Sapia Creative named a national nominee at the 2026 Australian Event Awards

The Brisbane studio behind Raine & Horne's NSW and ACT awards night is in national contention again, a year after that event won Best Corporate Event against the country's largest corporate productions.

Brisbane event design and production studio Sapia Creative has been named a Company National Nominee at the 2026 Australian Event Awards, the second consecutive year its work has been recognised at national level.

Winners are announced at the awards ceremony in Coffs Harbour on 21 October. Under the awards' judging structure, national nominees are the entries that record the top five moderated scores in their category and also clear a minimum threshold score, which makes the nomination a scored result rather than an invited shortlisting.

Sapia's standing in real estate rests largely on its work with Raine & Horne. The network's annual awards night for NSW and the ACT won Best Corporate Event at the 2025 Australian Event Awards, a category judged across corporate events nationally rather than within any single industry. Sapia has styled the event for three consecutive years.

The 2026 edition moved up in scale. Held at the Hordern Pavilion at Moore Park on 21 March, it followed the 2025 event at the Hyatt Regency in Sydney. Sapia says the night hosted 650 guests and representatives from 65 individual Raine & Horne offices, which the studio describes as the highest office representation and guest numbers in the event's history and an increase of close to 26 per cent on the previous year. Guests rated the experience 9.27 out of 10 in the studio's post-event survey.

Those are the studio's own figures, and they matter less as a scorecard than as a marker of where network events have moved. For a franchise group, the annual awards night is one of the few occasions in the calendar when an entire membership sits in one room, and it now competes for attention against every other night out those agents could have chosen. Production standards have followed. So has the cost.

Sapia Creative founder Samantha Hobbelen argues the shift is deliberate on the part of networks.

"Real estate networks are starting to treat their events the way top consumer brands do, as a genuine extension of their culture and their story, not just a night out," she said. "Raine & Horne's Awards Night is a great example of that. It's grown every year because the team there understands that the event is the message: it's how you make hundreds of people feel proud to be part of the network, all in one room."

The studio was founded in 2022 by Hobbelen and says it has since delivered more than 250 events, ranging from 700-guest galas to private functions, for clients across real estate networks, technology, construction, cultural institutions and government. Hobbelen's background spans events and ecommerce, and the studio lists LinkedIn, Toyota, Delta Air Lines, Domain and Pitcher Partners among the brands it has worked with, at venues including Howard Smith Wharves in Brisbane, the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney and InterContinental Hayman Island.

For principals and network leaders watching this, the useful detail is not the nomination itself. It is that a real estate awards night was entered into an open national field last year and beat corporate events with no property connection at all. That sets a reference point for what an industry event can be judged against, and it raises a practical question for any group budgeting an annual awards program: whether the night is being built to a standard the network's own people will talk about for the rest of the year, or simply to fill a venue.

Whether Sapia converts the nomination into a second national result will be settled in Coffs Harbour in October.