The inside story of our rebranding journey

If you’re a regular user of Property Hive you might notice we look a little different. What do you think?

We’ve been doing a lot of work on the Property Hive brand recently and wanted to share how that happened, what we learnt and why we made the decisions we did.

Why we decided to rebrand Property Hive

In September 2025, almost 12 months to the day, it dawned upon us that we were lost.

We were adding a new page to the website when we realised we didn’t have a clear direction for how it should look, feel and sound. As Property Hive had grown, so had the website, and we’d ended up making decisions page by page rather than from a solid set of foundations.

And it wasn’t just the website. We’d reached the same point with social media, newsletters and everything else. We needed a much clearer sense of how Property Hive should look, feel and sound wherever it showed up.

It was Laura who claimed we were missing the foundations and, looking back now, boy was she right. We knew who we were and what we stood for, but we didn’t have a clear way of translating that into how Property Hive looked, sounded and communicated.

Finding the idea at the heart of Property Hive

Before designing anything we needed to strip it right back and do some self-reflection. We had a workshop with Keith at Lark Design who carried out the branding and focused on what sits at the core of Property Hive, our values, current challenges, and our audience.

This was a really valuable step and not one in 10+ years we’d ever taken. It’s easy when building software to just build features and do the “cool stuff” but these workshops made us forget about the product, forget about the day to day, and take a step right back.

The values we identified and wanted the new branding to reflect were:

Let’s look at these in a bit more detail:

Passionate – We genuinely care about Property Hive, the people who use it and making it better. More than 10 years in, we’re still excited about what we’re building and where we can take it.

Authentic – What you see is what you get with Property Hive. We’re a small team, we’re open about how we work and we try to make decisions for the right reasons.

Personable – We’re not a huge corporation and we don’t want to behave like one. We get to know our customers and, when you get in touch, you’ll speak to the same small team of people.

Innovative – We’re always looking at how technology can make Property Hive more useful, whether that’s improving what already exists or exploring completely new ideas. We don’t build things for the sake of it though. They have to solve a real problem.

Enabling – Property Hive gives estate agents and web developers the foundations to build a property website without dictating what that website has to be. You can customise it, choose the tools you work with and keep control of your website and data.

A new logo for the next chapter

Take a look at our new logo. What do you see?

For us it represents a number of things:

A heart – Going back to that first value above, passion. It represents a love for what we do.

Boxes – A nod to the open-source nature of Property Hive and its modularity.

A block of buildings – Being property related it makes sense to have a nod to properties in the logo too.

Oh, and of course, not forgetting the hexagons. What would a hive-related company be without some kind of hexagon in their logo?

Owning yellow

If you run a company with ‘hive’ in the name you also kind of have to go for black and yellow. We tried different colours but it just didn’t feel right. We didn’t want to look like every other software company and go for blue, so back to yellow it was.

The trouble with yellow? It’s a damn hard colour to work with. You don’t want it too bright that it shouts ‘danger’, but not too dark that it starts to look murky. The yellow we’ve opted for is warm and inviting.

Making the language simpler

When you know your product inside out, it’s easy to assume people’s prior knowledge and their technical expertise.

We teamed up with Sophie at Yarn to handle our copywriting who, again, pushed us outside of our comfort zones in a number of workshops and forced us to explain, in layman’s terms, what Property Hive is about and what the product does.

We explained to Sophie that one challenge we’ve always experienced is that we essentially have two audiences: estate agents and web developers, of all differing technical expertise. We needed to find a way to speak to them both.

With this information she helped us to identify, articulate and develop our brand voice. One that would work across the entire site without overcomplicating matters or getting too technical. Just clear, digestible language.

For the agents and developers, we created two specific pages which speak directly to them using their language.

Becoming more personal

Going back to our third value, personable, this was one of the most important things we wanted to get across in the new branding.

To achieve this we invested in great photography. We had a number of photoshoots with Claire at In Her Wildest Dreams to really capture who we are as a team, our customers, and the local area.

These images are used throughout the site, helping put real faces to Property Hive and giving you a better sense of the people you’ll be working with.

We firmly believe that people want people. Especially in an age of faceless companies and AI-generated content, showing the real people behind Property Hive felt more important than ever.

Videos

We also knew we wanted to use more video. Property Hive can be difficult to explain in words alone, and sometimes it’s much easier to show what it does.

Credit to Conor Kershaw for the motion design in the videos on the homepage and import properties page, and the developer video shot with Sam Sayer at DeType.

Conclusion

Now that the foundations are in place, it feels like our brand has finally caught up with Property Hive. We know how we want to show up, our messaging is clearer, and everything feels much more like us.

So that’s how we got here. What do you think? We’d genuinely love to hear what you make of it, so get in touch.

Steve, Laura and the Property Hive team