Look Beyond Real Estate for Inspiration

You should be taking note of what your competition is doing, but your references and influences shouldn’t be solely from the real estate industry.

Start paying attention to branding that stands out to you, both online and offline. Save as many examples as you can. 

When you’ve amassed a large folder of references, look at them more closely and see if you notice similarities. Chances are you’re consistently drawn to a certain style, colour palette, typography and overall aesthetic. 

Consider Impressions and Clients

Your real estate branding helps create a certain impression for potential clients. 

More traditional branding can communicate that you’re a more traditional agent. Super contemporary branding tells clients that you’re youthful, or interested in doing things a bit differently.

You need to consider the impression you want to make before you set out to establish your real estate branding. 

Another thing that should be top of mind: your client base.

If you’re pursuing clients from a diverse array of demographics, you don’t have to worry too much about highly specialized branding — what matters is that it’s strong, unique and consistent.

But if you’re going after a particular subset of the market, not only does your branding need to be on-point, it needs to speak to your particular desired client.

For instance, branding for a real estate agent pursuing high-value luxury listings is going to look different than a real estate agent who specializes in helping condo buyers, millennial and Gen Z real estate buyers, or commercial real estate buyers. 

Create a Colour Palette

A defined colour palette is the first step in creating a consistent and recognizable look for your real estate brand.

Your brand colours communicate a lot about your business. Here’s what you want to think about before building a palette: 

• Colour associations. What do certain colours signify? Reds are associated with boldness and energy. Blues are trustworthy and calming. Yellows are happy, greens are peaceful, and oranges are lighthearted.
• Competition. Using an identical palette as your competitor is a branding death sentence.

• Complementary colours and contrast. Your favourite colours are yellow and pink, but that doesn’t mean they should form the backbone of your palette. Reading a bit about colour theory can help. And don’t forget about contrast. Your palette needs to include a balance of dark, medium and light tones to be the most useful.

• Application. Your palette will be used in every element of your real estate business branding, both online and offline. The colours you choose need to be fairly universal (for instance, neon yellow may look cool against a black business card, but it will be illegible nearly everywhere else).
• Rules. You won’t use every colour in your palette in the same way. You’ll have a few dominant colours and then a slightly larger selection of accent colours that you can pick and choose from depending on the application. 

No idea where to start? Try this colour palette generator. You can click through a range of ready-made palettes to start uncovering what you like and don’t like. 

Focus on Clarity and Simplicity

It’s easy to get carried away when establishing branding for your real estate business. You want it to look cool, so you keep adding and tweaking. 

The best branding tends to be pretty streamlined. No fancy bells and whistles, but impactful.

To achieve that for your real estate branding, let simplicity and clarity be your north stars. 

Simplicity 

Ninety percent of the time, the simpler choice is the better choice. The simpler logo, the most pared-back layout, the more basic typeface, and so on.

Clarity

Your branding shouldn’t make your audience work to understand it. From your logo to your fonts to how you combine colours, your branding needs to be clear. All the elements combined should instantly communicate a message about your business.

Pay for a Logo

A custom logo has so many applications. You’ll use it on your business cards, your social media profile images, your website, printed collateral, and many other places.

Don’t try to DIY your real estate logo. Logos have specific constraints and requirements — they need to be certain dimensions, they need a certain amount of padding and they require several variations for different use cases. 

Plus, your logo needs to be unique, completely customized and striking. Best to leave the design work to the pros. If you don’t have a designer in your Rolodex, you can try our Custom Design Solutions.

Develop an Assets Collection

When you’ve got the key elements of your real estate branding established — fonts, colour palette, logo — it’s time to establish an assets collection.

This collection is a repository of ready-to-go branded elements that you can pull from at any time. Having everything in one place keeps you organized and better prepares you for applying your branding properly and consistently.

It will include things like:

• Variations of your logo to suit a wide range of applications 
• Your font files 
• Your colour palette, with codes for each colour and instructions on how each one should be used 
• Templates, such as letterhead, postcards and thank-you cards
• Branded social media imagery (for headers, avatars and profile photos) 
• Various sizes of your headshot 
• Brand photography and/or stock photos 

Be Consistent

The enemy of good branding is lack of consistency. In order for your real estate branding to stand out and build familiarity with your audience, it needs to be used consistently.

That means sticking to your colour palette and chosen fonts, using the templates in your assets library and following your own branding guidelines when creating any new content.