Real estate company sports new look

Harcourts estate agent Max Martin with his two sons, Simon (left) and Nigel.

New Zealand's biggest real estate company Harcourts launched a refreshed brand to the market yesterday.

The new look is the group's first significant brand change since 1988 and is designed to make it more user-friendly and up-to-date for the mobile, digital era.

"It's a refresh of the brand," said Max Martin, owner of Harcourts Tauranga. "It's been around for a long time and needs an upgrade to reflect more modern thinking and times."

Hielke Oppers, principal of Harcourts Rotorua, said all the major brands were making changes, including simplifying logos.

"Harcourts is a market leader in terms of technology and is always looking at ways of improving everything. This new, fresher look is part of all that."

New Zealand chief executive Chris Kennedy said the new look was designed to reflect Harcourts' place in the modern New Zealand real estate landscape.

"We wanted our brand to reflect our commitment to innovation and the exciting changes we are experiencing in the industry," he said. "But in practical terms, it also needed to work across multiple platforms and be able to be adapted for use by all the businesses in our large franchise group."

Harcourts International managing director Mike Green said the brand rejuvenation had taken more than a year. He added that with the way the real estate industry was evolving, brands needed to be agile enough to change and grow as well.

"The way we do business within our industry has changed, our clients' perception of our industry has changed, essentially, our world has evolved, and so we knew our brand needed to evolve with it.

"We have consistently grown our investment in technology, have expanded into two new countries over the past 12 months, and are constantly looking at ways to innovate, but this wasn't necessarily apparent in our previous branding. It was important to us that our brand properly reflected our size, innovation, capability and global reach," Mr Green said.

Harcourts has been seeing strong growth in the Bay of Plenty, with Mr Martin of Harcourts Tauranga noting "the whole town is buzzing".

Growth had been seen across all property sectors, he said, noting the high level of light industrial development in areas such as the Tauriko Business Park.

"Tauranga is becoming an in-place to be," he said. "There are an amazing number of young professionals moving out of Auckland and in to town for a better lifestyle."

Harcourts Rotorua's Mr Oppers said the local market had been slower to take off than bigger centres such as Tauranga, Hamilton and Auckland, but had registered very strong growth over the past 12 months.

"We've seen residential prices increasing across all suburbs while supply has almost halved," he said.

And while commercial and light industrial responded to different variables, there had been good activity, with a lot of businesses moving into town.

Harcourts:

* New Zealand's largest real estate group with almost 2000 sales consultants in 190 offices nationwide.

* Founded in Wellington in 1888 and now has almost 800 offices in 10 countries.