the pre-sale half of the journey.
Three things go wrong in this allocation logic.
First, referral economics live in the unfunded half. A buyer doesn't refer because of a brochure. A buyer refers because of how the developer treated them after the contract was signed. The pre-sale half acquires a customer. The post-sale half creates a referrer.
Second, repeat-purchase economics live in the unfunded half. The customer who feels well-treated through their delivery period is the one who comes back.
Third, brand equity erosion happens in the silent half whether the brand is paying attention or not. The brand is being made or unmade in their living room conversations regardless of whether the marketing team is in the room.
For a developer's CFO, this reframes the marketing budget conversation entirely. The next dollar of marketing spend almost certainly returns more in the second half of the journey than in the first.
The pre-sale half acquires a customer. The post-sale half creates a referrer.
How Tydal sees it
The fix isn't to spend less on the pre-sale half. The fix is to make the post-sale half a designed programme, not a residual cost centre. Three operational moves.
Audit the actual spend. We've helped clients build a cross-functional view of every customer-facing touchpoint and the dollars behind it. The split that emerges is almost always more lopsided than the marketing team expected.
Reframe the second half as referral and repeat-purchase economics, not as customer-service overhead.
Pick one moment in the silent half and design it deliberately. One moment, designed properly, often unlocks the budget for the next.
Where this shows up in our work
After the Sale. The 2023 service-design engagement that built an operational programme for the post-contract half of the journey at AVJennings.
Digital Publications. The continuous-experience platform that extended the principle into the Lived Experience stage.
The 2019 AVJennings customer research. Provides the customer-voiced evidence that the second half matters as much as the first.
What to do about it
If you are a developer or builder thinking about your own marketing budget, three places to start:
Run the audit. Build a cross-functional view of every customer-facing touchpoint between first website visit and first-year anniversary in the home.
Find your referral attribution number. If your referral lead is half the cost of your paid lead, you have a financial case for funding the post-sale half.
Pick one second-half moment and design it properly this quarter. The handover ceremony is usually the cheapest place to start.
