Facebook ads for apartments and apartment Facebook ads with the leasing video script written for you

Yes, for communities that use them to show a unit to someone who is about to move, rather than to show the amenities to everyone. Renters start on their phone weeks before a lease ends, and most of them have already narrowed the search to a part of town before they open a listing site. Facebook and Instagram are where you can put your two bedroom in front of people in that area while they are still deciding, and a tour video is how you make them book a visit instead of scrolling past one more photo of a pool.

The second reason is cost. Listing sites charge by the month or by the lead whether or not anyone signs, and a vacant unit costs a day of rent every day it sits. A video ad that sends people to your own tour booking page is a way to buy some of those leads directly, and the test is simple: if the ad spend per signed lease is lower than what the same lease costs from your listing site, the ad pays for itself.

Where apartment ads fail is the creative. Since Meta removed age, gender and ZIP code targeting from housing ads, everyone in a city competes for the same broad audience, and the community whose ad shows a real person walking through a real unit gets the tour. That is the ad the brief is built for. If your residents already post about the place, the same structure works for UGC testimonials cut from their videos with permission.

Meta requires ads about housing opportunities, apartments for rent included, to run under the Housing special ad category, and for advertisers in the US the audience tools shrink. Meta's Business Help Centre says that "Age, gender, ZIP code or postcode, audience exclusion targeting, lookalike audiences, saved audiences and some interests are limited or unavailable" for advertisers based in or reaching the US. Ages are "generally fixed to include ages 18 to 65+", "Audiences must include all genders", and location can be a country, region, county, town or city, "but not by postcode". You "can't exclude locations" either.

The detail that surprises most property managers is the radius. Meta says audiences based on a city, address or pin drop "will include an expanded radius", and for the United States and Canada that radius is 15 miles: "if you want to reach people in the US who live in the city of Seattle, your audience will also include people within a 15-mile radius of Seattle's city centre."

The practical consequence is that the ad has to find its own renter. With a 15 mile circle around the property and no age filter, the first two seconds decide who keeps watching, and a hook about the commute, the light or the floor plan does the job the targeting used to do.

The Fair Housing Act makes it unlawful to publish any advertisement for the rental of a dwelling that "indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination" because of race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status or national origin. HUD's regulation at 24 CFR 100.75 extends that to "words, phrases, photographs, illustrations, symbols or forms", which covers a video script, its captions and the people chosen to appear in it, and to "Selecting media or locations for advertising" in a way that denies part of the market information about housing.

The clearest word-by-word guidance is still a 1995 HUD memorandum from Assistant Secretary Roberta Achtenberg. It says ads "may not contain limitations on the number or ages of children, or state a preference for adults, couples or singles", and that descriptions of the property, its facilities and the neighborhood are fine.

The rule that keeps a script safe fits in one sentence: describe the apartment, the building and the neighborhood, and never the person who should rent it. Our scripts start from that, and you approve every line before anyone films. We do not review ads for compliance; the rules are quoted so the brief starts in the right place.

Property managers searching for current fair housing advertising guidance will find less of it than a year ago. In a notice published in the Federal Register on 6 April 2026 (Docket No. FR-6571-N-01), HUD's Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity withdrew eight guidance documents effective 17 September 2025, including its April 29, 2024 "Guidance on Application of the Fair Housing Act to the Advertising of Housing, Credit, and Other Real Estate-Related Transactions through Digital Platforms". The 1995 Achtenberg memorandum has also been taken off HUD's website, though it was not on that list.

None of that changes the law. The statute and 24 CFR 100.75 still say what they said, and HUD's notice states that "Any actions that do not comply with the text of the Fair Housing Act continue to be subject to enforcement by the Department." It also notes that a complainant may file a civil action in federal or state court "within two years after the occurrence or termination of the alleged discriminatory housing practice", which is a private right no guidance notice can withdraw.

For an apartment ad, the safe reading is that nothing has loosened. The wording guidance that told you what was fine is gone from HUD's site, and the prohibition it explained is still in force. If you also run ads for homes for sale, our real estate UGC page covers listing walkthroughs for brokerages.

Five formats cover almost every apartment campaign. All five can be filmed on a phone in a model unit or a vacant one, and the generator writes each of them from one description of your community.

Start with the unit tour. It is the cheapest to make, it works for people who have never heard of you and for retargeting people who visited your site, and it is the one ad no listing site can make for you.

Everything that would otherwise be decided by whoever is holding the phone. This is what an apartment leasing video brief should cover, including the rows you fill in yourself.

The brief arrives as editable text. Add your rent, your specials and your company's fair housing line, share it with whoever films, and film the approved version. If you are planning a Reels push for a lease-up, the Instagram Reels ads page covers the placement in more detail.

Fifteen to twenty-five seconds for a unit tour, thirty for a resident story. That is long enough for a hook, three details and an ask, and short enough that most people who stop on the first frame see the community name and the tour link. A commute walk can run to 45 seconds when the walk itself is the point.

Shoot vertical. Reels and Stories are 9:16, and the same footage cut to 4:5 covers the Facebook and Instagram feeds. Put the community name, the ask and the Equal Housing Opportunity line on screen as text, because a large share of people watch without sound. For the hook itself, our ad hooks page covers how to write and test the first two seconds.

Two costs, and they are separate. The media is what you pay Meta, and you set that budget yourself in Ads Manager, per community or per portfolio. The creative and management are what you pay a multifamily marketing agency or a freelancer, and that range is wide: we put US vendors' own published prices on one basis in what apartment marketing agencies charge.

The script is the cheapest part to get right. A brief from UGCMarketplace costs nothing for the first one and $49 a month on Pro for unlimited briefs, and a unit tour filmed by your leasing team costs an afternoon. What you then pay Meta is the number that decides whether the campaign works, and it works when a signed lease costs less than the same lease from your listing site.