Real Estate Express is the market-leading online real estate education company in the United States. They guide real estate professionals through the education, test prep, testing and accreditation process, to help people all over the United States change their lives and make their dreams a reality.
Before our engagement in 2020, Real Estate Express had seen its market dominance slipping in the face of better-branded competitors. These newer faces were gaining market share by presenting themselves as more trustworthy, modern and professional, even though their core products did not match those of Real Estate Express.
Our first course of action was to lead a comprehensive design discovery phase. We consulted with Real Estate Express leadership about their challenges, reviewed the current product and marketing efforts, conducted competitor and user research, and led branding workshops with key stakeholders. This provided us with the foundation of knowledge necessary to move forward and explore creative directions for the new brand identity.
During the rebranding, we also began to explore aesthetic strategies that would incorporate the best user experience into the brand before a single screen of product or marketing UI was redesigned. The core congruences between UX guidance and brand guidance and the necessary co-informative relationship between the two is a principle often overlooked in our industry, to the detriment of bottom line effectiveness, accessibility compliance, and operational efficiency.
When the initial branding, UX research, and UI design phases were complete, we presented our new website design to Real Estate Express’s leadership team. They were all highly supportive of the result, which took all of their business, brand, and customer goals and hurdles into account, and solved them in an integrated experience.
Based on this work, the parent company restructured from the C-suite down to take advantage of the vision in numerous ways. Chief among them was to consolidate all of their real estate education brands into a single brand under the identity umbrella we’d presented. This was the birth of Colibri Real Estate.