Facebook new restrictions on real estate housing ads

While posting the most recent RealBird featured listings and boosting them as Facebook ads, we noticed the following new restrictions for housing ads. These are brand new changes and there might be more. We’ll update this post as more details are discovered:

1. When creating a new Campaign on Facebook, you have to declare whether it’s a restricted category, such as Employment or Housing.
2. When selecting Housing category, you will then be restricted
   1. Can’t select Age group, all age groups must be targeted from 18-65+
   2. Can’t select Gender for targeting. All available genders are considered for the ad by default.
   3. ZIP code selection is unavailable. Location selection must include all areas within a 15-mile radius of any selected city, address or dropped pin.
   4. Facebook states: “Some detailed targeting options, which may include demographics, behaviors or interests, are unavailable. Excluding any detailed targeting selections is unavailable.” We could still create Interest targeting that implies interest in home buying (e.g. interest in Zillow), but there is way more restriction now on demographics.

Many of the demographics targeting – rightfully – was not available for Facebook ads, but most likely, they were filtered out during the approval process and with this new user interface for ad management, Facebook wants advertisers to declare the type of ads and then limit demographics targeting upfront. The main change is probably that they don’t allow zip code or smaller than 15 miles radius location targeting for Facebook ads, which again, makes sense if it was used to improperly target certain demographics.

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