Spheres & Farms™ “seventh-inning stretch”

[Spheres & Farms™ is a game about real estate brokerage branding in the Puget Sound region.]

Today, I’m taking a break from the Spheres & Farms™ publishing schedule to summarize what I’ve published at Emelessence semi-weekly since November.

In the first post, I introduced the series as a design journal for a strategy game on premium real estate branding. In the second journal entry, I described how both the agent and the brokerage are real estate brands. These brands are the constant signals of value in a local or regional real estate market, but their strategies must be developed differently. This is because as a practical matter, their clients and services aren’t really the same.

In the third journal entry, I described how conventional measures of central tendency fall short when describing price trends in a given community. Happily, there are alternatives to these measures that allow for deeper, more precise descriptions of these markets. In the fourth journal entry, I described how due to their scope of operations, brokerages need to think more broadly than their agents about markets and brand visibility.

Building upon these general observations, in the fifth journal entry, I began to describe the early concepts driving development of the game itself: who would benefit and how, and presenting an abstract of the game. For the first time, I included some draft playtest-quality game components.

In the sixth journal entry, I delved more deeply into the challenges of operational scale and agent control, noting that “A real estate brand-building game that abstracts out market prioritization, farming methods, pricing strategy, listing promotion, risk management, economic cycles, and their effects on demand and supply offers no insight into the business.”

I began to introduce draft game components in greater detail with the seventh journal entry. Here I explained my conclusion that regardless of whether the game is to be an internal training program or a commercial product, a realistic range of agent attributes should be offered, with fictitious agent names substituted for their real ones.

In the eighth journal entry, I introduced the comparative benefits and limitations of the game’s namesake geographic farming, and demographic, niche, or “sphere marketing” from the brand’s perspective. In the ninth and tenth, I further introduced a model of the economic cycle and residential homebuying demand that calibrates the inputs of listing and selling opportunities into the markets targeted by the two different farming strategies.

In the eleventh journal entry, I explained how the scope of the game demanded an unconventional solution for a map. The solution devised was to replace a single large map with a deck of 178 tarot-sized “location cards,” each with ten different features. I provided a sample card to illustrate these features, which identify these locations; classify local properties at each by density, value, employment, and amenities; describe the range of likely prospecting outcomes; and allow tracking and scoring of listings at these locations. In the twelfth journal entry, I described each of these card attributes in greater detail.

As prospecting, listing, promoting, and selling activities are essential to any strategy centered on residential real estate sales, I introduced components and processes to model these in journal entries thirteen through fifteen. In the thirteenth, these included description of a “prospecting/event card” deck and a draft directory of events with their descriptions and effects. In the fourteenth, I walked readers through the procedure of prospecting for and winning listings, and incurring the aforementioned events. In this entry, I also explained the need to value listings relative to homebuying demand in place of an unmanageable pricing scheme, and the solution provided.

In the fifteenth journal entry, I introduced “promotion and cost recovery (P&CR) points,” an artificial currency representing that share of tangible and intangible gains from sold listings that is returned to the business to maintain operations and promote future listings. I also describe procedures for aging, promoting, and selling those listings that were won in the prospecting phases of preceding turns. To aid in these descriptions, I added illustrations of components to be used.

That’s where things are at the moment. There are just three journal entries left: the sixteenth on projects and pre-sales, including projects of all densities; the seventeenth to explain the method for scoring gains in brand visibility; and a final series entry that will tie everything together into a sequence of play.

Thank you kindly for reading!

Schedule of entries