Celebration

The challenge

Disney began developing Celebration, a master-planned community at Walt Disney World, after extensive research. Executives wanted to leave “no stone unturned” in considering every aspect of protecting the brand and the integrity of the community.

What made this one different was the stakes. For most developers, a community that underperforms is a financial loss inside that project. For Disney, a community that didn’t live up to the name would touch an asset built over decades and used everywhere else in the business.

That changes what the job is. It was less about absorption and more about making sure hundreds of independent parties — builders, their trades, developers, brokers, lenders, and every one of their staff — would work to a standard they didn’t own, over years, without Disney standing over each transaction.

Good intentions and a design guideline won’t carry that. It has to be written down, specific, and enforceable.

What we did

The executives contacted our team to create a policy and procedure manual for builders and developers along with their respective staff members.

We created an extensive document covering the strategy and tactics for every part of the community — residential, retail, commercial, recreational, and institutional neighborhoods and campuses.

Here’s the part that made it work: we didn’t write it on our own. We assembled a team of developers, builders, real estate brokers, and lenders to give us ongoing recommendations and critique.

A standards document written only by the people imposing it runs into the same trouble every time. It forbids things without explaining why, it’s silent on the situations that actually come up on site, and everyone bound by it treats it as something to work around. Bring those people into the drafting and you get a document that anticipates real situations, that people understand the reasons behind, and that they feel some ownership of. That’s the difference between a manual that gets followed and one that gets filed.

The result

A development treatise was prepared, complete with every strategy and tactic to enhance the residential, retail, commercial, recreational, and institutional neighborhoods and campuses of Celebration.

Today, Celebration is considered one of the finest master-planned communities in the world.

What you can use

Most builders will never work on a project with Disney’s exposure. The useful part here isn’t about scale:

• When quality depends on a lot of independent parties, write the standards down. Make them specific and make them enforceable.
• Bring the people who’ll be bound by a standard into writing it. Understanding comes first, compliance follows.
• A community’s long-term value gets set by the weakest work you permit, so the rules matter most at the bottom of the range.
• Governance is a marketing asset. What protects the community in year ten is what buyers pay a premium for in year one.

The same thinking runs through our management services, where policy and procedure work is a standing part of what we do.

Protecting a brand across a development? Call +1 303.500.3400 or send us a message.