Real estate is about brands. Brands are so important that the for sale sign has been replaced by a sign with a logo on it. In addition to the logo for branding we may find a web address and if we are really lucky a bigger than life size photograph of the listing agents head, a QR code and a tagline. There is still room on the sign for the fair housing logo and some fine print about “each office being independently owned and operated” but many of the big brands and some of the little brands have removed the words “for sale” because they did not want to go with a bigger sign and something had to go. The sign is still called a for sale sign but it should be called a for advertising our brand sign.
We can use sign riders and there is one that says for sale and if we use enough riders it looks really cool because the riders will touch the ground unless they tip the sign over first. All of those riders look so tacky, but tacky is what real estate branding is about. We never use a subtle approach and even though the color red means danger/warning we use a lot of it in our marketing and signage.
I am no expert on selling real estate. I just sell it which shows how clueless I am. It is easier and more lucrative to be a real estate expert than it is to actually sell the stuff post housing crash. I digress . . it 
seems to me that the reason for the for sale sign was to let people know that a home is for sale and from a marketing point of view it may be in the best interests of sellers to market the home instead of the real estate brokerage brand. It also seems to me that the reason buyers call me and ask if a home is for sale is because they really want to know. I have never had a buyer ask which brand has a home listed when I offer to show them a home that is on the market.
It is silly to think of any of this from the buyers or sellers point of view and even sillier to look at it from an agents point of view especially an agent who is so clueless as to actually work at selling real estate. The reason the signs are about the brand is because the people hired to do the branding wouldn’t have it any other way and without real estate brands we would not have have . . . ? For sale signs that say for sale? We can’t have than now can we.