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The real estate landscape is shifting – what’s going to set you apart?

Homebuyers today are market savvy and they place a high value on authenticity and connection. So, as the market cools and buyers are faced with more options, how they perceive your brand may very well be the deciding factor in choosing your community—or your home—over the next.

Last month, we talked about market dynamics and what you can do now to make sure your community is in a strong position to compete. This month, we’re diving into the specifics.

Whether you work with an agency or try it on your own, you’ll need a strong foundation to build your brand platform.

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We hope this gives you some ideas for where to start with your brand positioning, but we know it’s a difficult thing to do on your own. If you want to make it a lot more fun (and effective), we love nothing more than to collaborate on developing distinctive brands.

If you’re ready to get off the ground, let’s connect!

Contact Us

For those of you in the builder-developer world of Northern Virginia, you may know Stacey Kessinger from the Willowsford, Virginia Crossing and Hartland communities. Always a good sport, she agreed to be first up to help us celebrate National Get to Know Your Customers (or, in our case, clients) Day! Read on for insights into her time marketing master-planned communities.

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Where are you from?

Born in Iowa but grew up in NOVA and live here now with my husband and two kids. 

Name your favorite ad/commercial of all time?

If you show me a Nike commercial there’s a good chance, I love it. I have so much respect for their marketing department. They are incredibly creative, authentic and unapologetically true to their brand. This one happens to be one of all my time favs: Nike Commercial – You Can’t Stop Sport – Bing video

What was your very first job?

Subway when I was 15.  I was too young to drive so my parents used to drop me off and pick me up.

What brought you into marketing?

I guess you could say I fell into it by chance. I began my career in real estate and worked all different aspects of the profession until I found that marketing and sales were really my true passion. I love the aspect of bringing creativity to home sales. It’s my two great loves rolled into one. When I was a kid, I never played dolls or barbies but I would set up elaborate homes for them to live in, tear them all apart, and then start over again.  

Favorite new home trend and one you wish never existed?

I love the more modern open concept trend and the jewel box trend, especially a combo of the two. I would take high ceilings and an exceptional quality of finishes over additional sq. ft any day.  For my own personal taste, I’m not a fan of two-story family rooms. I’m not saying it doesn’t work or have a place in the market, it’s just not for me.

Okay, quiz time! How long has SparkFire been your go-to ad agency?

Yikes, I think it’s been since 2016 if my memory serves me correctly? 

SparkFire: Correct!

Do you have a favorite project we’ve collabed on? 

The brand update for Willowsford has to be my favorite. It stayed true to the original Willowsford roots but gave it a fresh and elevated look and was exactly what I was hoping to bring to the brand as I took the reins for the first time. This was my first big project with SparkFire but also on my own as a marketer and one that I will always hold close to my heart.  

All-time favorite marketing event from Willowsford

This is a really hard question because there were so many events to be proud of.  Even though it was a smaller scale event I loved our “Fall in Love” with Willowsford series on Valentine’s each year. From the creative, to the Georgetown Cupcakes, to the candy bar, to the kids’ activities it was always a rewarding and successful event. Packaged together we were able to spend less than our large-scale community events but typically find the same sales success. 

Spill the beans, which model was your favorite at Willowsford? We’ll tell you ours if you tell us yours.

SO HARD. I probably have to go with the Camberley model.  Everything about that home was gorgeous and the quality of finishes and attention to detail were amazing. They really took the time to merchandise the Willowsford brand throughout the home which resonated with prospects and buyers.  

SparkFire: We would have to agree. The master bath alone takes the win…that tub!

Is there a new master-planned community amenity or selling point that you think we’re going to be seeing a lot of in the future? 

I think creating a place to interact with each other will stick with us for some time. People want to be part of a community and connect with each other. Trails, paths, and active outdoor spaces will never get old. And I’m just going to say it – everyone wants a beautiful pool space, that’s never going to go away.

What’s your favorite part of developing a new community from scratch?

Hands down – placemaking. Don’t tell anyone but I love creating the personality of a community even more then I love marketing it.  

Is there one thing you’ve done at work/for work that you never would have expected to do?

Be interviewed on live television. I’ll never get used to that, nor will I ever enjoy it. I’m truly an introvert at heart.  

What are you most proud of professionally?

Stepping into Laura Cole’s HUGE shoes and not failing.  

If you could start a community from the ground up anywhere in the world, where would it be and why?

Charleston, South Carolina, because it’s my favorite place on earth.  

What’s the toughest part of working in home development?

Unhappy homeowners…can I say that?

Your all-time favorite Timber Ridge memory?

I have so many… every team dinner, every holiday celebration, every winery outing.  I guess any activity with the team that involves alcohol, lol. We’re a very small, close-knit team and they don’t feel like coworkers, the team feels like an extended family.

Nature trails or tennis courts?

Nature trails – no question.

Modern farmhouse or coastal cottage?

Yikes, can I have both or meld the two together?  I love both styles.  Just give me either of them in Charleston and I’m never coming home.

Market dynamics are changing rapidly, and it’s a good time to make sure your community is in a strong position to compete.

What we’re hearing most from developers, homebuilders and homebuyers alike, is that it’s hard to know what the right moves are. We don’t have a historical reference point to show us a market quite like this one, which makes big decisions feel riskier. 

In uncertain times, we look for what we can count on, and your brand tells people a lot about that.

At its root, branding is about how we communicate who we are. When what you communicate with buyers comes from authentic vision and values, promises are more likely to be delivered on consistently. That creates a credible brand that supports transactions today, and builds trust over time.

Here’s why you want to make sure your brand is well defined in the market to come.

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Capture Market Share

If your community’s brand expresses a vision and value set that are being delivered on site, it will make the home-buying decision feel safer for your buyers (which means faster), and put you in a better position to capture market share as competition starts to rise.

Build a Strong Pipeline

A strong brand also helps build a strong pipeline, by creating preference for your community when the time is right for the buyer. When someone aspires to buy into your community, and you can reinforce that aspiration over time, it narrows down their choice set to your advantage.

Differentiate Your Community as a Place

Community brands are also critical to help buyers understand the intangible qualities that differentiate your community as a place. In a time when many homes, floorplans, finishes, features and lot sizes are roughly equal, the place-making and programming that weave the fabric of the community together can be the deciding factor that motivates people to choose your community. 

Cultivate Powerful Brand Ambassadors

Finally, when a community brand matches the community experience, it can create a great deal of community pride. And that, in turn, makes powerful brand ambassadors out of your residents, who encourage friends and family to make the same move as they did. 

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Overall, in a time of rapidly changing market dynamics and fewer active buyers, a strong brand is an essential tool to build trust with your buyers, help them buy with confidence, and earn resident referrals.

Where to start? We discuss what goes into a strong brand positioning in Your Brand Is Your Edge in an Ever-Changing Real Estate Market.

Errors are no fun. But they can be! We’re talking about the 404 Error pages on websites.

A ‘404 Page Not Found,’ or 404 error, is no cause for panic. They’re actually quite common. You know the ones we’re talking about. You type in a URL or click on a link only to see the dreaded “ERROR” splashed across the screen. But have no fear, we’re going to cover what they are, why we see them and talk about the importance of customizing your own 404 page on your website.

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Here’s a few we’ve designed for our clients:

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What You Should Know About 404 Errors

What are they and why do we see them?

A 404 error will show when your browser is asking a website to display something but the website can’t find the right page. This results in an error. Simply put, you see a 404 error when you visit a page that doesn’t exist. And that’s no good! No good for you or for your user. Because that means the user isn’t finding the info they came onto your site looking for.

What causes the 404 error?

There are a few reasons why a user might stumble upon a 404 error including:

• The server is down.
• The page moved or was deleted and wasn’t redirected.
• The page never existed.
• The user typed the URL in wrong.
• The URL is broken.

Regardless of the reason, if a user tries to visit a page that cannot be found, they’ll end up on your 404 page.

Why you need one and should it be customized?

If it’s your error page that people are landing on, customizing it is your chance to have a little fun, to share your company’s personality, and to show users that you care leaving them with a positive experience on your site. Custom 404 pages can sometimes be so user-friendly that it can be hard to tell if you’re even on one. Adding links to guide users to relevant pages (homepage, FAQ, contact form) keeps the traffic on your site flowing while reducing the bounce rate.

The short answer is YES, customize it! Having a custom 404 page with helpful links is better for user experience, it will help boost your SEO and it can also help Google remove the unwanted URLs when indexing so the page doesn’t continue to be found.

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See our 404 error page in action here!

Just a few short months ago, we watched with pride as one of our first clients, Willowsford, achieved its final close-out.

Willowsford was the first agri-hood in the Capital Region and the best-selling, single-family community in the area for many years. We’d like to think their marketing had something to do with their success but, truly, they made it easy with the beauty of Willowsford Farm and Conservancy, the quality of their amenities and the joy and connection their lifestyle programming facilitated.

SparkFire became Willowsford’s agency in 2016, about five years into their project. Our challenge was to build on the foundation of the brand and keep what people loved about it, but refresh it in a significant enough way that it attracted new prospects and reengaged existing prospects.

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To achieve this, Willowsford engaged in our 4-step creative process:

STEP 1: Collaborate — The Brand Workshop

We start by listening. Our process has been refined over 20 years of working with builders, developers, planners and architects. We’re skilled at getting the very best thinking from your team members to uncover the key elements of your community’s identity. It works as well for small companies and communities as it does for small towns.

STEP 2: Clarify — The Brand Positioning

With the understanding we take from our initial input sessions and research as our foundation, we articulate the market positioning for your community and define a platform and personality that will resonate most deeply with your intended target audiences, whether they are residents, retailers or office tenants.

STEP 3: Create — Expressioneering

Now it’s time to turn ideas into designs. In our experience, most people can’t describe the design they’re looking for, but they know it when they see it. By presenting up to 10 concepts (unlike the typical 2 to 3), we invite team critique and true collaboration that results in everyone’s confidence in the final campaign.

STEP 4: Communicate — Marketing & Media Strategy

With a strategic position and a memorable campaign, you’re ready to go to market. We’ll tailor a marketing strategy and a media plan to your lead-generation goals and budget, then continually optimize your messaging and media to maximize performance.

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Our 4-step creative process gives our clients confidence in their creative direction and marketing strategy from pre-sales through close-out. For Willowsford, it helped increase on-site traffic to their Information Centers, accelerate sales, and gain regional market share.

We’re so honored to have been a part of Willowsford and we are grateful to the team behind this community for trusting us with their brand. Although we hate to say goodbye, we love that every home holds a family. Our job is done.

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A Look Back

When we think back on our years working with Willowsford, so many fun projects come to mind. Take a peek at some of the branding, marketing and collateral pieces we created for them over the years.

Humans have been telling stories from the beginning of time. We use stories to maintain a sense of shared history, to assert the character of our communities, and to learn how to behave individually and as societies.

Plus, stories also save us from making all our own mistakes if someone else does it for us and cares to tell the tale.

If you’re looking to create long-term value for your community, crafting the narrative that shapes it is critical from the start, and understanding how the story can and should evolve over the lifespan of the community can be helpful in navigating your communications and community relations.

I recently joined Dan Slone, who is a lawyer, novelist and “vision wallah,” and Monaca Onstad, Community Relations Director for Lakewood Ranch, to present this framework to the Urban Land Institute Community Development Council. Enjoy!

Understatement of the year: we are living in unusual times. One of our favorite recent memes said “2020: Written by Stephen King. Directed by Quentin Tarantino.” Sounds about right.

Usually, we compensate for a sense of disorientation on this scale by bringing our focus closer to home. And while we’ve certainly all been at home, we haven’t been able to engage with our extended friends, family and neighbors the way we instinctively would have otherwise in, you know, a normal crisis.

Zoom calls, virtual concerts, online book clubs & happy hours have been a godsend for connection, but they’re still facsimiles of the real thing.

We’re starved for community, but we’re all wondering what communal life can look like at a safe distance.

For master-planned and mixed-use communities used to promoting events, amenities and restaurants, the fact that social interaction can’t be one of our key selling points for a while also presents a new marketing challenge.

Or does it?

Can we get creative and, in that, find a way to connect and inspire people?

Here are some thought-starters (and we’d love to hear your ideas!):

Demarcate gathering spaces

People will naturally be hesitant to attend an outdoor concert or performance, but perhaps not if they know no one will encroach on their space. Your landscape architect may have great ideas for how to make a pattern on your parks and squares that would give a family a certain amount of “me space” while outdoors.

Multiple Gazebos

A large park that can’t be used for group sports could offer multiple gazebos to reserve in advance. Even if they’re not all together, seeing neighbors out and about and entertaining their small groups can give a sense of life and activity back to a park.

Artistic Directionals

To share sidewalks and trails on foot, we may want to adopt the same norms we have for driving: walking on the right side. Painted metal arrows could be installed as an inexpensive option to encourage this in your communities.

Check out these artistic directionals and these.

A Plein Air

If we can’t go to museums, maybe we can bring them to us. Open-air art galleries, painting studios and other installations could be toured with safe spacing, and then perhaps a discussion could be started online.

Park Pods

We don’t know if these are called Park Pods, but they should be. Artistic spaces that are natural but also solitary could give people a sense of being able to be in public, in a private way.

The Third Place, from the Car

Drive-in movies are making a big comeback, and there’s no reason we can’t do that on the community level with large screens. Also, with sports teams looking at playing without fans in the stands, the tailgate might play a bigger role. A screen on the outside of the arena could let fans watch from the parking lot (with extra spaces between cars) and, who knows, maybe the crowd noise could get broadcast into the arena to give the players back some connection, too.

We think the most marketable communities in the near future will be those that figure out creative ways to help people share community experiences in a safe way. Does this spark any ideas for you? We’d love to hear from you!

Like so many good things, SparkFire started with evening conversations on the back porch.

Just daydreams at first.

What if we…?
Do you think we could…?

Then things got serious. Paper came out. Ben Franklin got involved.

The pro list included things like getting to define our future and embrace new challenges. The con list was a little scarier, and included things like giving up good jobs and the fear of probable failure, as predicted by most statistics.

But while weighing out the pros and cons is a necessary step, reason can only take you so far. And then you have to choose. You don’t get to know if you’ll be one of the 35% who make it to five years or one of the 65% who don’t.

If you follow it, you might find like we did that, yes, success is about hard work and commitment.

But really, it’s about people. Those who bring their talents and commitment to work every day, and those who put their faith in us to bring their brands to life.

In that regard, truly, our cups have run over.

We are so very grateful to the team members, clients, mentors, and trade partners who have made this adventure possible, and the family and friends who have cheered us on along the way.

Here’s to the next five years!

In any market, you’ll get the most mileage from your marketing dollar by “meeting people where they are.”

And since “where people are” right now is online, it’s no surprise that digital advertising is even more important than ever as, across the globe, Google is reporting dramatic increases in web traffic.

In marketing real estate specifically, some elements have certainly had to change in the community-consumer relationship, such as emphasizing virtual tours and online appointments instead of working to book in-person tours.

But as far as consumer-driven interest goes, some surprising stats have emerged: Google reports an all-time high in the last week of April of searches in the U.S. for “houses for sale near me,” and, after a brief dip in March, a complete return in volume for search terms like “new homes” and general “real estate” terms. The chart below from Google Trends shows searches for “houses for sale near me” over the last 5 years.

While some of these searches are certainly more ‘aspirational’ than driven by an immediate move, focusing your spend on those Keywords that signal stronger intent (e.g., “buy a new home”) while also measuring success properly (e.g., targeting deep engagement with the site instead of just visits) ensures that you are in the conversation with relevant consumers at the very time that they are, in many cases, spending the highest percentage of their daily life online. It is a strong marketing move for now, but might also end up making very powerful impressions for actions taken later this year.

In Display, as long as the measurements of deep engagement are being tracked properly, the same dynamic applies: massive impression and click volume can almost be assumed, so the focus for us is on delivering the most relevant visits (conversions) to the websites at the best possible value. Google’s interface makes this simple to track and prioritize, and while the cost per conversion went up for many clients in March (because CPCs went up, given the ‘search demand’ for many Keywords), with the right optimizations it has settled down for most clients and has even started dropping to new lows for some.

In short, Paid Search and properly-tuned Display campaigns have gained as priorities, as they provide measurable success in terms of awareness and action: ad impressions at a time when it’s important to stay in the conversation, relevant clicks at a time when they are most needed for many clients, and — when coupled with Google Analytics — providing valuable data insights to help with decision-making for near-term marketing moves during a challenging period with cloudy-but-real opportunities.