Publish the proof
Every brokerage in Durango can publish a listing guide. And you’ve been telling people you know this valley since 1985. Let's publish the proof — four times a year, in print, with your name on the cover.
16
issues published
Eight
years, unbroken, since winter 2018
One
brokerage, still publishing
60 min
from our desk to your front door
—
Contents
Our Approach
01 The premise
02 What changes
03 What it does for the business
04 The math
05 What’s inside
06 Proof
0 7 Where it goes
08 How it works
09 Investment
10 The questions you’re already asking
11 Who we are
12 Let’s put a first issue on the table
01
The premise
A listings guide is inventory. A magazine is authority.
Every home in your guide is already on Zillow.
What isn't on Zillow: which trailhead is worth it in mud season, why the Bayfield boom is happening now, what forty-one years of watching this valley taught your brokers about where the next neighborhood goes.
That knowledge is the reason people hire The Wells Group. It's also the one thing you've never put in print.
02
What changes
From a catalog of houses to a record of a place
Same brokerage. Same market knowledge. A completely different object.
THE GUIDE TODAY
One issue a year, timed to the season
A catalog of properties
Property photography
A roster of names
Read once, recycled
Says we have houses
THE QUARTERLY
Four issues — you're in the home in every season
An editorial magazine: culture, business, philanthropy, environment, healthy living, and real estate
Commissioned photography, including full-page and spread portraits of your brokers doing what they actually do here
Fresh headshots and 75–100 word bios that read like people, not license numbers
Sits on a coffee table for a season
Says we are Durango
| THE GUIDE TODAY | THE QUARTERLY |
|---|---|
| One issue a year, timed to the season | Four issues — you're in the home in every season |
| A catalog of properties | An editorial magazine: culture, business, philanthropy, environment, healthy living, and real estate |
| Property photography | Commissioned photography, including full-page and spread portraits of your brokers doing what they actually do here |
| A roster of names | Fresh headshots and 75–100 word bios that read like people, not license numbers |
| Read once, recycled | Sits on a coffee table for a season |
| Says we have houses | Says we are Durango |
03
The return
Four things a magazine does that a guide can't
It wins the listing appointment
Two brokers sit across the kitchen table from the same seller. One says the home will go on the MLS. The other opens a magazine, turns to a six-page property feature shot by a working photographer, and says: this is what we do with a home like yours. You already win most of these. This makes them shorter.
It makes you the source
You already publish the annual forecast. This gives that authority a permanent home, four times a year, alongside the market report, the neighborhood reporting, and the giving-back work your brokers are already doing quietly.
It recruits, and it keeps
Independent brokerages lose producers to franchise marketing budgets. It's hard to leave a firm that gives you a full page, a real portrait, and a photographer once a quarter. Forty-plus licensees, four issues a year — every one of them gets a reason to stay and something to send their sphere.
It's twenty assets in one
Listing presentations. Relocation packets. Open houses. Closing gifts. Recruiting meetings. Sponsor conversations. Forecast night. A quarter of social content. One production cycle feeds all of it.
04
The math
What it has to earn to be worth it
850
homes closed in La Plata County in 2025, with 2026 on pace to match
$733k
countywide median sold price
20%+
of that market already belongs to The Wells Group
Run the arithmetic on typical listing-side economics and the entire four-issue program is covered by incremental listings a year — fewer than one per quarter, across forty-plus brokers.
Everything past that is margin. Plus a recruiting asset. Plus a relocation packet. Plus a year of goodwill you can't buy in a media plan.
05
Inside the issue
The issue architecture
Set the way a magazine sets its front matter, because that's the point.
Openers Short, visual, local. A new door on Main. A maker. A dish. A trail.
The Market Your quarterly data and your annual forecast, in print, under your masthead.
Features Two or three per issue. The reporting that makes a place a place: water, wildfire, the narrow gauge, workforce housing, a ranch family, the Iron Horse.
The Brokers Portraits and bios. The section that pays for the issue.
Portfolio Your listings, treated as architecture and design editorial. Not a grid.
Giving Back A featured nonprofit, plus what The Wells Group and its brokers actually contribute.
The Season What's happening in the next ninety days.
Back Page One photograph, or one short essay. The thing people remember.
06
Proof
Sixteen issues. Eight years. One brokerage.
Pinon Collection is ours. Ali and I created it for Pinon Real Estate Group in Chaffee County — a Colorado mountain market that runs on the same dynamics yours does: resort pressure, relocation demand, a fiercely local identity, and a brokerage that needed something better than a listings catalog to prove it.
We launched it in the winter of 2018. We've published every issue since — through a pandemic, a paper shortage, and a full market cycle. Sixteen of them. It's the magazine we left on your desk.
“Turning our regular listings directory into a branded real estate and lifestyle magazine set us apart from the competition and helped position us as true local experts.”
PINON REAL ESTATE GROUP
No brokerage funds sixteen issues of something that isn't working. Call them and ask. We'll make the introduction and step out of the room.
07
Distribution
A magazine nobody receives is a brochure
There are about 23,500 households in La Plata County. A 10,000-copy run puts The Wells Group on roughly four in ten kitchen tables in this county — and that's before the copies that never touch a mailbox.
Direct
Owner-occupied households in your priority ZIP codes.
Placed
Downtown retail, lodging, Purgatory and Tamarron rentals, arrivals at DRO, medical and professional waiting rooms.
Your offices
Durango, Bayfield, North County, and Tamarron.
In hand
Listing presentations, relocation packets, open houses, closing gifts, and forecast night.
Distribution strategy is built with you in the first working session and sized to your budget.
08
How it works
What you do. What we do.
You
Listings and property details
Broker bios and availability for portrait days
Market data you already produce
Any house ads you want to run
Approval at two gates
Roughly six hours of your team's time per issue.
The quarterly rhythm
Twelve weeks, repeated four times a year. One of them belongs to you.
Week 1
Editorial planning session
Week 2–5
Assignment, reporting, photography
Week 6–8
Design and layout
Week 9
Your review
Outerverse
Editorial planning and story assignment
Local writers and photographers, hired and directed
Design and layout of every page
House ad creation
Pre-press, file processing, and printer proof review
Printer negotiation, scheduling, and delivery
Distribution management
Every deadline that isn't yours
Turnkey means turnkey. You're not hiring an editor, a designer, a photo editor, and a production manager — you're hiring the four of them at once.
Week 10–11
Revisions, pre-press, print
Week 12
Distribution
09
Investment
What it costs
PREMIER ISSUE
$000
Includes brand and editorial system design, masthead development, and the first full broker portrait session.
Optional: digital edition and microsite, a quarterly content kit for social and email, additional portrait days.
Three things that change this number
Sponsorship offset
Local businesses — builders, designers, banks, restaurants, the resorts — will pay to be in a magazine like this. Underwriting can defray a meaningful share of production. We'll tell you honestly what we think it can carry in this market.
EACH ISSUE AFTER
$000
Per issue, quarterly. Editorial, photography, design, production, print management, and distribution coordination.
Category exclusivity
For as long as The Wells Group publishes with us, Outerverse won't publish for another brokerage in La Plata, Archuleta, Montezuma or San Juan counties. That's a term of the agreement, not a sales pitch.
You are never locked in
Pinon ran fully turnkey with us, then decided they wanted the magazine in-house. We trained their team over several issues and stepped back to a finishing role. They still publish. We still work together. If The Wells Group ever wants to own the production, we'll teach you how and hand it over rather than hold it hostage.
10
Questions
The questions you're already asking
-
For us. Not for you. Your input is roughly six hours an issue, and it's the same six hours whether we publish once a year or four times.
-
Some won't, at first. They change their minds when they see the first spread. We shoot in the field, not in a studio, and nobody gets used until they've approved their own frame.
-
It does work — at selling the homes that are in it. It does nothing for the ninety percent of your market that isn't buying this quarter. That's the audience a magazine holds onto.
-
Two formal approval gates before anything reaches a printer. Nothing goes to press that your leadership hasn't signed off on.
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Quarterly is more frequent, not more complex — the same production spine runs four times instead of two, and it's the rhythm we built Outerverse around. The content calendar is actually easier at four issues, because each one covers a season instead of straddling two.
-
Yes, and we'll help you. See the last note under Investment. We'd want four issues together first, because that's what it took to build a system worth handing over.
11
Who we are
Outerverse Media
We're Ali and Aaron. Thirty years of brand strategy, custom publishing, photography, and art direction between us, most of it spent making magazines for Colorado mountain towns — including the one on your desk.
We're in Pagosa Springs, an hour up the highway. We know what mud season does to a listing calendar, why the shoulder months matter here, and what a Southwest Colorado winter looks like on the page, because we've been photographing one for years.
Outerverse is a new name. What's behind it is eight years of getting a magazine to press on schedule, twice a year, without a client ever having to wonder whether the next issue was coming. And we're small enough that the two people pitching you are the two people who will make your magazine.
12
Next step
Let's put a first issue on the table
Forty-five minutes. We'll bring a rough issue plan for a first edition, a distribution recommendation sized to La Plata County, and a real number.