Veterans United Realty
Welcoming a nationwide network into a room that feels like home.
Industry
Financial Services / Real Estate
What We Did
Event Branding, Environmental Design, Experiential Graphics, Signage & Wayfinding, Apparel Design, Brand Activation
Veterans United Realty connects military homebuyers with a nationwide network of more than 6,700 real estate agents, each screened for their experience serving Veterans and their families. It's a business built on a promise made one buyer at a time, in thousands of different cities, by agents who don’t often get the chance to meet each other.
Once a year, that changes. Homebase brings the network together in person — realtors flying in from across the country to connect with each other and the Veterans United team behind the loans. For 2026, Veterans United asked Hoot Design Company to take on the event's second year, working from a set of visuals the first year had introduced into the world.
The Challenge
Homebase wasn't a single-venue event, it moved across Veterans United's headquarters office, a conference center, a sports bar and nightclub, and a brewery. These four spaces had four different personalities, and each needed its own approach. Our challenge was to make sure the venues, experienced one after the other, read as one event from one brand.
Most of what we had to work with wasn't a blank page, it was a first attempt. Veterans United had already found the beginnings of something worth building on, and the challenge was figuring out which parts of it deserved to come back, which needed a second pass, and how to make the whole thing read as one brand with enough consistency that agents could start to recognize Homebase as a thing, year over year.
Our Approach
We started by auditing what already existed — separating the ideas doing real work, like anchoring the event to Veterans United's own values, from the applications that were inconsistent versions of a good instinct.
From there, it was less about inventing and more about placement: extending the strongest ideas, like the hand-lettered values murals, into spaces where they hadn't shown up the first time. The same line could anchor a brewery window as a celebration and a loan officer's tee shirt as something closer to a mission statement — same brand, different volume depending on the room. The goal wasn't a reinvention. It was a version of Homebase that finally looked as intentional as the thinking behind it.
The Work
The general applications kit — pop-up table tents, banners, and booth backdrops — got rebuilt as a system that could travel across all four venues, alongside refreshed tee shirts for the Veterans United Realty team.
At Veterans United's headquarters, wayfinding did most of the talking: window lettering across the atrium, "Tour Starts Here" signage, and flags and banners marking the path for agents moving through a working office building for the first time. It's also where the values already lived on the walls, giving the rest of the event something real to build from.
The conference center got the fullest rework: an entrance banner and barricade signage to manage the flow of guests, a "Pre-approved to Party" bar area, cocktail tables and a dance floor, and a patio wrapped in perimeter graphics and a wall built in two lighting versions — evening and night — so the space held together visually from cocktail hour into the late set.
At MyHouse, the same system split into staff, production, and loan officer versions, so agents could tell at a glance who was who across a weekend built around new introductions.
At Logboat Brewing Company, we took those same values and pushed them furthest. Window and door murals now spell out Be Passionate and Have Fun, Deliver Results with Integrity, and Enhance Lives Every Day alongside #TogetherWeEnhanceLives, turning the brewery's own windows into the clearest statement of the weekend: this is who we are, not just what we sell.
The Impact
Homebase's second year gave a nationwide network four days of feeling like one team in one place — through a brand that read as a single, deliberate idea from headquarters to the brewery patio. Agents who spend the year representing Veterans United in their own markets got to see the company's values made physical, sharpened and carried through.
Does your brand need to show up as one voice across a dozen different rooms? Let's talk.