Creative brief template for Real estate

The creative brief with three columns a property campaign needs: which listing the asset is for, which stage of the sale it runs at, and exactly what imagery exists to build it from.

Everything else is the general creative brief, unchanged. One row per asset, a hook written as what happens, one message with a proof beside it, the specs up front and an honest must-avoid.

Write it before the shoot, because the shoot is the only chance to get the imagery a campaign needs. A photographer briefed to capture the property will produce a set for the portal listing and nothing framed for a vertical placement.

Use it again at each stage of the sale, because the asset that opens a campaign is not the asset that fills the last inspection.

Property campaigns have one production moment and it is usually booked before anybody has decided what the advertising needs.

The result is predictable. The photographer captures the property properly — wide, horizontal, evenly lit, framed for a portal listing — and the campaign then needs vertical crops, a detail shot that works at small size, a first frame that is not a hallway, and a walkthrough that was never filmed. The assets are assembled from material that was not composed for them, which is why so much property advertising looks like a slideshow.

Writing the asset rows first inverts the order. The rows become the shot list, the shoot is briefed from them, and the campaign gets the framing it needs. It costs an hour before the booking and it is the highest-return hour in the whole process.

The imagery available column is there because briefs routinely describe assets that cannot be made.

Drone footage that was not captured. A twilight set that was not shot. A walkthrough video nobody filmed. A detail of a feature the photographer did not think was important. The row names what exists — the shoot, the floorplan, drone or not, twilight or not, video or not — and an asset briefed against anything else is either re-shot or abandoned.

It also makes the cheap options visible. The floorplan already exists, costs nothing, and is one of the strongest performing images available in this category, because it answers the question a buyer actually has.

The stage of sale column changes what the asset is for.

Pre-launch has no address to send anybody to, so the asset is building an audience: a street, a type of home, a corridor. Launch asks for attendance at a specific first inspection. The open-inspection weeks ask for a particular time on a particular day, which makes the asset time-bound and disposable by design. Pre-auction speaks to a warm audience that has already seen the property and asks them to register.

One asset cannot do four jobs. Briefing them separately is what stops a campaign running its launch creative into the final week, asking people who have already inspected to come and discover a property.

Whether a price or a guide appears in creative is a campaign-brief decision, and the creative brief inherits it rather than re-deciding it.

Two practical consequences belong in the row. First, a guide in an asset makes the asset expire the moment the guide changes, which in a live campaign can be any week, so the default is usually to keep it off the image and on the listing. Second, a paraphrase of a guide is worse than the guide, because it becomes a second version of the most load-bearing sentence in the campaign.

Where the guide does appear, note in the row who checks it weekly.

The recurring list is specific and worth writing out every time: no drone shot that shows a neighbour's property in a way they have not agreed to; no twilight image presented as a daytime one; no staged furniture implied as included; no digitally altered view; no image of a neighbouring property used to suggest the outlook; no price or guide unless the campaign brief permits it.

Each of these has caused a complaint somewhere, and none of them is obvious to an editor who was not in the listing conversation.

A listing campaign is short and its assets are disposable. That changes the economics of production in a way the brief should reflect.

Some rows deserve real production: the hero image, the walkthrough where one is justified by the property. Most do not. A floorplan crop, a single strong detail with the inspection time set as a text layer, a simple carousel of the three rooms that matter — these take minutes, they can be regenerated when the inspection time changes, and they carry the campaign's middle weeks perfectly well.

Briefing that tier deliberately is what lets a campaign stay fresh for three weeks without a second shoot.

Property is one of the few categories where a named individual is genuinely part of the product, and most creative briefs treat the agent as a logo in the corner.

An agent speaking to camera about why this street rarely comes up, or what a buyer should look at in this floorplan, is specific in a way no stock line is, and it is cheap: a phone, ten minutes, no crew. It also works for the office's own presence spend, because it is the same footage that makes a vendor choose an agency.

Brief it as its own row, with a hook that is a sentence the agent actually says rather than a topic. Briefed as talk about the property, it produces a minute of nothing. Briefed as the first line is why this street rarely comes up, it produces something usable.

Seven checks. One row per asset, each naming the listing and the stage of sale. Every row names the imagery it will be built from, and that imagery exists. The shoot was briefed from these rows rather than the other way round. Price and guide appear only where the campaign brief permits. Must avoid names the drone, twilight, staging and alteration issues that are out. And every due date leaves room for review and a re-edit before the day the asset is needed.