Branding a real estate company, or even an individual building, isn’t just about sales, but about a company making its mark on a city, particularly when it comes to providing a common experience across properties. The companies that are good at branding find success to be much more attainable. Those that miss the mark fight an uphill battle for relevancy and profitability.
The best in modern real estate branding
Cast your gaze high above central park in Manhattan and you’ll see a tower thrusting out of concrete and pavement to touch the sky. Millions visit it every single year—making the Empire State Building one of the most iconic structures in the entire world. But cast your gaze up a bit higher and you’ll see 432 Park Avenue, which covers every other building around it—the Empire State Building included—in a rich shadow of opulence and architectural beauty.
“Park Avenue is globally famous as representing the pinnacle of luxury. This tower of 104 apartments and penthouse suites reinforces that opinion like no other,” ManhattanMiami.com explains. “It is intended by its architectural designer, Rafael Viñoly, to be more than a feat of engineering, but to apply the ‘traditional square’ to deliver an unequivocal message that luxury should appear simple because a successful life is not.”
Park Avenue is about more than real estate and architecture—it’s a brand. Clean, sophisticated, and established, the brand is success epitomized. It doesn’t have to try too hard—it just is.
The best brands are natural. They don’t feel like a byproduct of advertising and agendas. They’re rich in character and entirely organic. People flock to them because they resonate at a core, foundational level.
Century 21 is a great example. It’s one of the most recognizable names in global real estate. They recently underwent a rebranding in which they changed their decades-old logo and color in pursuit of modernizing the company’s image and infusing it with more luxury appeal. It’s been widely heralded as a success.
“They managed to not only come up with something that is bold and elegant, but something that doesn’t necessarily banish them to the ‘luxury Realtor’ space,” industry insider Emile L’Eplattenier writes. “It’s easy to imagine this logo looking just as good on a $12 million Malibu mansion as it does on a starter home in Ohio. No mean feat.”
Lessons from the experts
Whether it’s a luxury high-rise in Manhattan or a global brand that’s been around for decades, branding plays a critical role in luxury real estate. The right branding amplifies the underlying asset and helps real estate professionals find success in any market. Here are a few important principles and takeaways to keep in mind:
- Luxury branding is rooted in storytelling. The better you are at telling stories, the more successful and impactful your branding will be. This starts with choosing the right story with the correct emotional appeals and undertones. When combined with the proper execution and content strategy, results will naturally follow.
- You can’t build a luxury real estate brand with one advertisement or viral social media post. A brand is built over many months, years, and even decades. It’s about constant exposure and hundreds or thousands of distinct interactions. Repetition, as boring as it may seem, is at the heart of every good luxury real estate brand.
- The biggest mistake a luxury real estate brand can make is to overcomplicate its message and/or assume that people want something complex and sophisticated. What consumers really want is simplicity. Discovering how to simplify branding without losing flavor takes skill.
- Finally, luxury real estate branding commands consistency. You need consistency across platforms, mediums, and time. A piece of branded content that’s published on a social media platform today should be consistent with the podcast interview that’s given next year. A brand can’t afford to compromise on consistency. It’s the bedrock of a meaningful and influential brand.
Putting it all together
By definition, every brand is unique. But real estate professionals can learn a lot by studying what others in the field are doing and applying the same principles to their own companies, projects, and developments. The results will speak for themselves.
