Our client is a large franchised real estate network. The group has approximately 80 offices, specialising in the sale of residential real estate and the management of tenanted investment properties.
With nearly 1000 employees, the group focusses on delivering a great property result for their clients – and a great experience.
The real estate industry is highly competitive, and having a visible presence that reassures the public of their experience, results and expertise is vitally important. Their agents are invited to present when a person is thinking of selling their home or renting out an investment property. A good public profile is also important for recruiting good agents and more importantly, for recruiting new franchisees.
Our mission was to raise the clients profile and have their leaders top of mind at media outlets, so they would be contacted for comment on real estate issues.
In 2010, in consultation with the CEO and their Marketing and Communications Manager, we put in place a schedule of articles and media releases to build and publicise the reputation of the client. We developed surveys, with franchisees responses giving real-time snapshots of the market, which we could then fashion into informative articles.
We ran training sessions with their franchisees to help them communicate with their local communities, and to build a local brand. We emailed all offices every week asking if they had any interesting properties, well known sellers, stories of interest. We’d then follow up directly with the office to develop the stories.
We helped write award submissions for Franchisees and their teams, to maximise the quality of their presentations.
We developed strong relationships with contacts in real estate media and the real estate sections of major newspapers.
Over 10 years we have significantly increased the public profile of our client in a way that is reflective of their expertise and professionalism in their industry.
The relationships we developed with the real estate media has led to journalists approaching us to organise commentary from our client on real estate issues.
The amount of free publicity that we have generated for our client has risen exponentially over the years. In 2019, using a formula that calculates column centimetres of articles and applies the appropriate advertising rate, our client achieved a value of $1.3 million in free publicity.