Dean Otto and Noah Kirshbaum understood luxury real estate and saw what was not working in the vacation home market. High-net-worth buyers were being priced out of the places they wanted to own, while owners of high-end properties spent valuable time and money on upkeep with few ways to offset it. They had been testing a co-ownership model, and they came to DesignGood without a brand or a platform to share it with a wider audience.
A model like this is easy to misread. Without clear language, co-ownership can sound like a timeshare, and buyers weighing a significant purchase needed to understand the structure, the people involved, and the exit strategy before they felt comfortable taking the next step.
We began with discovery to clarify Cohana's market advantage and value proposition in contrast to other vacation co-ownership solutions and timeshares. From there we built the brand language, with Vacation Home Co-Ownership as the clarifier and Innovating in real estate investment as the statement, and named the company Cohana, which pairs co-ownership with the Hawaiian concept of ohana, or extended family. The door and keyhole logo points to residential real estate and the ease of the solution. We then built the website to walk buyers through the four-part process, communicate how co-ownership works for sellers, and answer common questions in an FAQs page, along with buyer and seller sales tools and email marketing.
Today Cohana has a name, a visual identity, and a website that explain the model in plain steps. Buyers and sellers can see how co-ownership works and who is behind it, and the team has detailed documents it can share with qualified buyers and sellers.
