Richard Roxburgh, Rick Barry, Ray White Launch Hollywood-Style Real Estate Spoof

Ray White has tapped Richard Roxburgh, Nash Edgerton, and Rick Barry to launch the first consumer-facing campaign under new brand platform, ‘We Bring the Whole Team’. 

The real estate giant and indie creative agency created ‘No.33: The Movie’, a Hollywood-style spoof of a property walkthrough featuring a real Sutherland Shire house available to buy; Tiffany Perez, the actual Ray White real estate agent tasked with selling the home; and a cameo from Richard Roxburgh.

Part send-up, part homage to polished video listings agents have created for years, the film was shot by Nash Edgerton. The first challenge was finding the right agency and the right house. With tens of thousands of properties on the market at any given point, the team had a checklist to narrow down the search: a house people “are aspiring to buy”, with enough space to shoot in.

Rick Barry founder Alex Derwin told LBB, “I’ve got to give a lot of credit to Collider and Nash, the director. 

“There were certain production realities here that were very different from any other production. We needed to find the agent first – they needed to be really camera ready but also really up for it. Then we needed to find a property that ticked a lot of boxes. Then we started really nailing down the script, because the choreography is all about what’s going on in the rooms. It was almost like reverse-engineering a script.

“What works really well on set is when you’ve got a client who is prepared to accept those good surprises and move on rather than go, ‘That’s not what it said on the board, that’s not what we agreed to in pre-production’. It was a really good production process – everyone was very generous to each other and just knew what they were in for.”

Head of marketing Todd Alexander was happy the final product was funnier than he’d imagined, pre-production.

“Our agents are almost turning into Hollywood directors with some of the property videos that they create,” he said.

“We wanted to pay a little bit of respect to the amazing work people do in this space, but also create something which is super fun, a little bit mischievous, with a little bit of humour. There’s actually more humour in the final cut than what I envisioned when we first put the storyboard in – that was such a pleasant surprise.”

With the property and agency secured, the team then turned to locking in Richard Roxburgh. 

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“We found out Richard Roxburgh has the leading fan base out of all companies at Ray White – every man and his dog absolutely loves Richard,” laughed Todd. “We were so fortunate that he was available. Very humble fellow, super talented and very passionate about his craft.”

The ‘We Bring the Whole Team’ platform was first launched internally, rolled out across owned channels before deciding to create an earned media campaign.

The process “hasn’t always been smooth sailing,” Todd acknowledged, adding, “we’ve started and stopped a few times. 

“We landed on the brand platform first, and then asked, ‘How are we going to do this thing without a hefty media budget?’ Then we pivoted again to create something that was going to be an earned media-first strategy. I’ve enjoyed the process so much. It was a daunting process for me to start with, but [Rick Barry] just made it so, so good.”

Without a large media budget, Rick Barry founder Hugh Munro said the team turned to the people who represent Ray White on the ground. “Each local agent is their own mini media network,” he said.

“They have little black books, they have followings on socials, they have big email databases in their local area. If you add all those together, then we can reach most of our audience through that channel. But in order to get them to share the message, it wouldn’t just be enough to create an ad and put it out there – we needed to do something a little bit bonkers, a bit unexpected, that would capture their imagination.”

Alex added, “There’s so much emotion involved in real estate that it felt like a missed opportunity not to be tapping into some of that emotional resonance. You do see a lot of sentiment around the competitors in the market – it felt like we could be differentiated by adding some humour, adding some scale, and not just falling into the traps of what the competition did.”

The work is also an introduction to a new piece of Ray White technology: NurtureCloud. The platform gives vendors transparency on the sale of their home, sharing live updates and tracking interest.

“Ray White has long been the biggest network in real estate, but real estate is a local game,” Hugh explained.

“The scale has been there, but it hasn’t been an actual advantage or benefit to Ray White customers or agents, until now. NurtureCloud takes all the inputs that agents are gathering from all around the country and feeds them into one platform so that every local agent can tap into the data and insights. It turns scale from a mere fact into an advantage. For us, that was the catalyst behind the new brand platform.”

It isn’t the first time Rick Barry has worked differently. For Pirtek, the agency skipped the three-way production pitch in favour of backing a director early, involving her in the creative process, and presenting a shared vision to the client. Alex said Rick Barry’s latest for Ray White demonstrated the model’s flexibility.

“Our model, and the indie model in general, is to keep ourselves relatively small and bring in experts,” said Alex. 

“Earned media is something that a lot of traditional agencies don’t really know how to do, so the fact that we were small and the fact that Todd trusted us to bring in experts has meant that we brought in some really big-hitting earned media players. I think it’s an example of the way that things are going.”

‘No.33: The Movie’ will live on realestate.com.au, Domain, and across Ray White’s owned and agent-led channels.