Tuesday, August 26, 2008

The Art of Catchy Real Estate Logos

By Frank Grifford


Real estate logos are both an art and a critical component of successful real estate marketing. A successful real estate logo is one that catches attention and garners new business for a real estate company. Following are the results of a survey analyzing the effectiveness of top real estate logos, and why they are so successful.

Remax logo

One of the best known realty franchises in America, Re/Max, has an assortment of logos. All of them share the company name in red and blue with the same font. It could be argued that the re/max logo is so effective because it is one of the simplest designs overall.

It's clarity and color usage seem ideal. The strong use of red, white, and blue suggest that they are the Patriotic choice, while the high contrast and bold letters make it easy to read and understand their purpose from a long way away.

ERA logo

Another example of effective real estate logos is that of ERA, one of the top residential brokerage networks. The ERA logo is evocative of the "American Dream" through its use of red, white and blue as the base colors. It is also a logo design that is unambiguous about the sector served by ERA, namely the home-buying market. In fact, their whole logo is very similar to the Re/Max logo and one might question if their logo designer blatently ripped them off.

The Century 21 logo

The Century 21 logo is quite likely the most recognizable of the bunch because it has been used much more often than any other franchises' logo. It has always featured their version of a house wrapping around their name, but the choice of colors has varied many times over the years. Despite that, the bolded fonts, the layout, and everything else is the same so it has always been a very effective logo.

Coldwell Banker logo

Using more of it's darkest color than any other logo, Coldwell Banker's logo is a very solid blue square that is very likely to stand out as the most 'dense' ad on a given page. This trick works great when prospects are flipping through a phone book for a realtor. Also, the simpleness of the design is admirable too. There is a subtle, yet eye-catching effect while viewing the letters in the logo because of the high contrast. Overall, Coldwell banker has a very well-thought logo.

Imperium Realty logo

Trying harder than usual to stand out from the others, Imperium Realty is very different in that it has a picture of a Lion's head in it. In fact, they have thrown away all of the common elements in real estate logos, and gone with the very different color scheme of Red and Gray. It is an interesting image that perhaps suggests nobility and pride... Although the colors make it the least likely to jump out when viewing it side-by-side with the others on a page.

Weichert Realtor logo

The Weichert Realtor logo is very catchy for people who respond to the color yellow. Weichert is the new name of the Beazley offices in some areas so some people are already familiar with the name.

Another concern about Weichert's logo is that many who were surveyed said that it was the most annoying sign by far, and the yellow was clearly too strong. Plainness was also noted repeatedly, but clearly 2nd to the brightness aspect. This is a case where they brightness annoys people into remembering the logo, so it is likely that they could have been much better off with a different logo.

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