Recently my wife and I have been shopping around for a pre-construction condominium. Living in Toronto, our agent has shown us many in the city and just outside of it. For the most part the price has been right but we’ve had a difficult time conceptualizing what the condo will look like when it’s completed.
Recently we were introduced to a game-changing company, 3D CityScapes, that has changed the way I view pre-construction developments.
“From a real estate agents’ standpoint, our app allows them to visually showcase existing and pre-construction properties that are situated within the city environment,” says Brian K. Lee, content specialist at 3D CityScapes. The app shows “what the exterior looks like, landscaping, neighbourhood points of interest, how the sunrise and sunset will look from their unit, how shadows from other buildings in the vicinity will affect their future home, how far transit stations are – all within a single application,” he says. “Using VR goggles, potential buyers can literally stand in all the rooms and experience the home as if it already exists. Buyers can customize the interior finishes and preview that as well.”
Typically the application is licensed to the developers. Real estate agents can pay a subscription fee to the developers to use the app to make their sales. The apps will also be available on touch screens at sales centres once they can reopen.
3D CityScapes also provides an option to discover the city and building environments using an avatar and they’re preparing to add drivable cars, both of which will add to the user experience. The avatars are entirely customizable and offer third-party 3D scanning services for individuals
who want to have their own avatar integrated into the app.
Within Toronto, 3D Landscapes have completed building Leftbank by Broccolini and The Hub by Oxford Properties Group and they are in the process of building Tridel’s newest project at Dupont and Ossington. Lee says, “Currently these are set up as separate projects, but next year we will have all of these buildings in Toronto available from within a single app platform as we complete GTA 3D interactive.”
The company combined the graphics and physics engines of game development with existing interior rendering technology and applied it to real-world environments. The cloud streaming technology is being developed in-house, which is unprecedented for a tech start-up company.
Lee says the firm saw a need within the property development industry for 3D visualization in an interactive environment, which helps with planning, showcasing, marketing and selling pre-construction properties. “We believe that our platform will eventually become the leading social interactive platform for people to meet together in a highly immersive and realistic 3D environment (within the cities we develop).”
He says, “In the past, home buyers relied on image renderings, 2D floorplans and physical models for their property investments. Our product uses tech innovations to immerse the potential purchasers into the virtual world, where they can see, feel and experience a place they will soon call home. It’s an entirely new way to buy and sell condos, one that is significantly more advanced, intuitive and immersive than the traditional methods. Add VR goggles and innovations in that area to the mix, and you have a bulletproof sales tool. Our technology will effectively usher in a new era of property sales.
“Because it is digital, changes to design and architecture cost a fraction of what it would cost to reproduce in traditional methods and the savings in costs for developers trickles down to buyers as well,” Lee says.
As for my wife and I, we’ve narrowed our choice down to three condos but I think I’ll put my goggles on one more time and look around before we make our final choice.
