Real estate flyers often come off as poorly branded when they feature inconsistent visual elements, cluttered design, and even somewhat generic content.
These, and a few others, are pretty common issues that lead to the off-brand real estate flyer problem, which is usually hard to fix because companies aren’t sure what the exact issue is or where to begin fixing it.
With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at this problem, its costs, what to do with each flyer, and what brokerages need to do to fix this conundrum.
The Real Cost of Inconsistent Marketing Collateral
Redesigned flyers with inconsistent marketing elements cost money. Once you print them, they get piled up, and you’re left with almost useless marketing material. Moreover, they lead to higher costs, including lost credibility and more expensive client acquisition. That’s because companies can see as much as a 33% increase in revenue with consistent branding.
When the visual identity or messaging isn’t consistent across the board, this tends to signal to potential clients that your company’s attention to detail is low.
They can perceive you as unprofessional and careless, but it can also lead to lower trust. This is crucial because trust is the deciding factor for around 81% of consumers.
It’s worth adding that inconsistencies also lead to weaker recognition. With your colors, fonts, and marketing message varying across multiple flyers, people can’t remember you, and it becomes harder for your brand to stand out in a sea of competitors.
Both real estate boutiques and enterprise brokerages can suffer almost equally.
For instance, if a real estate agent creates an Open House flyer using a simple free template, they may end up with a low-quality flyer that makes the boutique seem like a low-budget operation.
On the other hand, when multiple agents from an enterprise brokerage use different flyers, for instance, one uses a new design and one an older one, the company shows a lack of organization.
Bigger brands fix this by using the right platform, like Realty ONE Group and its use of MAXA Designs.
Why It Keeps Happening (Even If You Think You’ve Fixed It)
The inconsistent, off-brand real estate flyer problem keeps happening because the agent’s primary goal is to close the deal quickly. This can conflict with the brokerage's goal of maintaining brand integrity, which is often crucial to building a luxury brand.
Despite the templates, detailed marketing policies, and robust brand guides, agents can still use outdated templates. This happens when the centralized template library isn’t organized or is slow and confusing. Moreover, freelancers and even team members can interpret the rules differently.
If you’re using DIY tools that prioritize user-friendliness, agents can become more empowered, but this will also lead to more independent operations, where inconsistencies thrive. For instance, if the agent uses an eye-catching template created with the DIY tool, they can make a good-looking flyer, but it won't correctly reflect the brokerage’s brand.
This shows how crucial it is to have centralized approval or a robust, easy-to-use asset library.
The Hidden Workload Behind Every Flyer
The unfortunate truth is that when agents deviate from the set template behind marketing materials, like a flyer, the collateral can be devastating. Going off-brand results in a lot more work than the actual job of creating the flyer:
- Marketing directors get an endless queue of Slack or email review requests from agents who have gone off-brand. Reviewing material is usually easy when the agents are on-brand, but if they aren’t, checking and fixing each one becomes a major hassle, resulting in an endless queue.
- Since marketing materials are also legal documents, off-brand designs need to be corrected to include all missing disclaimers and ensure the data is accurate. Missing disclaimers can lead to legal issues like fines, while missing or incorrect data requires extensive cross-referencing with official MLS listing data to ensure you’re not providing inaccurate information to potential buyers.
- The off-brand real estate flyer problem can also lead to last-minute corrections. Mistakes are noticed late in the process, just before printing or publishing. This also tends to lead to late-night or after-hours work, which, in turn, inevitably creates a lot of stress for the whole marketing team.
The problem for marketing directors here is that they easily become overworked. Moreover, you can easily start feeling frustrated that you’re being ignored and that the resources are being wasted.
What Brand Control Should Look Like in 2025
The solution to the off-branding issue is a modern mindset that’s centered on brand control without bottlenecks. However, it’s not about being brand police but about being a brand enablement partner.
The main thing here is to use a highly scalable centralized system that will replace off-brand, generic, DIY tools. Your marketing team should create a comprehensive library of custom templates for flyers and other marketing materials you plan to use.
Naturally, as we live in the modern age, design automation should be your goal as well. This is a game-changer, as centralized platforms can integrate with the MLS and agents' databases. So whenever a listing goes live, the system pulls the price, photos, and address, along with the agent’s contact info and headshot, and integrates them into a complete, on-brand flyer.
Such a system ensures that all material automatically follows the predetermined brand guidelines. The agents can still make changes, but they can’t alter the main branding elements, like the primary color palette or the logo. This ensures quality control and full consistency on-brand at scale.
Besides brand management, a modern solution can also ensure compliance by making it fixed and automatic, just like branding.
In short, with this modern mindset, you get:
- Brand control through automation
- Elimination of bottlenecks
- Going off-brand becomes impossible, which eliminates off-brand costs
- The marketing team becomes the designer and enabler
- Agents get to make flyers quickly while staying on-brand
How Brokerages Are Fixing This With Platforms Like MAXA
The modern solution mindset we’ve discussed is embodied in MAXA Designs, the tool that helps you fully eliminate the off-brand real estate flyer problem.
MAXA helps you ditch the old-school manual brand enforcement that leads to all the issues we’ve discussed here for a modern approach where technology enables brand consistency.
The MAXA platform helps your marketing team set brand-safe templates and place them in a centralized system. Agents can access it and pull the templates they need, then personalize them in various ways while staying fully compliant.
The Design Editor Studio lets you:
- Lock down critical elements that cannot be affected when making material
- Set primary and secondary brand fonts and colors that are pinned to the top
- Automatically eliminate elements when they aren’t used
The platform eliminates bottlenecks by automating the most labor-intensive aspects of flyer creation, increasing agent speed and ensuring compliance.
So, how does this work in practice? Consider the example of a brokerage with 500 agents we’ve worked with. It had issues with brand consistency, and its marketing director often spent as much as 70% of their time reviewing and fixing material like flyers. At the same time, agents had to wait for a couple of days almost every time.
Then, the brokerage started working with MAXA. The marketing team created over a hundred modern templates and used the lock feature to protect the logo and brand colors. They also added their agent roster and MLS to the platform and set the legal disclaimers to auto-populate specific materials. Agents were then able to use the platform to easily create and publish social media posts and to personalize designs before they were launched.
In just 6 months, the brokerage achieved full brand consistency across all its marketing materials, not just its flyers.
Final Thoughts: Off-Brand Shouldn’t Be the Default
As you can see, brand chaos may be an issue, but it’s completely solvable. The only thing that your marketing team needs here is a more modern mindset and the help of a real estate-focused marketing and design tool like MAXA.
If you’re ready to begin fixing your off-brand marketing issues like the ones described here, book a demo with MAXA and see how our platform can help you stay on-brand without slowing you or your agents down.
