Thinking of Selling? Real estate postcard designed to attract potential home sellers.

In 2012, I was charged with the task of creating a direct mail postcard to encourage potential home sellers to list their properties. It was a very strange time to work in real estate because things were just beginning to transition from a buyer’s to a seller’s market. This meant that there were a great many buyers in the Hudson Valley looking for great deals, but most homeowners were squeamish about listing their properties because of the perceived depreciation in market value.

A bold message was required to convince home sellers that it was in fact a good time to list their homes. The message was simple, “Thinking of Selling?” on the front with the headline on the back “Now’s The Time.” A brief message explaining the current market conditions with just enough information to entice prospective home sellers that they could potentially get a good price for their home. All it states is, “If you are thinking of selling this is the time. Lots of buyers out there waiting for the right home to come to market. Inventory is low. Curious about the value of your home in today’s market? Call me at 914-424-7160”

The postcard was created using Adobe Photoshop and InDesign. The standard Better Homes and Gardens grass and sky branding background was utilized, but in a unique fashion. In this case I silhouetted the grass, which proved to be very time consuming, so that it could overlay a pocket watch. The pocket watch is the compelling image in this design and it is used to tie the “Now’s the Time” concept between the front and back of the postcard.

The postcard utilized variable data in print production so that the designs could be personalized for the individual real estate agents. This way they are able to include their name, photo and contact information reaching the mail boxes of their sphere of influence. This postcard design proved to be fairly effective in bringing in listing leads.

If you have a direct mail project that you would like to have produced yesterday, you better stop the clock and contact Ortner Graphics immediately.

Let me start from the beginning, I have been using an old version of Microsoft Office Word 2004 for Mac for almost as long as it’s been released. Being a graphic designer, pretty much the only thing that I need Word for is to open Doc files and paste them into InDesign or other text editors like TextEdit or TextWrangler. Shelling out $130 or more for the luxury of text editing just seems to be unfathomable. After all, I live in Rockland County near New York City and that $130 really needs to get spent on rent, or perhaps something more fun than a word processor.

Recently I’ve been running into more and more issue opening up .docx files. Therefore, I decided to give OpenOffice.org a go several months back and try to save the $130. I’d used Open Office for Mac in the past, but it needed to be run out of a Linux window and was a clunky nightmare as a result. Let me just start out by saying the current version of OpenOffice.org 3.4.1 is awesome and a vast improvement!

I’ve recently been involved with a website based in the Blogger/BlogSpot CMS platform. The project required taking tons of old content originally printed on paper and transferring the digital files to Blogger. I initially started copying the files into InDesign to lose all of the excess code bloat and then pasting the resulting text into Blogger’s compose post dialog box. Simple enough, but a lot of the text needed to be reformatted once I brought the stripped out text into Blogger. It was going to be way too time consuming to reformat everything.

Therefore, I took the lazy way out and just started posting it straight into Blogger from OpenOffice.  Following this production method, I noticed right away that the Blogger Theme I was using was displaying some minor code bloat in the site’s post snippets. Well we can’t have that, so I reluctantly went into the HTML view and deleted the bloated code out of each article. It was still faster than re-typesetting everything, after all.

Last night, though, I pasted an old article out of Microsoft Word 2004, which I opened just out of old habit. I was surprised at how much more code bloat seemed to be getting carried over to blogger from Microsoft Word.

So I decided to conduct an experiment and share the results with you fine readers. Both of the examples below used the same exact Word Document. One example copies the document’s text directly from OpenOffice.org into Blogger. The Other copies the text Directly from Microsoft Word 2004 into Blogger.

An illustrated example of the amount of code bloat that is retained when a Word 2004 document is copied and pasted into an HTML text editor

An illustrated example of the amount of code bloat that is retained when a OpenOffice.org document is copied and pasted into an HTML text editor.

I think the results here, really speak for themselves and once again, Microsoft sucks! I’m starting to sound like a broken record. There is simply way more code bloat being produced by Microsoft Word than a OpenOffice.org text document. I found this to be pretty interesting, and useful information (I know I’m a total nerd). I only wish I could further this comparison experiment with Word Perfect, iWork and Microsoft Office X. Based on my statements above, there’s obviously no way I’m going to purchase any of those programs. If any of you readers happen to take an interest in this and want to conduct your own research with these other programs, I would love to see the results, please post them below.

Thinking of Selling? We'll showcase your home on all of the top national and local real estate websites. This is a variable direct mail post card for use in the real estate industry.

Creating an engaging direct mail post card design can be a challenging task. Especially in the field of real estate where postcard designs are most often simply a photo of a MLS listing along with a brief description of the property on the back. The above design breaks the mold of standard real estate postcard designs.

The Thinking of Selling concept pictured above promotes Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty’s listing syndication through social media and real estate websites such as Facebook, Trulia, Realtor.com and Zillow, to name just a few. A stock photo of a laptop computer was used to drive home the fact that this message is about an information technology service that the company offers. The real estate websites logos were then assembled in Adobe Illustrator and warped to match the laptop photo’s perspective in Adobe Photoshop. The Laptop was also silhouetted in Photoshop so that it could then be imported into Adobe InDesign and placed over Rand Realty’s standard grass/sky background branding image. The text was also written and typeset in InDesign and the logo was placed in the top right corner in accordance with Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate’s branding standards.

To ensure a cohesion between the front and back of the postcards the grass/sky image was used again as a background for the text. The body copy on the back further drives home the point to the card’s audience the significance of getting the potential lead’s home on as many websites as possible.

Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty utilizes a direct mail vendor with the ability to create postcards with variable text and photos. This gives their agents the opportunity to include all of their contact information along with headshot on the card. They also could customize the message on the back of the card to suit their needs.  This all ads up to an effective direct mail campaign. The postcard was so successful and popular with the real estate agents that the design was modified and resized to run in several of the Hudson Valley region’s publications as a branding ad.

Branding ad for Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty

Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate has created a large number of videos for the purpose of attracting a web audience to their site. These videos are also a great opportunity for the company to increase brand awareness, so they opted to create some on-air marketing to promote them. Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate then in turn syndicates the videos out to their Franchisee’s. Rand Realty used the opportunity to drive some more web traffic from their print campaign in a few local publications in Westchester and the Hudson Valley with the print ad displayed on the left.

The Power of Color certainly appeals to a graphic designer’s sensibilities. This video explains the basic principles of color theory and how to apply it in interior design. I also clearly used some color theory in the design of the ad. Three instances of Better Homes and Gardens green were placed over a black and white CAD rendered image adhering to the law of thirds. This has resulted in a logo that really stands out and text that is easily readable.

While working on this project I was both under time and budgetary constraints so I used my trusty flatbed scanner for the image of the fanned out Pantone book. This, of course, required some moderate retouching and color correction in Photoshop. The background image, Pantone book, logo and text were all assembled into the final design using Adobe InDesign. Certainly a fun project to work on and the end results make for a great looking ad.

Cover for catalog insert in the Wall Street Journal promoting the new "Distinctive Collection" luxury real estate brand created in Adobe InDesign

Realogy’s Better Homes and Gardens franchise has dropped their Premier Selections luxury brand and replaced it with the Distinctive Collection brand. It was perfect timing for Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty as they entered their spring market campaign. The Rands decided to promote their extensive inventory of luxury homes with a catalog insert in the Wall Street Journal.

Being such a high profile marketing campaign it was incredibly important that the cover use a highly compelling photograph. Conveniently Rand Realty had just struck up a new relationship with Edberg Marketing. Edberg specializes in real estate photography and has the capability of taking elevated photographs.

Simply put, elevated photography raises a camera on an extending mast and tethers the camera to the operating photographer on the ground. The photographer has some limited ability to pivot the camera in order to get the correct angle. However, due to the height the mast often sways in the wind causing some motion blur on many of the exposures.

The Distinctive Collection cover proved to be a very complicated shoot for a variety of reasons. The first reason being that, as always in the world of marketing, we were on tight time frame. The time factor was further compounded by the terribly wet spring that prevailed in 2011. Edberg was forced to try and make the shot in iffy weather at least three times before they finally got some decent light. A second complication was that Edberg was unable to take a vertical photo due to the way that the camera mounts on the elevated mast. Typically in real estate photography this wouldn’t be an issue because horizontal compositions tend to be the preferred format. Unfortunately, Edberg was only able to mount an EOS Rebel on the mast, so a horizontal photo did not hold the required resolution for a high quality cover photo. After a great deal of back and fourth Eric Ortner finally was able to figure out a solution to the problem. With a great deal of reluctance on their part Eric managed to get Edberg to release him the Raw CR2 files. He then opened them in Photoshop at the largest Raw settings effectively faking in resolution. This gave resulted in a large enough pixel dimension to create a hi-res cover photo.

The work didn’t stop there however. Due to the home’s foliage there was a great deal of retouching required. The tree in the front of the house cast unsightly shadows all over the front of the house. The solution, remove the tree and shadows in Photoshop. This required about three hours of retouching. As we all know though, a cover photo with blemishes might as well not be printed. This is especially true when pitching to a luxury market, where everything must be perfect. The following examples are the before and after of the retouched photos.

Original photo with branches and shadows obscuring the front of the home.

Photoshop Retouched cover photo which removes the tree's branch and shadows.

The Distinctive Collection cover proved to be a rather hi-stress project, but in the end it resulted in a great quality high impact presentation piece.

The Explore. Play. Grow. HudsonHeartbeat.com Lifestyle Branding Ad for Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty

It was decided that a major portion of the  marketing campaign for  HudsonHeartbeat.com branding would need to be focused on the Hudson Valley lifestyle. This ad was designed with the Luxury market in Westchester County in mind. After some exhaustive image research and a few other design comps we decided that we should down play screen grabs of the actual site. Instead Rand Realty’s owners wanted to present it as a lifestyle ad. This style actually ties in more with the typical branding ads produced by Realogy‘s Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate franchise branding.

Initially the design used an image of a laptop. However, the new iPad was so much fun that we though it would be more hip to use an iPad instead of a laptop and better reach our luxury audience. The main background photo of the Adirondack chairs, dock, and water is from iStockPhoto. Eric Ortner took a studio photo of an iPad matching it to the perspective of the iStockPhoto shot. He then superimposed a screen grab of the HudsonHeartbeat.com site into the iPad image in Adobe Photoshop. Mr. Ortner then used Photoshop to place the iPad image into the Adirondack Chair Image. Upon purchase of the Hi-Res Adirondack chair it became clear that additional retouching of the iStock Photo image was required. In addition to being distressed, the hi-res photos revealed that the chairs had a great deal of dirt and mildew on them. So Eric Ortner needed to “repaint” the chairs in Photoshop. Some careful selection, masking, feathering and layering eliminated the filth. The page layout’s, photo, logos and text were then all put together in Adobe InDesign.

This branding ad is being used extensively in local publications throughout New York’s Westchester the Hudson Valley. It has also been turned into a postcard and flyer.

Display ad promoting Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty's Text message yard signs

In an effort to better serve interested buyers in  a challenging real estate market, Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty adopted a new text message system. The company added a rider to its yard signs, so that perspective buyers could find out information about the property on the spot.

The display ad in this sample was created to further Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty’s brand awareness and promote the new text message riders. The design utilizes two primary elements the stock photo of the house and the photo of the yard sign and text rider.

An interesting point regarding this display ad is that the only use of the company’s logo is on the sign itself. Believe it or not, but this is a major break from the company’s standard design. Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate’s branding standards mandates that the logo always be included in the top right corner of the ad. This design doesn’t stray too far from that design standard, although it is a stretch having the “For Sale” rider above the main sign.

I particularly like this design because Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate’s design system revolves around grass. Grass is a prominent feature in this particular display ad so, I think it is helpful in reinforcing branding.

It was created using Adobe Photoshop and InDesign.