Real estate company Redfin on Wednesday announced “The Great American Home Search,” a nationwide activation that gives consumers a chance to win a home valued at more than $1 million, per details shared with Marketing Dive. The activation will begin just after an ad from Redfin and parent Rocket Companies airs during the Super Bowl.
The contest builds on the theme of the Super Bowl effort, which the brands teased last week. The spot includes a performance of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” the theme song from “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” by Lady Gaga, and tells a story of people finding community through acting neighborly.
“Brands that just give a narrative at Super Bowl, but don’t actually activate, don’t actually see as much of a financial return as those brands that have a massive activation,” said Rocket Companies CMO Jonathan Mildenhall. “In the context of being neighborly, and the context of Redfin’s inventory, we decided that we would do something that has never been done before.”
The strategy comes a year after Rocket’s “Own The Dream” Super Bowl ad culminated with an in-stadium singalong to John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” The effort was viewed nearly 250 million times on social media and earned a Cannes Gold Lion in 2025.
This year, consumers can take part in the home search via a scavenger hunt in the Redfin app. Redfin will release six app-exclusive prompts over the 48 hours following the airing of the Super Bowl ad. The hunt, created in partnership with geoguessing creator Trevor Rainbolt, requires consumers to use Redfin’s search tools and filters, and the winner will be the first eligible participant to identify the home.
“Each clue takes you deeper and deeper into Redfin’s products, so that the players can understand Redfin’s product superiority over our competition. Then we will be fueling social media with what it takes in America today to be neighborly, and neighborly ‘hacks’ so that you can break the ice and knock next door,” Mildenhall said of the scavenger hunt, which will reveal a home in “one of America’s most celebrated neighborly neighborhoods.”
Super Bowl-sized strategy
Rocket and Redfin’s Super Bowl play comes as the companies prepare for their next stage of growth. After the 2025 acquisitions of both Redfin and mortgage servicer Mr. Cooper, Rocket is now responsible for one in six American mortgages. The company’s ambition is to make Redfin the biggest home search platform in the U.S., inclusive of 2,500 real estate agents.
“As we started to really understand the insights from the Redfin real estate agents, I got very excited that we could move from just broadening the aperture of the Rocket brand to actually standing for something and standing up for something,” Mildenhall said.
Those insights drove Rocket and Redfin to focus on working to reverse the erosion of trust in the American neighborhood, which fell during the pandemic and never bounced back, the executive said, citing a Pew study that found only 26% of Americans know their next door neighbor by name. That focus on neighbors and neighborhoods led the company to work with Fred Rogers Productions to use “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” which is being licensed for commercial use in the U.S. for the first time.
“When we had that asset, we were like, ‘Okay, we don’t want to be nostalgic and backward-looking. We need to project this into the future,’” Mildenhall said. “Working with Lady Gaga was our No. 1 choice, so we now have this beautiful vocal rallying cry to really wake America up and to get America to think about what it means to be neighborly at a civic level.”
The new version of the classic theme song soundtracks an ad created with agency Mirimar that focuses on two families moving to new homes for different reasons. The ad will highlight a white family going through divorce and a young girl moving to a new neighborhood with her mother, and a Hispanic family with a girl the same age moving to a bigger house because of the birth of a baby.
“The Super Bowl ad itself shows these two girls moving into a neighborhood. They’re strangers, and they become friends. It’s really powerful, authentic storytelling,” Mildenhall said.
Rocket’s decision to focus on neighborhood trust with an ad featuring cross-cultural connection comes as neighbors in cities like Minneapolis are coming together to push back on increased immigration crackdowns and violence by ICE. The company sees the purpose-driven push as one that goes beyond politics.
“It doesn’t matter which side of the aisle you’re on, which political party you vote for. The erosion of trust in the American neighborhood is universal,” Mildenhall said. “The feeling of loneliness and isolation is universal, and the need for connection and community is universal. None of it is political — it’s very civic — and the ambition that Rocket and Redfin have is to make America feel more connected.”
