Summary

• Prior to implementing Canva, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty dealt with inconsistent branding and time-consuming design processes across 36 offices.
• Using features such as Magic Write, Background Remover, Smart Mockups, Whiteboards, and Bulk Create has saved the team significant amounts of time and enabled them to scale offerings with clients.
• The team can now service design requests in approximately 10 minutes, significantly reducing turnaround time by 83%.

About Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty

Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty⁠(opens in a new tab or window) is a full-service, locally owned brokerage backed by the top national brand in home services. The goal is simple; Homesale helps people achieve their real estate dreams. The company was founded on trust, support, and dedication to upholding high standards of excellence with a mission to meet people where they are and get them to where they want to be - in life and in their career.

The Challenge

Before Canva, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty grappled with internal inconsistent branding. With 36 offices publishing content, the company's brand aesthetic often lacked uniformity, and that adversely affected their professional image.

“Brand awareness and continuity were important to us, which is one of the major reasons why we chose Canva,” recalls Dawn Fink, Vice President of Marketing and Agent Services at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty. “Our brand was all over the place before, and our logos were distorted. People were adding tag lines and colors to designs that didn’t fit our brand.”

“As a company, we were able to tap into keeping a brand image by using Canva. One of our main focuses was how do we keep our brand concise and clean, especially when working with real estate agents who want to incorporate their own brand.”

Creating marketing materials was time-consuming too, as not all team members had a design background. This burden fell on Mercedes Palmer, the Lead Designer, limiting the self-service capabilities of other team members.

“Other software takes time to learn and understand, so not everyone can use them,” says Mercedes. “As a result, anything I designed depended on myself to make revisions.”

Initially skeptical, Mercedes quickly realized the benefits of the platform after she explored Canva’s drag-and-drop technology.

“Once the whole team became well-versed in Canva, we created templates to share with our office admins,” says Mercedes. “We wanted to ensure any Homesale office you walk into would look and feel the same.”

The Solution

Since April 2022, the Homesale Realty team has been using Canva to streamline design processes.

“The onboarding process was fast and efficient. It only took a day or two to set up our Canva team profile,” says Mercedes. “We utilized Canva’s training team to onboard our admins and get them familiar with using Canva. Now when we get requests, anyone on our team can just pop into Canva and look for the template we already created, instead of having to ask myself or another team member.”

Having set up a library of branded templates, administrators are empowered to personalize materials while maintaining brand consistency.

“We're creating templates for events that we can push out and say, ‘The holiday season is coming up, here's three different versions of an office holiday party,” says Dawn. “Here's an invitation for a shred event, or here's an invitation for a pie party that your agents are going to’. So it really allowed us to tighten up our brand and be consistent.”

Canva's ready-made dimensions and formats, as well as the Resize & Magic Switch feature, has made document creation and repurposing content for different social platforms significantly easier.

These features were particularly useful during the production of the Homesale Awards Gala in March. Collaborators were able to brainstorm ideas for the event in real time using Canva Whiteboards, and subsequently crafted all event materials, such as invitations and presentations with ease.

“The sharing and commenting capabilities are great when working in teams,” says Maya McKinzie, Digital Marketing Coordinator. “The element and photo library is great, and I love to search the templates when I need ideas to add to my designs. Brand Kit is also fantastic as it makes it so easy to brand content.”

Tools to work smarter in design

The team has been using Canva’s AI tools to create content incredibly fast.

The Background Remover tool ensures clean and professional agent headshots by eliminating distracting backgrounds in one click.

Magic Write not only provides creative ideas, but enhances the quality of marketing copy, greatly assisting Maya with brainstorming ideas for flyers, trifold brochures, and postcards.

Mercedes relies on Smart Mockups to easily insert product mockups into her designs, even for large projects like a 100-page Brand Guide.

“I used it for the whole Brand Guide,” says Mercedes. “They look realistic and it’s so easy to pop them in there. We use the booklet ones, the folder ones. Any type of print marketing.”

These advancements are just the beginning. As Canva’s technology continues to grow, the Homesale Realty team plans to further integrate their affiliates and agents onto their Canva Teams account.

“Our next step is to create our Homesale Realty environment and bring our agents into that,” says Dawn. “We haven't gotten to where we feel we have enough templates in there to open the door for agents to come into our Canva team environment. Which is our long-term goal.”

Save time and boost efficiency

Canva’s Bulk Create feature has been a game-changer for Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty.

Maya can now complete tasks, like personalizing materials for their agent's subscription service, in just one or two hours, instead of spending an entire day on it.

Maya says, “Canva saves time in exchanging assets with other design softwares and our administrators are less reliant on designers for small projects as they’re now able to hop in a design themselves. This saves us from long troubleshooting times when admins or agents have issues.”

And it's not just the administrators who benefit from Canva. Thanks to the streamlining of workflows with Canva, designers can now complete graphic requests in as little as 10 minutes, reducing their turnaround time by a staggering 83%.

“It is a huge time saver when we have all of our assets in Canva. I always browse templates, then I change them to match our branding. Canva already has the social media sizes for Facebook and Instagram. If we have a request come in and they want a social media graphic for Halloween, we could have it done within 10 minutes instead of an hour,” explains Mercedes.

While being a vital efficiency asset, Canva has proven to be a cost-effective solution too, particularly due to the reduction in licensing costs.

With the help of Canva, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty has positioned itself as an industry leader, transforming their business practices to meet evolving consumer expectations and using technology to stay ahead in a highly competitive real estate market.