After much thought and design we settled on a logo for our new office.
John Petrella, REALTOR®
ABR®, GRI, Principal Broker
Direct: 808.640.3953
Fax: 808.443.0500
Local Hawaii Real Estate
159 Keawe St., Suite 1
Hilo, HI 96720
Your Referrals are most Welcome!
REALTOR® is a federally registered collective membership mark which identifies a real estate professional who is Member of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® and subscribes to its strict Code of Ethics.
Very nice, I am ready to head to Hawaii now! I have only been once, but I would love to return one day.
Hi Todd,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
It is tough to roll ALL of what we do as a Brokerage into a logo. I suggest that a Logo is about branding. The letters in Coke say nothing about it being a drink. The letters in Google say nothing about being a search engine. the Micorsoft logos say nothing about software.
We live and work in Hawaii. There are many logos out there to me that do not say real estate. There are logos with balloons, houses, frogs, horses, dogs, mountains, cattle, silos, trees, flowers...the list goes on and on.
In the end, we mixed Hawaii law with a bit of local myth/custom, and and multiplied by two.
Law
Hawaii Administrative Rules Title 16 Chapter 99-3
Conduct: (a) To fully protect the general public in its real estate transactions, every licensee shall conduct business, including the licensee's own personal real estate transactions, in accordance with this section.
(b) The licensee shall protect the public against fraud, misrepresentation, or unethical practices in the real estate field.
Myth
Please ref Guardian Geckos by Veronica S. Schweitzer
http://www.coffeetimes.com/geckos.htm
some excerpts...
The geckos of Hawaii have earned a great reputation rooted in the earliest history and the first migrations to the islands. While there are over 900 species of geckos worldwide, only eight species have settled on the islands, four of these in recent years.
The mourning gecko, the stump-toed gecko, and the Indo-Pacific gecko were gregarious and lived close to humans, in urban areas. The tree gecko lived a solitary existence in forests and meandering valleys near streams.
They are modest representatives of the great magical lizard, the powerful mo'o. They are guardians, not just against bugs.
The mo'o is an ancient mythological being which appears in legends throughout Polynesia. For the Polynesians, geckos were perfect mirror images of this dragon-like monster. It was believed that the great mo'o could simply use the body of the gecko for one of its many manifestations.
Naturally the gentle, little geckos were deeply respected. They were sacred. The vigilant geckos, with their ability to change colors and to drop wiggling tails when threatened, resembled the mo'o and filled a crucial role in Hawaiian religion.
The lizard or mo'o, shape-shifting and agile, was one of the oldest and most powerful of guardian spirits along with the shark, the owl and the hawk.
These guardian spirits were called aumakua in Hawaiian. Mortals did not harm or eat their living representatives, and their wisdom came through in visions and dreams.
The mo'o has been described as a lizard of monstrous size somewhere between 12 and 30 feet, with a glistening black body. It lives in fish ponds, quaffs the sacred and intoxicating awa root in great delight, and can be seen when the first flames of a fire light the altars where it dwells. When there is foam on the fishpond, you know the mo'o is home and any fish caught there will taste bitter.
So old is the mo'o as guardian spirit and protector, that it appears in the Hawaiian creation legends in the garden of the first man and the first woman.
The mo'o guards not only individuals and families, but also districts and places. (end of excerpts)
In my opinion, the Hawaii Gecko myth is very similar to the Chinese Dragon. In China, the Dragon is often seen as the symbol of divine protection and vigilance.
We choose the two Geckos because of their symbolism. In Real Estate and at a minimum, there are always two entities involved. Two could be an agent and a client, a husband and wife, or two partners or buyer and seller (the list can go on).
Before we adopted the logo designed for us by Bill Frampton (email: Bill@BillDesigns.com) we showed it to scores of folks. It always met with a smile. It always met with a welcome. When on our business cards, folks always kept looking at it and then put it in thier pocket. When ever one of our cards is on a pile of other cards ours seems to be the first one picked up.
Different versions of our logo are on our letter head, signs and our cards. Here is what my card looks like.
Kind Regards,
John Petrella, REALTOR®
ABR®, GRI, Principal Broker
Direct: 808.640.3953
Fax: 808.443.0500
Local Hawaii Real Estate
159 Keawe St., Suite 1
Hilo, HI 96720
Your Referrals are most Welcome!
REALTOR® is a federally registered collective membership mark which identifies a real estate professional who is Member of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® and subscribes to its strict Code of Ethics.
I like what that has to say and creating the logo from a local myth is kinda cool. Do you have this information on your website? I'm sure most of the locals know it, but for people relocating it might be fascination to learn.
Well, it has been about 16 months now since we have adopted our logo. It is everywhere! Signs, business cards, banners, and as a water mark in all of our correspondence.
Here is a sample.
Stop by, visit and talk story at our office on the Big Island of Hawaii!
John Petrella, REALTOR®
ABR®, GRI, Principal Broker
Direct: 808.640.3953
Local@LocalHawaiiRealEstate.com
Local Hawaii Real Estate
Honesty • Integrity • Commitment
159 Keawe St., Suite 1
Hilo, HI 96720
REALTOR® is a federally registered collective membership mark which identifies a real estate professional who is Member of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® and subscribes to its strict Code of Ethics.
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