Harcourts - Second Life

Brief

In the midst of a real estate boom, Harcourts Real Estate needed a comms initiative that would project their brand above all others in the minds of potential clients across New Zealand – and do so on a shoestring budget of $10,000!

Solution

To ensure whatever we did actually punched above it’s weight we recommended focusing on the creation of something that would be so topical to the public and media, all we’d need to do was light the spark - they would do the rest!

We selected two topical news streams of the time; the real estate boom and the growth of online virtual worlds, and meshed the two to create New Zealand’s first ‘virtual’ real estate office: Harcourts Second Life (only the second real estate company in the world to go virtual).

We selected Second Life as the virtual environment for Harcourts as it was one of the largest ‘virtual world’ social networks, and was attracting loads of media attention.

The biggest commercial activity in Second Life is the sale of virtual land, so there was a natural synergy with a leading first life’ real estate company deciding to immerse itself in what was a new and exciting online model.

The solution consisted of a new virtual office based on the ‘main land’ and an island that sold land to virtual residents. The ‘main land’ office was inspired by Harcourts’ existing Brisbane office, with the island terraformed and ‘roaded’ to look like an attractive holiday resort.

Results

The project was an outstanding success, reaping approximately $850,00 worth of PR, including full page spread in the Christchurch Press, coverage in the Dominion Post, NZ Marketing magazine, content on TV3’s Campbell Live as well as on 60 Minutes – as well as a huge amount of blog coverage online.