Chris Audette is the founder of The Group at Re/Max First. This organization is a prominent real estate services and marketing firm in Canada.
Please give us a brief bio of yourself, your background, and your job profile.
Hi, my name is Chris Audette. I’m the founder of The Group at Re/Max First. We help builders, buyers and sellers. We have a national real estate listing site, www.real-estate.ca We also have one local site for Calgary Alberta, Canada, that’s Calgary-real-estate.com. Primarily though, we have expanded into the luxury market and builder and developer promotion and marketing. The foundation of that marketing is based around a new construction website www.New.ca. That’s us in a nutshell.
What is your role in the company?
I’m the founder of The Group at Re/Max First. Informally I act as the Creative Director for our property marketing and also have headed the Search Optimization side of the business.
Performance is what drives me. Every engagement, whether it is a website or digital marketing campaign, needs to be quantified in the context of solving a problem and needs to push the client closer to achieving their business goals. At the end of the day, as an individual and an agency co-owner, accountability for every dollar spent on behalf of a brand is of paramount importance. That has been a core differentiator for me.
Please tell us more about your company / organization.
It’s a primarily real estate services and real estate marketing firm. We were fortunate enough to find some really great people to work with early on in the formalization of our transformation to a team dynamic. We’ve never been the biggest, but we’ve been close. Primarily though, we just always tried to be among the best, and to always be learning, growing and improving in what we do and the job we do for our clients.
Congratulations! As the winner of the 2021 TITAN Property Awards, what does it mean for you, your team, and your organization, to receive this distinction?
Pretty overwhelmed to be in here with such a high caliber of architects, designers, and marketing agencies. With representation of real estate developers from Qatar, to Singapore, Korea to the states, Madrid to Nepal. I mean the list is pretty impressive and to be included in that with a winning marketing piece is phenomenal. To have been nominated, period, was quite ingratiating and warming, but to be a winner in the video field.
Could you briefly explain about the winning project / title you entered into the 2021 TITAN Property Awards, and why you chose to enter this project?
So this one, was our personal residence. I wanted to use this as an opportunity to tweak out some of the marketing that we’ve been doing for more of the high end luxury properties. As part of that, we did the full suite including a property video. We called in my good friend, Darryl Crawford from InTheHood, to do a property video. When he showed up at the door, he had nothing with him and he looked at me and he said, “I want to do this all with the iPhone.” “I just picked up my brand new iPhone and I want to do this entire video with that.” I thought this is really an opportunity to not only stand out, but to also show what amazing things you can do, not relying on the caliber of high cost equipment.
Getting a little bit creative with the process really led to a quite heartwarming and astounding little video. To be perfectly honest, it wasn’t shoot it and go and perfect on the first take, but it really turned out well.
Biggest challenges you faced with this project?
Did I also mention that it didn’t come out the way we wanted it the first round? Darryl the videographer actually lives in Vancouver, BC. He shot back the first edited version, we felt like it was just kind of missing a little bit of something. So, I grabbed my iPhone and shot a couple of supplemental clips with my dog Eddie, and it just all pulled together really quite nicely from there. Those supplemental shots, basically just kind of book-ended the story, giving it a bit of a reference. Coming home to a pooch who’s greeting you at the door and going on and playing with him at the end of the day.
winning this award developed your practice / career?
I am inspired in upping my game in the world of real estate marketing for the most part. You don’t have a lot of agencies partaking in this, unless you get into the large developments. The creative shops do a pretty amazing job, but here, at the individual listing level it’s not particularly awe inspiring.
We want to really capture the essence behind the homes we represent. Typical property marketing is pretty devoid of life and it’s more geared towards just taking pictures of walls, a little bit of furniture throughout. It really misses the living, breathing things that reside within it. The parents, the puppies, the pooches, the children running around, the friends, the families, the gatherings. All those things that make a house into a home and a property into something that really has intrinsic value.