Rebranding a Pioneer of the New York Townhouse Market
For over 40 years Leslie J. Garfield has been a full-service real estate firm dedicated to the sale and purchase of luxury townhouses in New York City.
While the firm had a successful year-on year growth and repeatedly ranked as a ‘Top Residential Firm’ in various real estate publication awards, its reputation was still relatively unknown to many.
Garfield looked to Studio Sanderson to help re-establish themselves as the go-to firm for townhouse buyers, sellers and agents in every neighborhood of New York City with a comprehensive refresh of their brand.
With the internet making market information more accessible, there is increasingly less differentiation between experienced real estate professionals and online listing platforms, like StreetEasy or Trulia. After several conversations with the Garfield team and their clients, we identified one thing which distinguished them from their competitors was their obsessive dedication to providing honest, experienced perspective based on facts and figures.
Our challenge was to turn Garfield’s rich history and this distinction into a contemporary and cutting edge brand. We then set about refreshing, refining, and unifying the communication approach around the narrative; ‘Truth Builds Trust’.
Communicating this message in a relevant, modern way became the focus of the identity rebrand, encompassing a new logo, easy to navigate website, signage, online and print collateral, and reporting.
The result is a refined company image and messaging, and tools which enable a consistent voice and simplification of workflow across all their marketing channels.
To uphold the truism that ‘Truth Builds Trust’, it was important that Garfield provide reliable metrics and analysis to buyers and sellers that supported their perspectives and advice. With over 40 years of historic data, we had ample stats to draw on, but the challenge was presenting this information in a simple and engaging manner.
We created a new reporting system that accomplished this goal with easy to understand infographics. It also allowed for the digitization of reports, so content was easily indexed and shared online.
Most importantly, this new system allowed for the quick and consistent generation of reports across print, email, and website. Designing and building templates, automating tasks and simplifying workflows helped reduce steps by as much as 50%, making better use use of agent’s time and resources.
“Very thoughtful - Sanderson took the time to understand our business. This was really important to us”
- Jed Garfield
"Studio Sanderson is particularly good at aligning smart strategies with good visual design in a way I’ve rarely seen."
- Rick Pretsfelder, Managing Director
We factored the needs of both townhouse buyers and sellers into the redesign of Garfield’s website. For townhouse buyers, it was important to easily access and share information, and inquire in a seamless manner. For sellers, it was imperative to to find historic property data and understand trends and nuances of the townhouse in the market place. Both needed a modern, responsive online experience, which worked seamlessly across multiple devices and browsers.
Just as importantly as what the new website could provide for Garfield’s clients, it needed to be functional, fast, and easy for their brokers to use. We created a CMS which was able to quickly list a property not only on the Garfield website, but push the listing out to other real estate sites such as StreetEasy, saving the brokers time with every listing.
