The 2025 Exhibit Awards winners: Celebrating innovation at The Gathering

As housing companies continue to adapt to changing consumer expectations, recruiting pressures and market competition, the Exhibit Awards spotlight how branding is evolving beyond traditional marketing. For many firms, brand strategy is increasingly tied to talent acquisition, customer trust and long-term growth.

This year’s winners reflected how the industry is moving beyond logos and visual identity alone, focusing instead on creating consistent brand experiences across recruiting, community engagement and customer interactions. 

As MAXA Designs founder James Wong said, “This year’s submissions were incredibly outstanding. I could tell the marketing team has really prepared incredible presentations. The full brand, the full world of their brand, which is amazing, because that’s what a brand is. A brand is a world that you can step into, and the best submissions showcase that, a world to step into and experience, whether it’s for print, social, email or in person in the community.

That’s the differentiator: there’s having a name and logo… and then there’s having a brand, which is a world of an experience that you can step into and you recognize. The Winner submissions were so palpable this year, incredible to showcase how much effort and how well executed these teams do to produce the world of their brand.”