Real Estate Keyword List: 741 Terms With Real Volumes

Most real estate keyword lists are the same thirty terms with a stock photo attached. Somebody typed "real estate agent" into a free tool, pasted the top ten, wrapped it in 900 words and published it. That list is useless for planning a site, because a solo listing agent in Tampa, a 40-agent brokerage, a property management company and a commercial broker need four different keyword universes, and none of them fit inside thirty terms.

This one carries 741 measured keywords across 17 categories. Every row has a monthly search volume and a keyword difficulty from the Semrush US database, pulled on September 13, 2026. Every category is split by search intent, so a term lands on a listing page, a guide, a service page or nowhere at all. And the list includes the categories other real estate lists leave out: the portals that own half the vertical, property management, commercial and land, transaction vocabulary, recruiting, and the vendor keywords an agent marketing company would sell you against.

The list came out of the keyword work behind our real estate SEO agency practice, where the first deliverable on any agent or brokerage engagement is a measured term list rather than a seed keyword and an opinion.

What is in the list

Seventeen categories, 741 measured keywords, 45.8 million combined monthly searches before portal brands are stripped, organized the way a real estate site actually gets built:

How to read the numbers

Search volume here is Semrush's modeled US estimate, rounded onto its own buckets. The buckets are wide, and identical figures across different terms are a sign of that rather than a coincidence: real estate agent near me and real estate agents near me both report 49,500, and homes for sale and homes for sale near me both report 450,000. Treat every figure as a relative magnitude. Ranking the list by volume is sound. Quoting one number to a seller as a forecast is not.

Keyword difficulty is a vendor model, useful for sequencing and useless as permission. Difficulty 100 on real estate does not mean the page is impossible, it means the page needs more than a rewrite. Difficulty 1 on business property for sale does not mean the ranking is free, it means the current results are weak enough that a competent page changes the outcome.

Intent labels come from Semrush and were kept as reported, with multi-intent terms marked Mixed. In this vertical they matter more than volume, because transactional and informational versions of the same subject belong on completely different pages.

The contamination problem nobody filters for

Real estate vocabulary collides with other industries constantly, and the collisions are invisible in an export. Five examples from this pull, all real:

Real estate lawyer reports 450,000 and real estate law 368,000, both far above real estate agent at 135,000. Pull "real estate" without a filter and most of what comes back is legal-services demand. County tax portals are the second leak: wake county real estate at 33,100, allegheny county real estate at 27,100, allegheny county real estate portal at 14,800, real estate tax santa clara county at 12,100. Those searchers want a tax bill, not an agent.

The home value pull is worse. Alongside the valuation terms it returns homo energy value at 22,200, valu home center at 14,800 and valu home centers at 8,100, which are a hardware chain, and home depot stock value at 4,400. A "home value" keyword total that includes those rows is inflated by fifty thousand searches that belong to a retailer and a stock ticker.

Then there is the near-me leak: storage units near me at 823,000 sits inside any property-search pull and belongs to self storage. And the category name itself carries pop culture: sunny day real estate is a band, married to real estate is a television show, and both surface in a broad match for the term you are planning a business around.

Every table below has been filtered for this, with two deliberate exceptions. The legal terms and the storage term are kept and labeled, because their size is the point.

1. Head terms and category anchors

Eight terms carry the category name, and an agent wins none of them. Real estate reports 301,000 at difficulty 100, which is the ceiling on both scales. Real estate agent reports 135,000 at 71. Their value is vocabulary rather than traffic: Google treats agent, realtor, broker and agency as one idea while buyers and sellers type all four, and a bio page that uses only one of them is thin to the systems reading it.

Worth noticing how small this block is. Eight head terms hold 545,000 searches out of 45.8 million measured for this document. The category anchors are not where the demand lives, which is the first argument against building a site around them.

8 keywords · 545,000 searches/mo · median KD 62

2. Near-me and local intent

Seventy-seven near-me terms, 4.24 million searches, median difficulty 42. This is the block a single agent or a two-office brokerage can actually win, because the ranking surface is the map pack and the local pack weighs proximity, profile completeness and review volume before it weighs domain strength.

Two things in this table need saying. Storage units near me reports 823,000 and is in the list because it sits inside every near-me property pull, not because it belongs to an agent. It is self storage. Leave it to the operators who own the buildings. Second, real estate agent near me and real estate agents near me both report 49,500, the same number for singular and plural, which is Semrush bucketing rather than two separate measurements.

Service-side near-me terms outnumber agent-side ones here: title companies, mortgage brokers, home inspectors, property managers, appraisers. Every one of those is a referral partner, and every one is a page most agent sites never build. Real estate SEO for a local agent is a map-pack project before it is a content project.

77 keywords · 4,239,750 searches/mo · median KD 42

3. Home search and listings

Twenty-five terms and 1.34 million searches at a median difficulty of 31, which looks soft until you check who holds position one. Homes for sale reports 450,000, homes for sale near me another 450,000, houses for sale near me 550,000. Those results are Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin and Trulia, four sites with an IDX feed, a national brand and a twenty-year head start.

The winnable version of home search is qualified. A price band, a property type, a school zone, a feature. Homes for sale under 200k at 14,800 and difficulty 31, homes for sale with acreage at 1,300 and difficulty 12, homes for sale no hoa at 260 and difficulty 18. Small numbers individually. A hundred of them, each a static page that survives the listing selling, is a different site than a bare IDX search box.

25 keywords · 1,335,940 searches/mo · median KD 31

4. City, metro and relocation

The longest block in the list: 139 city, metro and state terms. Also the least concentrated, 701,130 searches spread thin, median difficulty 49. Real estate demand fragments by geography more than any vertical we measure, which is why national volume figures mislead so badly here.

Read this table as a template rather than a list. Homes for sale in las vegas at 4,400 and condos for sale chicago at 4,400 stand in for whatever markets you actually serve. The pattern that repeats: city plus property type beats city plus "real estate" almost everywhere, and the city page that wins is the one with a market report, neighborhood detail and current inventory rather than three paragraphs and an IDX iframe.

Relocation terms sit in the same cluster because they share the buyer. Moving to florida at 2,400 and best neighborhoods in austin at 1,000 are lead-generating pages that no listing feed will ever produce for you.

139 keywords · 701,130 searches/mo · median KD 49

5. Land, luxury and property types

Thirty-seven terms, 784,870 searches, median difficulty 36. Land is the surprise: land for sale at 201,000 and land for sale near me at 201,000, with difficulty in the forties, and farms for sale at 27,100 with a difficulty of 9. Nine. That is close to an unguarded term at real volume.

Luxury behaves the opposite way to how agents talk about it. Luxury homes for sale reports 6,600 and luxury real estate agent 3,600, both at difficulty around 25. The demand is small and the competition is soft, which means luxury is won on relationships and referrals with search as support, not the other way round.

37 keywords · 784,870 searches/mo · median KD 36

6. Rentals and tenants

Thirty-one terms and 1.68 million searches at a median difficulty of 29, the softest large block in the document. Apartments for rent reports 550,000 and rooms for rent 60,500. Bedroom-count terms are cheaper still: 3 bedroom apartments for rent at 8,100 and difficulty 15, one bedroom apartments for rent at 4,400 and difficulty 18.

Rentals are the block agents dismiss and property managers underuse. A renter today is a buyer in three years, and the rental search is the cheapest first touch in the vertical.

31 keywords · 1,681,600 searches/mo · median KD 29

7. Property management and landlords

Ten terms, 61,920 searches, median difficulty 48. Small demand, high intent, and almost nobody competing on the operational vocabulary. Lease agreement at 33,100 is a document download that captures landlords. Tenant screening at 5,400 and eviction process at 2,900 are the searches a landlord runs at the exact moment self-management stops being fun.

A property management company that answers those three questions properly converts better than one that ranks for its own name.

10 keywords · 61,920 searches/mo · median KD 48

8. Sellers: valuation, listing and cash offers

Sixty-one terms, 403,670 searches, median difficulty 53. The valuation half is brutal. Home value estimator at 33,100 and difficulty 81, how much is my home worth at 8,100 and difficulty 81, zillow home value at 14,800 and difficulty 100. Zillow, Redfin, Chase and Bank of America have owned the valuation query for a decade with tools backed by transaction data an agent cannot match.

The reachable half is the distressed and fast-sale side. Sell my house fast reports 40,500 at difficulty 52, and the city variants collapse to nothing: sell my house fast houston at difficulty 15, sell my house fast florida at 15, sell my house fast nj at 11. Those are cash-buyer pages and they are winnable this quarter. The seller who types them has a deadline, and no portal is writing city-level content for that intent.

61 keywords · 403,670 searches/mo · median KD 53

9. Buyers: process and offers

Twenty-four terms, 597,070 searches, median difficulty 31. How to buy a house alone reports 368,000. This is the block that feeds AI answer engines, which cite explanatory content far more readily than they cite a listing page, and it is the block most agent sites skip entirely in favor of a testimonials slider.

What does contingent mean in real estate at 18,100 and difficulty 30 is the shape of the opportunity. A buyer asking it is mid-transaction, confused, and one good answer away from remembering who wrote it.

24 keywords · 597,070 searches/mo · median KD 31

10. Mortgage, rates and affordability

Fifty-six terms and 7.52 million searches, the second largest block in the document, at a median difficulty of 77. Mortgage calculator alone reports 3,350,000. This is lender territory, and the difficulty numbers say so plainly.

An agent site does not win mortgage rates. It can win the affordability conversation around it: how much house can i afford at 110,000, first time home buyer programs at 27,100, down payment assistance at 8,100 and difficulty 50. Those searchers are not shopping lenders yet, and the page that explains their price band naturally introduces the agent who will show them houses in it.

56 keywords · 7,522,700 searches/mo · median KD 77

11. Transaction: inspection, title, tax and legal

Twenty-three terms, 1.42 million searches. The block also contains the single strangest number in this dataset: real estate lawyer reports 450,000 and real estate law 368,000, against 135,000 for real estate agent. Legal intent out-searches agent intent by more than five to one on the category name, and any keyword tool pointed at "real estate" without a filter will hand you that traffic as if it were yours.

The rest is transaction vocabulary that converts on trust rather than volume: escrow at 49,500, earnest money at 22,200, title insurance at 18,100, home inspection cost at 8,100 and difficulty 33. Write these once and they work for every client for years.

23 keywords · 1,417,620 searches/mo · median KD 50

12. Investment and commercial

Forty-two terms, 885,200 searches, median difficulty 26, and the best ratio of demand to competition in the whole list. Commercial property for sale reports 22,200 at difficulty 10. Business property for sale reports 6,600 at difficulty 1. Industrial property for sale 3,600 at 9. Nnn properties for sale 1,900 at 12.

Commercial search is thin because commercial brokers do not publish. Deals come from relationships and CoStar, so the public web is close to empty and the terms cost almost nothing to take. The residential investor set behaves the same way: duplex for sale at 74,000 and difficulty 34, cap rate at 14,800, 1031 exchange at 40,500.

42 keywords · 885,200 searches/mo · median KD 26

13. Foreclosure, auction and distressed

Fifteen terms, 86,340 searches, median difficulty 45. Small and cyclical. Foreclosures near me reports 33,100, fixer upper homes for sale 18,100, foreclosure listings 8,100.

Distressed inventory demand tracks the market rather than the calendar, so the volumes here are the least stable numbers in the document. The pages age well even when the volume moves, which is the argument for writing them before the cycle turns rather than during it.

15 keywords · 86,340 searches/mo · median KD 45

14. Portals, brands and competitors

This is the table that should change the plan. Fifty-three portal and brand terms carry 24.71 million searches a month, 54 percent of everything measured for this document. Zillow alone reports 16,600,000, which is 36 percent of the total on its own. Redfin reports 1,500,000. Realtor.com 1,000,000. Loopnet 450,000.

None of it is available to you. Those are navigational searches for a destination, and a page ranking second for zillow collects a rounding error. The number matters because it sets the size of the real market. Strip the portals and the addressable vertical in this dataset falls from 45.8 million to about 21 million, and stripping lender brands from the mortgage block takes more out again. Any real estate SEO company quoting you an unstripped category total is quoting Zillow's traffic back at you.

The comparison pages worth writing are the considered ones: zillow vs redfin at 720 and difficulty 18, how accurate is zestimate at 1,000 and difficulty 18, is opendoor legit at 480. A seller running those has not decided, and an honest answer from a local agent beats a portal's own marketing page.

53 keywords · 24,714,280 searches/mo · median KD 61

15. Questions, market and research

Twenty-one terms covering market conditions, commissions and the questions that surround both. Real estate market reports 49,500 and real estate news today 49,500, at difficulties of 86 and 84 respectively, because national outlets own them.

The local version is open. Nobody with a national domain is writing the Tampa market report, and the agent who publishes one monthly, with actual numbers, gets the local query and the referral that follows it.

21 keywords · 230,750 searches/mo · median KD 37

16. Agent marketing, SEO and B2B

Forty-nine terms, 117,450 searches, median difficulty 24. This is the vendor side of the industry, which matters if you sell to agents rather than through one. Two of the biggest figures are software rather than services: follow up boss at 33,100 and zillow premier agent at 12,100 are navigational.

The service terms are small and largely unguarded. Real estate seo reports 3,600 at difficulty 27, real estate seo services 1,300 at 33, seo for realtors 880 at 22, property management seo 720 at 12. Whole segments of this block have never been properly contested, which is unusual for a commercial keyword set and worth knowing if you sell real estate SEO services rather than houses.

49 keywords · 117,450 searches/mo · median KD 24

17. Careers, licensing and brokerage

Seventy terms, 481,740 searches, median difficulty 45. Real estate license reports 49,500 and how to become a real estate agent 22,200. This is recruiting demand, and for a brokerage it is the most direct hiring channel in the vertical.

Most brokerage sites publish a careers page with a form on it. The searches say people want the licensing path, the cost, the exam and the commission structure before they want a form. How much do real estate agents make at 18,100 is a recruiting page wearing a question mark.

70 keywords · 481,740 searches/mo · median KD 45

What the list says about real estate site architecture

Clustering all 741 keywords by the page that should carry them produces 30 clusters. Four of them are templates that repeat rather than single pages: the city page, the agent page, the property type page and the price band page. The rest a site builds once.

Read the table by ratio rather than by volume. The investment and commercial cluster carries 520,670 searches at a median difficulty of 25, which is the cheapest real demand in the vertical. The portal cluster carries more volume than everything else combined and returns nothing. The rental, land and buyer-guide clusters sit in between, and all three are pages an agent already has the market knowledge to write.

The mapper at the top of this page runs the same clustering against a page description, so you do not have to read 30 rows to place one page. IDX architecture, canonical rules on filtered search results and index bloat from every possible search combination are a separate problem, and a real one on agent sites: see our technical SEO work rather than a keyword list.

How to use this list this week

Start with the near-me and city pages for the markets you actually serve, because the map pack is the only surface where a local agent outranks a portal. Then write the transaction vocabulary, escrow through closing, since those pages work for every client for years and cost nothing to maintain. Then take the commercial and land terms if either is in your scope, because difficulty 9 on real volume does not appear twice in a career. Leave real estate, homes for sale and the portal names alone.

If you want the same treatment applied to your own domain and your three closest competitors, that is what the free SEO audit does, and you keep the output whether or not we work together. For the engagement itself, the scope sits on the real estate SEO services page.

Data appendix

Source. Semrush US database, pulled September 13, 2026, using phrase_fullsearch, phrase_these and phrase_questions. Seeds: real estate, realtor, homes for sale, houses for sale, property for sale, apartments for rent, sell my house, mortgage, home value, real estate agent, plus curated batches covering property types, rentals and landlords, the buying and closing process, investment and commercial, portals and brands, agent marketing, licensing and careers, and city and metro terms.

Filtering. Individual agent and team names were removed, as were off-vertical homonyms, duplicate query strings and tool artifacts. Portal and brand terms were kept and labeled, because their share of the vertical is the central finding. Legal and county-tax terms were kept for the same reason. Volumes and difficulty are reported exactly as Semrush returned them.

Known limits. US only. A Canadian build needs the whole list re-pulled against the ca database, where Realtor.ca holds the position Zillow holds here and the French-language variants change the vocabulary completely. City-level volumes are a sample, not an inventory: every market has its own long tail. Market-condition terms move with rates. Keyword difficulty is a vendor model and vendors disagree with each other. No competitor density benchmark was run for this page, so nothing here should be read as a measured coverage target for a specific SERP.

Related lists. The same treatment for three other verticals: the automotive keyword list, the cannabis keyword list and the casino keyword list.

RDF semantic triples

Dataset

1. Real estate keyword list → contains → 741 measured keywords
2. Real estate keyword list → uses → Semrush US search volume
3. Real estate keyword list → uses → Semrush keyword difficulty
4. Real estate keyword list → covers → 17 keyword categories
5. Real estate keyword list → maps to → 30 page clusters

Structure

1. City pages → carry → metro-level buyer demand
2. Agent pages → carry → near-me and name demand
3. Property type pages → carry → condo, land and new construction demand
4. Valuation pages → carry → seller intent
5. Guide pages → carry → transaction and process questions
6. Investment pages → carry → commercial and multifamily demand

Findings

1. Portal brands → account for → 54 percent of measured volume
2. Zillow → accounts for → 36 percent of measured volume
3. Commercial keywords → show → median keyword difficulty of 26
4. Legal keywords → outrank → agent keywords in search volume
5. Near-me keywords → rank through → the Google map pack
6. Keyword difficulty → measures → competitive effort, not permission

Provider

1. ProStar SEO → publishes → the real estate keyword list
2. ProStar SEO → provides → real estate SEO services
3. ProStar SEO → serves → agents, brokerages and property managers
4. ProStar SEO → applies → contextual density methodology