Customer stories
Independent luxury
brokerage · Arizona
How luxury brokerage North & Co. scaled its brand across every agent with Xara, before joining Compass
North & Co. built its name on a luxury brand its agents could stand behind. As the brokerage grew past 260 agents, it used Xara to put that brand in every agent’s hands, inside the portal they already worked in, without loosening its grip on the identity.
The setup
A luxury brand, built to grow with the roster
For North & Co., branding was never simply about placing a logo on a template. Founded in Phoenix in 2015 by Brian North, the independent brokerage grew into one of Arizona’s fastest-growing luxury names, with agents across four Greater Phoenix offices in Arcadia, North Central Phoenix, Scottsdale and Chandler.
In the luxury market, the quality and consistency of marketing is part of how a brokerage wins listings, recruits agents and sets itself apart. The brochures, social media posts, newsletters, postcards and seasonal campaigns all needed to feel unmistakably North & Co., polished enough for luxury properties while staying practical for agents working across different teams, markets and listing types.
As the brokerage grew beyond 260 agents, holding that standard across the organization got harder. Every new agent was another person who needed brokerage-grade marketing, and another chance for the brand to drift.
What wasn't working
The old setup couldn't hold the brand together
Brand Director Andrea Larson led the evaluation. Her job ran from buying the brokerage’s marketing tools and integrating them into North & Co.’s systems to protecting the brand and helping agents market their listings, so the gaps in the current setup were hers to close. North & Co. was already a Breakthrough Broker customer, and it wasn’t keeping up as the brokerage grew.
Before · using breakthrough broker
Where it fell short
- Limited customization and too little template variety for agents
- An existing portal that wasn’t working well for the brokerage
- No clean way to divide content across internal teams
- Too many undirected choices, leaving agents in analysis paralysis
- Not enough control over branding and how content was organized
- Agents left to deal with the print provider directly
- Little visibility into which templates agents used, or who wasn’t engaging
Andrea evaluated Xara head to head against Breakthrough Broker, and chose it to build a new North & Co. Marketing Center.
The build
Giving agents flexibility without losing brand control
The brand team controls
The identity, set once
The marketing team holds the core of the brand, so nothing goes out under the North & Co. name off-standard.
- Layouts and typography
- Colors and brand elements
- Compliance elements
- Approved templates and libraries
Agents personalize
The details, per listing
Inside those guardrails, agents make each piece their own without touching the brand.
- Headshots and contact information
- Property photography and listing details
- Team members and permitted text
- MLS smart fields fill property data automatically
Where agents found it
Delivered inside their own Command Center
Rather than sending agents into a generic design platform, Xara was connected directly to North & Co.’s Command Center, replacing the portal that had not been working. Agents did not have to create or remember another login. They reached their marketing through the portal they already used every day.
Materials could be organized for individual teams and different marketing needs, so agents found the right content instead of navigating an uncontrolled library of designs.
Complete campaigns
From Just Listed to Just Sold
As the partnership developed, North & Co. became an early user and contributor to Xara Playbooks, which turned each stage of a listing into a coordinated marketing kit rather than a single post. Each kit held several pieces across social media, email and print, personalized to the agent and on the North & Co. brand.
1 agents
downloaded Playbook materials for their listings, roughly two-thirds of the roster
1 stages
of the sale each turned into its own branded, personalized kit
The rollout
A committed rollout, not just a software purchase
- 01
Prepared and rebuilt
The team rebuilt familiar content inside the new environment so agents recognized it from day one.
- 02
Trained the roster
North & Co. and Xara ran live training calls, demonstrations and Q&A sessions, with brokerage-specific onboarding.
- 03
Shaped the product
Feedback from Andrea and her team led directly to product and workflow improvements during the rollout.
Extending the brand across a growing brokerage
By pairing central brand control with agent-level personalization, North & Co. extended its marketing operation across a roster of more than 260 agents. The result was not simply a larger template library. It was a connected system that held brand consistency across the whole brokerage, brought more agents into listing marketing, and coordinated campaigns across digital and print, all through the brokerage’s own portal. Print pieces ran inside the same branded workflow instead of agents wrangling the print provider on their own, and the brand team finally had a clear view of which agents were engaging.
For a luxury brand recruiting in a competitive market, that reached beyond marketing. Giving every agent brokerage-grade materials, on brand and ready to use, is part of what North & Co. put in front of agents to win them and keep them. Xara became part of the infrastructure the brokerage used to turn a distinctive luxury brand into practical marketing agents actually used.
The next stage
From independent luxury name to Arizona's largest
2015
Founded in Phoenix
Brian North starts North & Co. as an independent luxury brokerage.
Growth
260+ agents, four offices
One brand standard held across Greater Phoenix.
With Xara
The Marketing Center
The brand runs across the roster inside North & Co.'s own Command Center.
Sept 2024
Joined Compass
Arizona's largest luxury brokerage, with more than 450 producing agents.
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Scale your brokerage marketing without diluting your brand.
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