Hoarding Signage for Property Developments: What to Put On It and When to Brief It

Hoarding signage on a property development should show passers-by what's being built and give them one easy way to register. That means one strong exterior render, the project name, a short line on what's for sale and a clear call to action. Brief it with your first renders and branding, so the artwork is ready when the fence goes up.

Most of the pages that rank for hoarding signage are written by printers and fencing suppliers. They cover panel sizes, materials and installation, which matters. They rarely cover the part a developer controls: what the hoarding says, what it shows and how it ties into the rest of the campaign.

That's what this post is about.

What hoarding signage does on a development site

A hoarding is the temporary wall around a construction site. On a residential project it's often the first piece of marketing anyone sees, and it stays up for most of the build.

That makes it the longest-running piece of advertising in the campaign. It sits exactly where many of your future buyers already walk and drive, and people who would never open a brochure pass it every day.

It also has two jobs at once. It has to meet the site's safety and permit conditions, and it has to sell.

The permit side, briefly

In the City of Melbourne, a hoarding on a footpath, road or other council land needs a council permit, and at least 1.5 metres of footpath has to stay clear for pedestrians, according to the Australian Government's ABLIS listing for that permit. Other councils run their own process.

Some councils also have a say in the artwork. The City of Sydney, for example, requires original artwork on some hoardings, kept separate from promotional content. Check your council's position early, because it decides how much of the run is left for marketing.

What to put on development hoarding signage

People give a hoarding a few seconds, often from a car or the other side of the road. Everything on it has to read at that distance. The more you try to fit on, the less of it anyone takes in.

One hero image

Use your strongest exterior render, large. One image across several panels will do more for you than a grid of small ones.

The render also has to survive being printed metres wide. An image made for a website banner may not hold up at that size, so tell your architectural visualisation studio the print dimensions before the image is rendered. Changing resolution and framing afterwards costs time you may not have.

The project name and one line

Give the project name and a short line on what it is, such as two and three bedroom apartments or a small group of townhouses. Leave floor plans, finishes and pricing for the brochure and the website.

One call to action

Ask people to register their interest, with a short web address or a QR code that goes straight to a registration page. Make the code big enough to scan from the footpath.

If the hoarding sends people to a general homepage, many of them will give up there. The landing page should look like the hoarding, so people know straight away they're in the right place.

The project team

Developer, architect, builder and selling agent logos usually sit together. Keep them in one consistent band so they don't compete with the image.

Hoarding signage is part of the campaign

The hoarding, the brochure, the website and the display suite should look like they came from the same place. Someone who sees the hoarding and then visits the website should recognise the project immediately.

That happens when the hoarding is laid out from the same brand system, renders and copy as everything else. When it's handled separately by a sign supplier working from a logo file, it often ends up with its own crop of the render and its own take on the type. Small differences like that make a project look less considered than it is.

We wrote about when each part of a campaign needs to start in our post on the off-the-plan campaign timeline. The hoarding is one of the earliest items on that list.

Plan the image set for every format

For Claremont, a proposed 16-residence building on Claremont Street, we delivered 15 stills in landscape and portrait formats. The set covered design review, client presentations and the developer's brochure and website.

The same planning applies to a hoarding. If we know the length and height of the run at the brief, we can frame the exterior hero so it works as a long, wide print as well as a brochure cover and a web banner.

Large-format work comes from the same system

Large-format graphics are easier to get right when they come out of the identity itself. For four three, an independent cinema platform, our work ran from naming and the logo through to posters, mural schedules and billboards, all built on the same 4:3 frame. A development hoarding benefits from the same approach.

When to brief hoarding signage

Hoardings often go up when the site is established, which can be well before a display suite opens. If the artwork isn't ready by then, the site sits behind a blank fence or a builder's generic banner while neighbours are first noticing the project.

So work back from the date the fence goes up. Before layout can start, you need the project name and brand settled, a hero exterior render approved, the registration page live and the council's position on artwork confirmed.

After that, allow time for layout, sign-off and printing. In practice, the simplest approach is to brief the hoarding at the same time as your first renders and branding.

What to send your studio

Start with a site plan or elevation showing the hoarding run and the panel sizes. Add any permit conditions, the builder's required safety signage and any council artwork rules.

Then send your brand assets, the project name and the approved renders, or the views you'd like rendered. Finish with the registration link and the print supplier's file specifications, including bleed, resolution and file format.

Updating the hoarding during the build

Builds run for many months and the message usually changes along the way. Early on it's about registering interest. Later it might be a display suite opening, a new release or an update on construction.

Design the layout so the call-to-action panel can be swapped without reprinting the whole run. That keeps the hoarding current while the hero artwork stays in place.

If your site is about to be fenced, or you have renders that need to work at hoarding scale, send us the project details and we'll tell you what we need to have the artwork ready in time.