Spheres & Farms™

The game was conceived as a training exercise to “get inside the heads” of owners of a branded real estate affiliate and their senior staff. The next step was to host a game involving the managing brokers of that brokerage’s regional offices, giving them the chance to “play the owners for a day.”

Brokerages need to think more broadly than agents. While the agents practice place marketing in miniature—an apt description of home sales—the brokerage brand sells intangibles. Their scope of business comprises those markets of all the agents whom they employ, or might employ in the future.

Measures of central tendency are potentially erroneous and, in any case, self-limiting methods of determining where the most brand-aligned homes are being sold. ... There are alternatives to these measures and counts of sales above a threshold for more precisely identifying target markets by price.

The homes themselves vary widely; prices are abstract and always in flux. The agents’ and brokerage brands’ faces, names, and logos are visible and persistent. So more than anything else, the constants in a local real estate market are the names of agents and branded brokerages.

The first of a series of posts of a “design journal,” introducing readers to a strategy game on premium real estate branding. This series will start with 18 journal entries describing the logic and inspiration of the game and its components, then go on to playtesting outcomes and strategic insights.