In today’s shrinking home buying market, real estate professionals need to market more heavily to stand out to the decreasing number of home buyers. Below are some ideas to help real estate professionals get their company name displayed and remembered.

My husband and I bought a house last year, and for our first Christmas in our new house, the Realtor® we used to buy our home gave us a cute ceramic house ornament that said “Our First Christmas.” It also had the name of her real estate brokerage on the back of the ornament. Of course I hung it on our Christmas tree. I appreciated the gift and I also thought it a well calculated reminder of her name and services.

But with Christmas over, the ornament was packed away for the next eleven months, so her promotional item has a useful marketing life of only one month every year. That’s better than being a throw away product, but I think there are items out there with longer marketing life that would be better for her industry.

Five promotional items for Real Estate Industry that I think are the best for logo display and useful marketing life are: house dry erase boards, house cutting boards, house mint cards, drinkware and pens. This Part One will talk about house-shaped dry erase boards.

A dry erase board, in the shape of a house of course, is a great promotional item for a Realtor®.

With a magnet on its back, most people would put the dry erase board on the refrigerator and that is an excellent spot for a promotional item to do its best.  The board advertises the Realtor’s® name from the refrigerator door every time someone reaches in for food. There’s much more marketing life in that board than a magazine or newspaper ad which are typically glanced at one time.  

I’ve seen a house shaped dry erase board titled “Things to Do” with numbered lines underneath. Because everyone can use such a handy list, few people would throw it away, and the logo gets scanned every time someone adds to their “To Do” list. The logo is not only at the top by the roof line, but on the included marker attached to a clip at the bottom of the board. A logo in two very visible places—I think the dry erase board gets double points for logo display.

Because the dry erase board has a useful marketing life (it wouldn’t be immediately thrown away), and both its logo imprints would be noticed more than once (otherwise the advertising money would be just as well spent on a newspaper or magazine ad), a house shaped dry erase board would be an excellent choice for a Realtor’s® company logo to get noticed and remembered by a home buyer.