Seeing is believing: The technology changing the way we buy off-the-plan
There’s no denying that the decision of where to live is arguably one of the most important decisions anybody will make in their lifetime. You’re choosing the place you’ll call home and emotions can and will run wild given the significant financial investment involved.
In this day and age, to make things interesting, you can shake up an already difficult and stressful process with a healthy dose of ambiguity by buying a property off-the-plan.
At its core, buying off-the-plan is a process underpinned by a promise made by the developer that a home will exist in alignment with expectation. To inform and manage this expectation, the developer will deploy an elaborate sales campaign that seeks to communicate the look, space and feel of the development project upon its completion. Typically, the physical nuts and bolts of such a campaign include a display suite, a mountain of brochures, colour-swatches, floorplans etc.; with the goal being to paint a good enough picture that you like what you see and are confident enough in its delivery to purchase.
However, the reality is that this approach is inherently fragmented.
E.g. The display suite may only show what the kitchen and living room of your apartment will look like. The colour-swatches don’t really look like anything when you hold them against a surface. You don’t understand the floorplan, nor can you visualise what it represents.
You just don’t see the entire, final picture (and you can’t - because it doesn’t exist yet).
Fortunately, this is why we have architectural visualisation or ‘ArchViz’.
ArchViz, as put by Jeff Mottle, CEO and Founder of CGarchitect, “is using some form of computer-generated visualisation to depict architecture”. In the off-the-plan sale, ArchViz is critical as it allows a glimpse into the future to see how the final product will come together, in its entirety. The most common form of ArchViz are CGIs (computer-generated-images). These are the polished images you typically see on project websites, brochures and within the display suite and they represent the bottom line of ArchViz in any off-the-plan campaign. Now CGIs are great, however, they only scratch the surface, representing a window into a wider, virtual world.
Through the power of interactive Realtime3D* technologies, ArchViz studios can now bring a future property to life as a living, breathing, virtual space that you can visit. For example, with Virtual Reality you can literally walk right through the front door of your future home and freely customise colours, materials, furniture and layout, allowing you to see and genuinely understand what you are buying in full.
It doesn’t stop there either - 360° web tours allow you to access, explore and share your future home from the palm of your hands via smartphone. Interactive 3D floor plans allow you to dissect a development floor-by-floor and understand the interplay of context, space and layout. Deeper, more engaging video animation tells stories, transporting you to the heart and inspiration of a development.
The fact of the matter is it’s hard to buy something that doesn’t exist, but it doesn’t have to be. An off-the-plan purchase has customarily been, in part, a stab in the dark. You’re laying down a lot of money and purchasing a property that you're pretty sure is going to be the place you call home. Well now, you can not only see your future home - you can visit it, explore it, experience it, and make a purchase decision you can be sure about.
These Realtime3D technologies are readily available to developers and as the homebuyer, you deserve to be well-informed and confident in what you are purchasing. So when buying off-the-plan consider developments that are utilising these technologies to better inform your decision-making and alleviate the ambiguity when shopping for your future home off-the-plan.