Your brokerage’s brand is the compilation of everything you present on a daily basis—from the people on your team and the service you provide to the materials you use to market your brokerage and properties.
[Strong brands] influence customer choice and create loyalty; attract, retain, and motivate talent; and lower the cost of financing and raise valuations. –RE Journals
A consistent brand identity is crucial for building a positive reputation among potential clients and brokers. A developed, reputable brand is more likely to win listings than a disjointed brokerage with an unprofessional appearance.
But despite the importance of branding, many brokerages are still not paying enough attention to it. In particular, many firms continue to turn out inconsistent or outdated marketing pieces.
Read on to learn more about:
- Why brand consistency matters and how to achieve it
- How doing so will position your firm to overcome other challenges that limit your ability to scale
- How Buildout makes it possible to scale your brokerage through branding
Why brand consistency matters
The importance of brand consistency can’t be emphasized enough. In fact, brand has a monetary value. Research has indicated that consistent brands are 20 percent more valuable than erratic ones.
In commercial real estate, your firm’s brand shows investors and owners how well you’ll represent their brands. Would you entrust the future of your most valuable assets to someone who struck you as unprofessional? A stakeholder’s initial assessment of your brand often happens before you or your brokers have the chance to make a direct connection. Polished, consistent materials are the best way to make each first impression a positive one.
Build your brokerage’s brand and keep it consistent
Building a consistent brand is clearly crucial, but it can be difficult, especially as your brokerage grows. Every year, brokerages across the country work with Buildout to streamline the process.
First, our designers collaborate with your firm’s team to develop—or redevelop—a strong brand for your brokerage. This ensures that every marketing piece you create conveys the image you want to present.
On your initial kick-off call, you’ll discuss your brokerage’s unique identity with our account teams. They’ll review your assets including logos, colors and stylistic preferences and develop customized document blueprints just for your brokerage.
Your team can then easily create proposals, OMs, brochures, flyers, emails and websites aligned with your firm’s brand.
Buildout automates the creation of these assets and eliminates the need to make manual updates every time you need to change a listing detail. This makes it easy to create consistent materials efficiently, even as your firm wins more listings and engages in more proposals.
Truly amazing program. We secured a $4 million listing, a $1.5 million listing and sold a $3 million investment using Buildout! Awesome! –Allen Buchanan, Lee & Associates Orange
Overcome common brokerage challenges
We partnered with theBrokerList to evaluate the genetic makeup of the CRE industry and learn more about the challenges brokerages face daily.
According to those surveyed, some of the top challenges in marketing listings are:
- Speed to market
- Redundant data entry for new listings
- Gathering accurate property data and research
- Quality of proposals/listing presentations
Each of these challenges has the potential to stunt your brokerage’s growth. But when you put a tool like Buildout in place to make consistent branding possible, you set your firm up to address each of them. Here’s how.
Get to market faster
To close more deals, you need to get more proposals, OMs, emails and brochures out to your buyers and sellers. Buildout’s document automation speeds up that process. When you add or update a property in Buildout, the relevant information automatically populates across all of the brand materials you’ll need from proposal to close. You can still make modifications to each piece if you need to, but material creation will take far less time than it would if you started from scratch.
Streamline data entry
Manual data entry can waste brokerages hundreds of hours each year and hold your team back from focusing on more important tasks. But when you put a tool in place to improve brand consistency, you’ll cut manual data entry time down significantly. All of the materials created in Buildout are live links. When you update listing information in Buildout’s property form, it’s automatically pushed to all of your documents, websites and emails.
Gather property data and research
The more detailed your listings, the better your properties will sell, but gathering and referencing property data takes time. Buildout makes the process more efficient. You can easily store comparable property information within Buildout and then use it to automatically populate your materials. You can also keep track of your property comparables across listings.
Create high-quality proposals and listing presentations
Your firm can’t win listings and grow without high-quality, professional proposals. With a tool like Buildout, the proposal creation process is no longer time-consuming and cumbersome. Buildout also automates the creation of marketing materials, so you can create sample property websites and brochures to share with prospective clients during the proposal process.
Scale your brokerage through branding
When you put a consistent brand in place and overcome challenges like these, your firm will be positioned to scale because:
Client satisfaction will improve
Great client service is a requirement for success. Buildout helps your team deliver high-quality materials to brokers more quickly. Brokers can then spend their time working with clients, not chasing down materials.
Buildout also makes it easy to elevate your clients’ brands, which leads to improved client satisfaction. Through our work with over 1,000 brokerages, we’ve recognized a shift in the past few years away from a brokerage-forward approach where firms rely on their own brands to win listings. Instead, many are pursuing a new strategy that showcases how they market their clients’ brands. With Buildout, you can create materials that display your brokerage’s logo in an understated manner and place the property or the client’s own brand at the forefront.
You'll attract, hire, and retain more brokers
The market for top talent is highly competitive. When you put tools in place that help brokers work more efficiently and equip them with consistently branded materials, you show that your firm prioritizes broker success. Top talent will be eager to join your team and take advantage of the resources you offer. A streamlined system also keeps your firm from experiencing the growing pains that often come with an influx of new talent.
You'll be able to open, merge with or acquire more offices
Success leads to growth. Depending on your goals, that growth could lead to mergers, acquisitions and expansions. When everyone on your growing team works within the same systems, you can ensure brand cohesion, even across offices on opposite sides of the country.
You'll be able to facilitate a rebrand rollout with ease
Rebranding is a difficult, time-consuming and expensive process, especially for large or enterprise brokerages. But when you work with Buildout to update and rebrand your document blueprints, you’ll save significant time and ensure that all new materials reflect your new branding.
Buildout is leverage. KW Commercial chose to provide this easy-to-use tool to all of its brokers so they can create and disperse exceptional marketing products quickly, freeing them to spend more time prospecting and growing their business. KW Commercial’s agents are all business owners focused on profitability, and Buildout allows them to spend more time on the activities that count. –Schuyler Williamson, Former Director of KW Commercial
If you’re interested in learning more about how Buildout can save time for everyone on your team, check out our white paper “Building your brand: save time and focus on what matters most with Buildout.” And if you’re interested in learning more about how Buildout can help your brokerage scale, contact us.