How to Build Your Brand as a Realtor

Creating an effective real estate brand is key⁠ in building recognition and trust among clients and prospects⁠—pushing leads further through your sales pipeline. Start creating a brand by establishing a plan, including your mission, and compiling branding elements like a logo, slogan, and promotional materials. Use the following 10 steps and examples to build real estate branding that you and your clients feel confident in:

1. Establish Your Timeline

If you’re starting from scratch, the first step to creating a strong and trustworthy real estate brand is actually not to tackle it all at the same time. A brand can encompass so many different elements of your marketing, and it can take years to develop and build the right one. No powerful brand is created overnight.

Instead, start by narrowing down the foundation of your brand. Consider your ideal clients (like first-time homebuyers vs investors, or young professionals vs empty nesters), the geographical area you plan to work with, your values, and your mission. Once you have these foundational elements, you can start building actual branding elements that will speak to the right people and set you apart from the competition.

Next, establish your timeline for the most important branding elements. By setting specific goals to build your brand over time, you’ll avoid spending too much time or money on unnecessary marketing tools before you even serve clients. Instead, you can—and should—create the branding elements you need to generate real estate leads (like a logo, website, social media templates, and headshot) while you serve clients, growing your business, income, and brand at the same time.

2. Evaluate the Competition

Effective real estate brands are clear and memorable. Unless you take the time to evaluate what your competition is saying and offering, you won’t know how you stack up. Determine why a buyer should choose you to help them find a home. Think about why a seller chose you to sell their home for top dollar. Your leads will be asking themselves these things, so you need to clearly define how you stand out from all the other real estate agents they could choose.

To start evaluating your competition, get a quick overview of the most successful real estate agents, teams, and brokerages in your farm area. Pay special attention to their business name, logo, and slogan. What does their branding look like? Is it more traditional, more modern, or more elegant? What do you think they’re doing wrong? What can you emulate with your own branding?

To make the process easier, take screenshots of their websites, logos, and slogans and compile them into a Pinterest board or your favorite productivity tool. Seeing them all together in one place will help you find out what they have in common, or give you an opportunity to create a new and unique brand based on your research. You could even lay out all the information in the same way you create comparative market analyses (CMAs) for clients.

If you’re a new agent or just new to branding, it may be confusing and overwhelming to figure out how to build a unique brand. Here are some questions to help get your wheels turning about your unique strengths:

• Are you tech-savvy?
• Do you have great marketing skills?
• Do you have great closing skills?
• Do you have a great network of agents, lenders, or contractors?
• How many deals have you closed?
• Do you specialize in a small neighborhood?
• How well do you know the neighborhood?
• Are you a master of Facebook advertising?
• Do you have a great eye for design?
• Do you have a professional background or skills that can help your clients?
• How long have you worked in the industry?
• What’s your work ethic like?
• Are you a data-oriented person?
• Great at crunching numbers?
• Do you have strong organizational skills?

Start putting the pieces together by writing down all of the strengths and skills that your clients will gain value from. It’s also helpful to think about what you would mention in your elevator pitch to a prospective client. If you find this to be challenging, you might get the most benefit from hiring a marketing expert through Fiverr. Fiverr can not only help you find graphic design freelancers, but it’s also a valuable place to find experts who specialize in branding and messaging.

3. Decide on Your Mission, Values & Vision Statements

Every brand has core values that define their positioning and the way they serve and market to clients. Even if you don’t already have a strong mission or a cause you’re passionate about, it’s not difficult to define the values that are most important to you. In order to blend these values into your real estate business plan, they should be personal to you but also benefit your clients.

For example, honesty may be one of your strongest values. Honesty benefits your clients by helping them see property problems with more accuracy—even if they are emotionally attached to it. In this way, your value of honesty can truly help homebuyers make the best choice for their needs. On the other hand, if you strongly value family, it may lead you to working with families of all sizes and ages to help them find the right home to grow in.

Check out a few examples of real estate agents and companies that have built a brand around their values:

Mission, Values & Vision Statement Examples

4. Employ a Graphic Designer

Many agents and brokers spend hours or days trying to learn graphics programs and create their own real estate marketing materials. However, outsourcing this work to design companies and professionals is often a more efficient and cost-effective strategy to get a professional design. Whether you choose to hire a professional or do the work yourself, make sure you use the right sources and tools.

Click through the tabs below and discover ways to get high-quality graphics for your website and other marketing collaterals:

5. Create a Memorable Logo

Although your logo may seem like a small piece of your branding, it will be displayed on your ads, business cards, website, social media, and direct mail. That’s a lot of impressions, so it’s important to create a professional logo that you can use to build brand recognition over time. Logos can be based on your values, target audience, or even your personality.

6. Pen an Unforgettable Slogan

While slogans and taglines may not be a necessary branding element for every real estate agent or broker, they can be a powerful asset when it comes to being remembered. The best real estate slogans create an emotional connection with potential buyers and sellers. They clearly describe your unique qualities and offerings. Take a look at the following examples for inspiration.

7. Take Your Real Estate Headshot

Having a real estate headshot is a key part of your real estate branding. Many agents choose to include it on different marketing pieces, like their website, flyers, and even their real estate signs. Putting a face to the name can build familiarity and trust. Even if you don’t include your headshot on many marketing materials, it’s important to have a strong headshot on your website and social media pages.

8. Design a Website & Landing Page

For most real estate agents and brokers, the website is considered the centerpiece of their marketing strategy. Even if you market heavily through ads or social media, having a website for potential clients to learn more about you and search for properties is essential. In addition, many real estate marketing strategies utilize landing pages to speak to a specific subset of their audience or to collect leads from advertisements.

Unless you have professional coding or website design experience, building a website from scratch will likely require much more time and resources than it’s worth. Instead, check out Placester, a website design service built specifically for real estate agents. Rely on the professionals at Placester to design a website you can preview within 48 hours, and enjoy unlimited website updates forever.

Learn more about building your own website and landing pages using the following articles:

• Top 6 Real Estate Website Builders in 2022
• What Is IDX? Definition, Cost, Features & Providers
• Real Estate Landing Pages: A Guide to Generating Leads

9. Produce Real Estate Branded Collateral & Promotional Materials

Developing a real estate brand is an art, not a science. What one agent uses successfully may not apply or be effective for your target audience, style, and marketing plans. As your brand and your services grow, you should continue to create and develop branded collateral that is specific to your marketing needs. This can include flyers, letterheads, social media graphics, and even unique pieces like stickers or GIFs.

A benefit of building a real estate brand in 2022 is that there is no limit to the number of unique ways you can promote your business. While it’s important to have real estate flyers and signs, don’t stop there. With a one-stop shop like AnyPromo, you can easily customize unique materials like pens, mugs, beach towels, and laser pointers to promote your real estate business. Scroll through hundreds of unique options to build your brand on their website.

There are so many mediums you can use to create branded collateral. Take a look at your options in 5 Essential Real Estate Marketing Materials for Success (+ Examples).

10. Create Profiles on Major Listing Websites

Even if you create the perfect real estate brand for yourself, it won’t successfully grow your business if you don’t put it where people will see it. One of the most accessible ways to find leads and drive traffic to your brand is by creating a team or agent profile on the top real estate listing websites. Most real estate platforms offer the ability to add extensive details to set yourself apart from the competition.

Why Real Estate Branding Is Important

Consumers in 2022 see an average of 10,000 advertisements every single day. Without branding, you won’t give your potential clients any reason to identify or remember you. Building a brand can seem very unclear and overwhelming, but it essentially comes down to differentiating yourself from the hundreds or thousands of other real estate agents who are marketing to your audience.

Here are a few notable statistics that prove the significance of real estate branding:

• 75.4% of homebuyers will pick up the phone for an agent after they’ve seen and clicked on the agent’s ad
• It typically takes five to seven brand interactions before a consumer remembers the brand
• 94% of all consumers are more likely to be loyal to a brand when it commits to full transparency
• It takes 90 seconds of initial viewing before people make a subconscious judgment about a product and brand
• 31% of consumers believe that trustworthiness is the most important aspect of a brand

Resources to Help Create Your Real Estate Brand

Although the idea of designing logos and website pages or writing slogans may not come naturally or feel enjoyable for many real estate professionals, it can be done with the right resources, tools, and expertise. There are an endless number of tools and programs available, and it can be extremely confusing to choose the right ones.

A few of the most reliable real estate marketing resources are:

• Fiverr: This freelance platform helps you connect with thousands of marketing specialists—allowing you to find the right person for every job on your list.
• Tailor Brands: If you’re a do-it-yourself type, but you need a nudge to send you in the right direction—Tailor Brands might be the perfect solution. It offers a logo maker and design templates for you to customize without creating designs from scratch.
• Placester: Your real estate website is arguably the most important piece of your branding. It’s possible to create a beautiful, custom, highly functional real estate website in a matter of hours with Placester. Placester offers a variety of customizable real estate templates and professionals ready to support you at any time.
• Artur’In: Although Artur’In is a digital marketing solution, it provides real estate-specific solutions for various branding needs. Get custom photos and videos, blogs, newsletters, and even use the creative design studio to create custom-branded materials.

Bottom Line

Even though real estate branding can require a lot of work, consider it a foundational piece of building a long-term real estate career. An effective brand will encompass your values and services, and resonate with your ideal client through online and offline marketing.

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