Glocalization – Think globally, act locally
Founded in 1995, REA Group is a public company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange that operates realestate.com.au, the country’s largest real estate platform (4.4 million visitors/month). At the same time, REA is a global player that has grown and expanded its portfolio of companies over the sixteen years.
In 2007, they acquired a majority stake in casa.it, this was followed in 2011 by the acquisition of atHome (Luxembourg, France, Belgium, Germany) and then in 2014 they joined forces with real estate broker Move, Inc. (realtor.com, USA). More recently, in 2021 they acquired a stake in the mortgage and lending platform Simpology.
Australia’s largest real estate platform, realeastate.com.au, advertising at the Sydney Cricket Ground (Australian Rules Football: Sydney Swans vs Geelong Cats)
Following the sale of its European holdings, REA Group is now active in Australia, Asia and the USA. With a Head Office in Melbourne, they also have offices in Hong Kong, India, Vietnam, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. 2022 was extremely successful for REA and its subsidiaries; with a turnover of €719 million and a profit of €251 million, REA rose to become Australia’s seventh largest digital brand, reaching 62 percent of the adult population.
But it’s not just the business figures that showcase the real estate platform's forward-looking, global strategy: it has also treated itself to a new visual identity with a multilingual, forward-thinking font. Pangea and Pangea Text are now the new corporate fonts and used globally across REA’s branding. The Pangea family currently supports over 500 languages with its character sets European-Latin, African-Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic.
Train station: Sydney Central Railway Station
Pangea is an example of extensive global cooperation. For the design of the upright Latin glyphs, the designer Christoph Koeberlin worked closely with Hungarian Gergő Kókai, while Tanya George (India) and Japan-based Gabriel Richter contributed to the italics. To ensure the quality of the Greek, Cyrillic, Vietnamese and African-Latin characters, Koeberlin brought in Irene Vlachou from Greece, Ilya Ruderman from Russia, Donny Truong from the USA and Paul Hanslow from Australia. The spacing and excellent kerning of the typeface would not have been possible without Igino Marini from Italy and his innovative iKern technology.
Since its release in July 2020, Pangea supports all languages based on the European Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Vietnamese character sets. The first language extension, Pangea Afrikan, was released in December 2021 and supports all Latin-based African languages, as well as some indigenous languages of North America. A year later, Arabic and Hebrew extensions followed, designed by Azza Alameddine from Lebanon and Yanek Iontef and Daniel Grumer from Israel.
© All images: REA Group
By the way: all previous customers of Pangea can download the extended fonts free of charge straight from their Fontwerk account. This also applies to all future language extensions that are already in the works. Just as Pangea grows, the REA Group is too. “REA’s growth is driven by a clear strategy that balances the expansion of our core business and the defense of our strong position with expansion into new, adjacent and diversified markets,” is how CEO Hamish McLennan describes their plans for the coming years in REA’s Annual Report 2022.