RIVER STREET REAL ESTATE
Complete Branding
Real estate brokerages are at a crossroads. If you're an agent, there are your traditional high-structure brokerages that control your every move. And there are your decentralized brokerages that leave you to your own devices without any support. It's time for a collaborative brokerage that supports each agent's real estate ambitions.
Client | River Street Real Estate |
Date | January 2024 |
Scope | Brand Strategy |
| Visual Identity | |
| Copywriting |
Brand Strategy
River Street Real Estate didn't come out of nowhere. River Street was a well-established Medicine Hat brokerage with Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate. However, Better Homes and Gardens has very few Canadian brokerages leaving the Medicine Hat brokerage disconnected.
During our strategy workshops, we realized that there was a large gap between the traditional high-structure brokerages and the newer decentralized brokerages. With the traditional brokerages, there are a lot of supports but realtors can often feel restricted by the brokerage's brand regulations while facing in-office competition. With the decentralized brokerages, a realtor is free to create their own brand but the supports are minimal and distant.
In either scenario, a realtor is facing some kind of isolation. Competition with other realtors in your own traditional brokerage causes you to not be open with your colleagues. Being a part of a decentralized brokerage leaves you on your own. Add to that the fact that most realtors are small business owners who want to build their own brands to power their real estate success.
In today's real estate market, people hire the realtor, not the brokerage. So goodbye, Better Homes and Gardens. And hello, River Street; a real estate brokerage that equips ambitious, collaborative real estate agents who know they can go further together with a team that supports each agent's goals.
The Logo
Like most Western Canadian cities, Medicine Hat was settled beside a river. The river is what brought the community here. And as the city grows, the river becomes the centre and heart of the community.
The brand strategy lead us to values of ambition, collaboration, and community. A river, representing helping real estate agents and property buyers and sellers flow from where they are to where they want to be, could be a great symbol of those discovered brand values.
Using shades of blue and interconnecting curves, we created an icon that expressed the breadth and depth of the river.
Visual Identity
In the real estate industry, the biggest opportunity for brand awareness is the "For Sale" lawn sign. Since travelers in cars driving by these signs have seconds to register this new brand, colour needed to be leveraged as an important distinctive brand asset. Along with muted river blues in the logo, a vibrant orange, representing the coulee walls around the city, is used as an eye-catching anchor.
New Spirit, designed by Newlyn type foundry, gives an adventurous, earthy feeling to the logo. To maintain a contemporary personality, the Inter font family, designed by Rasmus Andersson, is used everywhere else in the River Street visual identity. This beautiful and flexible font family is free and open source, which makes it easier for any real estate agent in the brokerage to use the River Street identity as they need.
Brand Application
With our vibrant Coulee Orange colour becoming the distinctive centrepiece of our lawn signs, we wanted to uncover many playful ways we could incorporate the bending river from the River Street icon. From pillars to patterns, arrows and badges, we wanted to create a flexible catalogue of branding resources for the many ambitious real estate agents would are looking to build their real estate business.
