Canva commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Canva Enterprise.¹ This abstract will focus on the real estate industry’s use of Canva and its value to their organizations.

Forrester interviewed two representatives of organizations with experience using Canva Enterprise:

• Director of marketing operations at a real estate organization with 2,000 non-agent employees and 82,000 agents globally.

• Head of marketing at a European real estate franchising company with 25 non-agent employees and 33,000 agents.

The real estate industry encompasses teams at small local agencies to large global franchises and, regardless of scale, these organizations share the common challenge of managing widely dispersed networks of agents and offices. The real estate industry’s highly distributed workforce introduces operational complexities for marketing, brand management, and content creation.

The interviewees said lean central teams support their organizations’ agents. Both companies operate at significant scale, but with relatively small core marketing or staff teams. In these environments, agents are expected to be self-sufficient marketers who are responsible for generating their own leads; maintaining brand compliance while promoting their individual professional brands; and producing high volumes of localized and visually engaging content for social media, listings, and events.

Before using Canva, the organizations relied on a mix of external design agencies, industry-specific legacy platforms, and complex design tools. This led to slow turnaround times for asset creation, high costs for outsourced design, inconsistent brand application, and limited ability for agents to customize or localize materials. Some agents at the organizations already used Canva independently.

Interviewees said Canva is flexible, scalable, and user-friendly, and that it helped agents and central teams at their real estate organizations tackle common challenges in the following ways:

• Brand consistency. Each interviewee said that maintaining a unified brand across thousands of independent agents in different regions is difficult and that agents need to personalize materials for their markets. However, they explained that before using Canva, this could lead to off-brand assets and compliance risks, and central teams lacked the tools or resources to enforce standards or efficiently distribute templates.
  
  Interestingly, each interviewee described leveraging Canva with a different focus. The director of marketing operations emphasized that an agent’s own professional brand is important: “While we have brand consistency at the corporate level, and we have compliance requirements using a certain logo in a certain region, we also empower our agents to create their own brands. So, we aren’t necessarily monitoring or doing anything if they are not on-brand; rather, we are encouraging them to create their own brands. Canva has really empowered them to do that.”
  
  The head of marketing at a European real estate franchising company spoke to the importance of brand consistency: “Agents across Europe have been either spending additional budget on using designers who would create materials for them. Or, if they worked with materials that their region provided, agents would end up using the assets in ways that didn’t follow brand guidance. So, before Canva, we weren’t able to keep a certain brand standard.”
  
  Both interviewees said Canva helped enable agents to exercise creativity and build their own professional brands while ensuring corporate brand standards are maintained across all regions. They said this balance supports agent autonomy without sacrificing the consistency and compliance needed for a strong, unified brand presence.

• Speed and efficiency through template ownership. Interviewees said that before using Canva, traditional workflows through agencies or legacy platforms were slow and expensive. Simple updates took days, and approval processes were bottlenecks while agents and staff often waited for creative support, delaying go-to-market timelines. The head of marketing said, “Before Canva, we would always need to go to our design agency to create assets.”
  
  The director of marketing operations said: “Our [previous industry-specific design tool] limited our staff marketing team from updating templates quickly for our agents. So, if there were any changes to statistics that needed to be immediately reflected in our content, the change took too long because we had to go through a third party to get those updates made to the templates. We didn’t have back-end access to the templates we provided the agents.”

• Localization and scale. Because real estate is inherently local, it requires content to be adapted for different regions, languages, and market conditions. However, interviewees said legacy tools made localization cumbersome and often required third-party translation services and manual adaptation. The director of marketing operations explained, “Pre-Canva, we would use a third-party service to translate the material, wait a few days, and get it validated by a local market resource.”

• Cost efficiency. Each interviewee said their organization faced high costs from agency spend, software licensing, and inefficiencies in asset production. Agents sometimes paid out-of-pocket for tools or design help, and central teams struggled to justify investments in new solutions. The head of marketing said: “We still use professional design tools [in the central team], but we have cut down on licenses. … [Before using Canva,] we also had a creative agency adapting our presentations.” The director of marketing operations explained, “Adopting Canva led to] cost savings for our agents, which is huge and really adds to the value prop of our company’s tool stack.”

Investment Drivers For Real Estate

The interviewees’ organizations adopted Canva to address legacy pain points in their content creation environments to support rapid content creation and help them improve consistency, speed, and cost-effectiveness in a highly competitive and decentralized industry. These organizations sought a solution that could:

• Empower agents. The organizations wanted to enable agents to quickly create, customize, and publish professional, on-brand marketing materials without needing advanced design skills or expensive software.

• Drive brand consistency. Interviewees said their organizations needed a solution that would provide centralized templates, brand kits, and easy-to-use tools to ensure compliance and provide a unified look and feel while still encouraging agent-level customization where appropriate.

• Increase speed to market. It was important for the organizations to streamline workflows and minimize approval bottlenecks to reduce the time from ideation to publication.

• Support growth and expansion. The organizations needed a solution that could make localization and template distribution seamless to facilitate entry into new markets and support global operations.

• Reduce costs and allow for reallocation of resources. Interviewees said their organizations aimed to lower agency and software spend, reduce reliance on external vendors, and free central teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than repetitive creative tasks.

• Leverage technology for differentiation. The organizations wanted modern and intuitive tools (e.g., AI-powered features and integrations) that could keep pace with agent expectations and industry innovation.

Canva Features

The interviewees’ organizations chose to invest in Canva for the following reasons:

• Sharable templates, brand kits, and centralized assets. Interviewees said Canva provided their organizations’ teams with the ability to publish, share, and centrally manage templates and brand assets that agents could quickly customize while maintaining brand compliance. This capability gave large, distributed agent networks access to on‑brand, ready‑to‑use materials that could be adapted locally without heavy design support.
  
  The director of marketing operations said: “There are so many real estate-specific templates available in Canva’s native library. … It’s made our job a lot easier because we don’t have to maintain the volume of templates. We can just tell agents, ‘Go search Canva’s library.’”

• Translation and localization features. Because brokerages operate across countries and regions, having localized and compliant materials is important for listings and community engagement. Interviewees noted Canva’s built‑in translation quickly converts designs into local languages

• Video and social content creation, including captions. Interviewees said Canva provided easy creation of video assets and social formats, which is important because agents use social media and short-form video for market listings to drive attention. The head of marketing said, “In Canva, agents create social media assets and video content that we use in [Instagram] Reels.” The director of marketing operations said: “We use any of Canva’s video editing capabilities. We use captions and all of the templates.”

• Background removal. Property and headshot images often needs fast cleanup for flyers, postcards, social posts, and signage, and interviewees said Canva allows users to isolate subjects with one click to produce clean brand assets. The head of marketing said, “Things like [Canva’s] Background Remover are brilliant for real estate.” And the director of marketing operations echoed, “Background Remover is our most-used functionality for agents.”

• AI text generation and automation. Interviewees said agents and lean staff teams need to quickly produce listing descriptions, event promos, and campaign variants, and they explained that Canva’s AI assistance with writing and bulk creation decreased the time needed for repetitive marketing tasks. The head of marketing said, “The text writing tool is amazing for real estate.” And the director of marketing operations said: “Canva Sheets and being able to [create designs in bulk] has been game-changing.”

• Multiformat projects in a single file. The interviewees explained that listing campaigns often require multiple outputs (e.g., Reels, stories, flyers, decks) that need consistent branding and quick iteration. They also said agents need to keep related assets (e.g., social posts, presentations) together within one project. The head of marketing noted: “With Canva, you can have several different document types in one file. One project can contain the social media template and also the presentation. Canva makes this really easy.”

• Canva’s app ecosystem. Interviewees said their organizations needed their teams to drive lead capture from print to digital, quickly stand up lightweight listing sites, and automate listing details across marketing materials. They explained that teams used Canva’s built‑in apps to generate QR codes, publish simple websites, and pull Multiple Listing Service (MLS) data into templates.
  
  The director of marketing operations remarked: “We’re seeing agents leverage all of the different apps available within Canva, like the ability to create QR codes and publish websites. This was not as easily accessible before Canva. … We created our own unique app for MLS listings that allows integration to Canva so that our agents can go and grab the details from their listings and pull it directly into the templates. That has been a huge thing, and Canva is working on it to bring it into the native platform for real estate.”

• Collaboration and commenting. The interviewees explained that Canva’s in-line commenting and shared editing reduced back and forth via email, which  enabled lean creative teams to have faster review cycles for time‑sensitive materials (e.g., open house flyers, listing updates). The head of marketing said, “Reviews are quicker because we’re just adding the comments and the feedback directly in Canva versus sending an email.” The director of marketing operations noted: “With the Canva commenting functionality, reviewers are able to see so clearly. It has for sure saved time, and [things are] so much better than the olden days.”

• Single sign-on (SSO) and rapid onboarding at scale. Because brokerages frequently add agents and open new geographies, IT teams need simple, protected access control, and interviewees said Canva provided secure, fast provisioning for thousands of users across global regions. The director of marketing operations said: “When we expand into a new country, the setup of getting employees going in Canva is a matter of minutes for secure SSO verifications. Before Canva, it was a whole IT project to get agents access to the correct templates.”

Key Results For Real Estate

The results of the investment for the interviewees’ organizations include:

• Faster asset creation and speed to market. The director of marketing operations said the industry average for agents to create a design from start to finish is 25 minutes, but that using Canva reduced that time to 8 minutes: “So we’re beating the industry average.” The head of marketing also noted improvements and said tasks that previously required at least two days with a design agency now take their company as little as 2 hours. They said, “If we need an asset on the spot, we just create it ourselves.”

• Reduced creative requests for the core team. The self-service capabilities of Canva led to a marked reduction in creative bottlenecks and requests for support for the core design team. The director of marketing operations reported their organization’s number of creative requests dropped by 54% year over year from approximately 1,200 to 600 annually. They said, “By putting that in the hands of the agents to just do it themselves, it’s saved days.”

• Creative empowerment for agents. By enabling agents and staff to create their own assets, Canva freed the organizations’ central creative teams and decreased turnaround times for marketing materials. Interviewees said the platform also empowered agents to take ownership of their marketing, which enabled rapid customization and publication of professional materials.

• Brand consistency and personalization. The head of marketing said Canva helped their organization with two specific goals: “On one hand, we want to make templates easily editable for agents. On the other hand, we also want to support a unified and consistent brand look and feel across Europe.” The director of marketing operations also spoke about how Canva helped with branding: “Canva is the tool that enables agents to have a personal brand and to scale it. Without Canva, who are the agents? They’re going off, they’re being inconsistent, they’re not upholding the corporate compliance rules, and they’re not upholding our brand standard that we work so hard to create every day. Now, Canva is the engine that empowers their business.”

• Improved localization and translation. Interviewees said Canva’s translation and template-sharing features are critical enablers for expanding into new markets and deepening relationships with prospects in existing markets while the solution made localization and translation more efficient and cost-effective. The head of marketing noted €50,000 annual savings on translation costs as a direct result of using Canva’s built-in translation features. The director of marketing operations also mentioned this: “With the Canva translation functionality, we can literally just tell the Canva platform what language we need for the asset, and Canva converts it for us within minutes.”

• Cost reductions for design agencies, software, and assets. The head of marketing said their team reduced the number of licenses for complex professional design suites and cut agency spend for presentations by 25% in the first year: “We still use the [prior tools], but we have cut down on licenses because we just don’t need them anymore.” This organization also saved approximately €50,000 on translation costs in a single year.
  
  The director of marketing operations noted that their organization used Canva’s library to reduce its spend on assets (e.g., stock imagery). They said: “Canva has helped to cut down on the number of assets purchased because of the robust asset library, resulting in savings of 60% or around $500 monthly — or from over $800 each month to $333.”