Luxury Condos: How to Pre-Sell with 3D Visualization

Pre-selling luxury apartments and luxury condos has become increasingly important for successful real-estate developers these days, and is often an essential requirement in successfully completing any luxury residential development. The requirements can vary from site to site, but developers normally need to pre-sell a certain number of units before construction begins to guarantee further loans to help complete later phases of construction.

The Buyer’s Perspective: Buying Luxury Condos

From a buyer’s perspective, pre-buying luxury condos or luxury apartments is considered risky-business, but is also one that offers significant advantages.

Often there is a great chance that a luxury apartment will be worth significantly more once built, meaning that if risks can be minimized, obtaining a property for a much lower price via a pre-sales scheme can be very lucrative.

There are also laws and regulations that help to minimize any risks. In the case of luxury condos in Vancouver, there are benefits such as only having to leave a 5–10% deposit fee, not having to take out a loan straight away, warranty protection, and in the case of a property never being completed, a full refund to the buyer is guaranteed. In such environments, buying a pre-sale property could be well worth the investment.

Another big advantage of pre-sales is that buyers can get the opportunity to have direct input into how their own brand-new luxury apartment will be customized, often down to the very last detail.

However, there are also significant risks. Firstly, although there is a good chance that your off-plan property’s value will increase, this isn’t guaranteed, so there is always the risk that your property could actually lose value if the market is volatile. Unforeseen delays may also arise during the construction stage delaying the completion of your luxury apartment.

The biggest risk of all to the buyer is ending with something that’s very different to what was expected and paid for. With this in mind, it can be much harder to convince a client to invest in a property without trust earned from a comprehensive and well-communicated design process. Luckily there are ways to aid all parties in this.

3D Visualization for Pre-Selling Luxury Condos

Thanks to 3D visualization technology, many of the obstacles associated with pre-selling luxury property can be avoided.

With architectural renders the buyer can see exactly how the luxury apartment will look and get a sense and feel of the space. Photorealistic renderings can also be used to accompany one of the largest benefits of buying a pre-sales apartment: customization.

As changes can easily be made, a client can essentially design their own apartment to their own liking, making 3D renderings a new cutting-edge tool when it comes to persuading your clients and keeping them happy.

3D visualisation technology can also help overcome another large obstacle of selling an unbuilt property: selling the concept of a home rather than a house.

The emotional connection created through a rendering or a VR tour can be extremely powerful as buyers are able to visualize their own lives in a space and see the luxury apartment as a home rather than just a house, which is the key to selling luxury real estate.

The fact that the client knows exactly what a property will look like before construction means that many of the doubts associated with not knowing what the product will look like can be significantly quelled. That matters most when the buyer lives in another country and may never visit the site before signing, the situation our guide to pre-selling Caribbean real estate to remote buyers covers in detail.

A Pre-Construction Condo Launch, Stage by Stage

Most luxury condo launches move through the same four stages. The images are needed at the first one, which is why they have to be planned early.

1. Before reservations open. The hero exterior, the amenity images, one or two residence interiors and the launch film are finished, the project website is live, and an interest list of buyers and brokers is being built.
2. Broker and VIP preview. Brokers and the first buyers on the list see the full set, the floor plans and the sales materials before the public does. This is where the strongest early reservations usually come from.
3. Public launch. The sales gallery opens with the renderings, the film and a virtual tour for buyers who cannot visit, and the same images carry the press release, the listing and the website.
4. During construction. Buyers who have signed get progress updates and choose their finishes, often from renderings of the finish options, while the remaining units keep selling from the same set.

Our developer pre-sales toolkit covers each stage in more depth, and architectural animation explains how a launch film is made.

What a Luxury Condo Sales Kit Includes

• The hero exterior, the image that will be on every page, sign and listing.
• Amenity floors: lobby, pool deck, rooftop, gym, shown at the hour residents will use them.
• Residence interiors, at least one per unit type, finished the way the price suggests.
• Views from the real floor heights, so the view in the image is the one the buyer gets.
• 3D floor plans, furnished, from the same model as the renderings.
• A launch film and, for remote buyers, a virtual tour.
• A sales book or brochure and a reservation website that use the same images.

You do not always need a finished model unit to sell. A sales gallery with this kit, or a remote presentation for overseas buyers, can carry a launch on its own; we explain how in selling before the model home opens.

Conclusion

A mediocre 3D rendering might serve some purposes, but to be enough to grab buyers’ attention and create the emotional connection needed to close a sale, they increasingly need to be of photorealistic quality. As an image is “worth a thousand words”, getting these images to be perfect will have a huge impact on your pre-sales. Any less than amazing may harm your chances. The same images often do double duty as renderings in an investor deck, before a single unit is offered.

Pricing for these types of images may seem a touch steep, but the introduction of good quality 3D rendering has had a big impact on the construction industry, meaning that top quality renderings can set you apart. And in the luxury real estate market, cutting corners by attempting to save in the short term will likely hand the advantage to your competitors who take investing in quality marketing materials seriously. Read about the cost of rendering, and see our guide to pre-selling real estate with 3D visualization.

In the end, the costs of these images are likely an infinitesimally small fraction of the overall value of the luxury property, and yet will make the difference between selling and not selling a property to a prospective buyer.

FAQs