Virtually Tour Stonehenge, pinkSTONE Built’s New Wellness-Focused Community

It’s 3D CityScapes’ first proptech demonstration in the state of Tennessee.

3D CityScapes marks its latest proptech demonstration in conjunction with pinkSTONE Built and their Stonehenge development.

Stonehenge is a multi-phase residential community designed with wellness in mind. Located in Sevierville, Tenn., near the state’s Smoky Mountain region, the community will feature mix-density townhouses, duplexes, and detached homes.

“We wanted to approach residential design in a different way and focus not so much on the individual residences, but on the community itself,” said Rebekah Meredith, Owner & Principal Engineer at pinkSTONE Built.

The upcoming development will feature walking trails and a community garden where residents can pick fresh fruits and vegetables for their meals. There are also plans to focus on air and water quality within the individual units in order to provide healthier built environments.

But it wasn’t just integrating physical wellness into Stonehenge’s design that was vital to the pinkSTONE team. Meredith also wanted to incorporate and drive human connectivity as part of the overall project.

“One of the things COVID-19 did was put us in isolation and being an overall healthy person [requires] human interaction,” she said.

That notion of bringing people together was one of the main reasons pinkSTONE Built focused on 3D visualization and chose 3D CityScapes for their needs.

“How do you sell something that doesn’t exist anywhere else? How do you show somebody what this is going to look like and feel like by just telling them? People don’t always grasp the concept,” said Meredith. “That was one of the biggest reasons why we decided to take the time and spend the money. We’ve got to somehow sell something that doesn’t exist yet.”

3D CityScapes, for its part, built the virtual tour which you can see below.

“I think there exists a powerful relationship, especially for the people who embrace 3D visualization technology and integrated it into their marketing efforts,” said James Borst, 3D CityScapes’ CEO, and co-founder. “Rather than seeing just rendering, you’re  able to interact in a 3D environment that helps these projects get off the ground.”

Investing in 3D visualization early in the development cycle also means developers gain access to a sales tool that evolves along with a project.

“In terms of Stonehenge, with our kind of 3D visualization, as we move through and continue to develop units, we’re going to want to continue to develop that overall master plan,” said Meredith. “That only helps us in the sales cycle – being able to potentially pre-sell and generate cash flow. The quicker that we can change the direction of the money flow, the better for us and that’s one thing we feel this is going to help us do.”

About 3D CityScapes:

3D City Scapes Inc. is a 3D visualization technology company based in Canada specializing in building 3D interactive environments, assets, and digital twins. Founded in 2019, 3D CityScapes works with property developers, municipalities, urban planners, seaport authorities, and architects to provide 3D applications for use in sales/marketing, planning, predictive analysis, cinematic video production, and more.

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For more information, please contact:

Brian Tien Trinh

3D CityScapes

647-524-4003

Btrinh@3dcityscapes.ca

3D CityScapes Builds First Retirement Home In Unreal Engine 5

The project was made in partnership with Chartwell Residence.

The Ridgepointe retirement residence located in Kamloops, B.C..

3D CityScapes is pleased to present the world’s first independent living retirement home created in Unreal Engine 5.

Created in partnership with Chartwell Residence, the largest operator in the Canadian seniors living sector, the 3D model is a to-scale replica of the company’s Ridgepointe Retirement Residence, located in Kamloops, B.C..

As part of the partnership, 3DCS created an interactive application to showcase the residence’s exterior and surrounding mountain views. Included is the ability to venture inside the walkable lobby entrance and around the residence’s amenities, like the public and private dining rooms, library, as well as an interior suite.

An interior rendering of the bistro area inside Chartwell Ridgepointe residence.

“One thing that’s so nice about this program is that when prospects are picking out the suites they want, I can show them this is what your view is going to be like,” said Kathy Wishnevski, a retirement consultant at Chartwell Ridgepointe. “I can show them what kind of sunlight they get during the day or how much sun they get at night, which is huge.”

In addition to the app, the 3DCS team created a collection of photo-realistic renders, a 4K cinematic video tour, as well a hotspot tour to aid in Ridgepointe’s marketing to future residents. The project comes as the Ridgepointe Residence adds a brand-new wing to the property, bringing in 90 new, fully self-contained apartments.

“We needed to be able to show our prospects and their families all about the new building and apartments which don’t actually exist yet,” said Chartwell Ridgepointe’s retirement living consultant Lori Kininmont. “Since the construction won’t be completed for another year, the 3D presentation has been vital for guests to see where their apartment will be, what the natural light will look like at different times of day or season, as well as what their ‘view’ from their windows will be.”

“It was important that the whole family could understand the environment their loved one would be living in and that’s really how this whole conversation got started because Chartwell saw the quality of the immersive 3D environments that we were creating,” said James Borst, CEO and co-founder of 3D CityScapes.

The living room of a unit at Chartwell’s Ridgepointe residence in Kamloops, B.C..

For the 3D CityScapes team, it marks the first project created from the ground up using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5, bringing a new level of polish and fidelity that has made it the gaming engine of choice for powering 3DCS’ latest app.

“UE5 definitely gave us a leg up in quality to enable Nanite technology to have higher quality scenes with less pull on a good computer with a decent video card,” said Borst. From a user’s standpoint, UE5 has already captured the attention of those interested in living at Ridgepointe.

“The application has been very well received by guests, residents, and staff alike. Everyone is fascinated by the features that we can highlight and explain about the building by using it,” said Kininmont.

About 3D CityScapes:

3D City Scapes Inc. is a 3D visualization technology company based in Canada specializing in building 3D interactive environments, assets, and digital twins. Founded in 2019, 3D CityScapes works with property developers, municipalities, urban planners, seaport authorities, and architects to provide 3D applications for use in sales/marketing, planning, predictive analysis, cinematic video production, and more.

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For more information, please contact:

Brian Tien Trinh

3D CityScapes

647-524-4003

Btrinh@3dcityscapes.ca

Prop tech is making clients smarter and forcing older agents to adapt

 It’s getting harder for some millenials to see a future where they’re working with a realtor. 

After a mediocre condo buying experience and a lackluster case of an agent listing one of his other properties last December, Varun Kochar, a 31-year-old consultant, says the process left a bad taste in his mouth.

“I wasn’t convinced that he had my best interests in mind,” said Kochar, citing a lowball bid for his one-bedroom property in Etobicoke that he was skeptical of accepting at his agent’s advice.

“The first offer I got was something super low, like $630K for my condo. He tried to convince me to do it. ‘You should sell. This is amazing. This is the highest you’re ever going to get. This is the highest per square foot,’” he recalls his realtor saying.

“I didn’t believe him.”

Kochar, like those millennials able to afford property in Canada’s hot real estate market, did his own homework through the use of property tech. He decided he could do better.

“I did an easy search on Condos.ca to see the average per square foot in my condo building was going for and I could do the math in my head.”

Property technology, or prop tech for short, is loosely defined as software or hardware that makes real estate dealings less of a pain. While many programs are designed for real estate agents and brokerages in mind, others have become online platforms compiling and publishing real estate data. It’s effectively opened the floodgates of information – once solely in the hands of those in the industry – to everyone else.

Properly.ca, a website that offers free property appraisals using artificial intelligence, is another example of prop tech Kochar says is making agents less useful. 

“I was telling [my agent] ahead of time that this property sold for this price and he was like, ‘oh, I didn’t even know that. My system’s not updated yet.’”

Canada’s prop tech industry isn’t particularly new. A February 2021 report by PropTech Collective found that of the 300 companies they analyzed, 67 percent were founded after 2014. While nearly just as many are start-ups in the early funding phases and only a few like Ecobee, BuildDirect, or Properly.ca, have become recognizable names, the industry’s overall usefulness has become more apparent following the fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

 THE NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK

In some ways, 3D visualization and VR became the new reality for Christ Stapleton and Jenny Bui. Stapleton founded Coral Realty in early 2020 with partner Pawel Parafianowicz, with Bui joining the team shortly after.

She noticed buyers and sellers in Toronto were coming to the table better prepared.

“Clients will know what they want to sell for based on what they’ve seen online in terms of sold prices. They are well-informed.”

Part of that surge of smarter clients also had to do with the adoption of 3D virtual tours and staging.

“It made buyers even more informed because they were able to thoroughly go see it online before they even went in person. They knew what exactly to look for or what they didn’t like. They’re able to compare prices more from the comfort of their home with more time, rather than being rushed like from one showing to another showing.”

For Stapleton, he’s seen 3D visualization go from a nice-to-have feature to a necessity for many resale condos. It’s also highlighted how prop tech skews towards certain groups of clients more than others.”

“I don’t want to say it’s going to push older people out of the markets because there are older agents who have the right team to support them and utilize technology but I would say that the appeal of this technology, unsurprisingly, skews to a younger demographic,” he said, while cautioning on age being the only factor.

“We’ve had listings where the sellers have been in their late 50s and they have been sort of like, ‘oh, that’s cool’, but they’re not really engaging with it too much. Whereas we also have sellers who are in the same age bracket and happen to be in an industry that uses technology and they go, ‘Oh, this is amazing! I don’t believe it.’”

While clients of all identities are readily adopting prop tech as part of their real estate journey, that’s not always the case with some realtors.

A CHANGING OF THE GUARD

Asif Khan remembers the surprise he got when he took over a downtown Toronto brokerage in November of 2021.

“Of about 30 agents, about seven of them are on Facebook. Because [most] don’t believe in it,” said Khan of the social media platform as a means to reach new clients.

“There’s such a generational factor because a lot of realtors are old. We’re starting to get some younger ones coming into the business but the average age could be 55, 60.”

The typical real estate agent in Canada is a 54-year-old white female who attended college, according to Real Estate Magazine, citing 2020 data from the National Association of Realtors. While that doesn’t mean they’re incapable of using prop tech, it can put them at odds with younger clients who, as Khan puts it, value “instant gratification”.

“They’re not going to wait for a realtor to call them back or anything like that. They want the information and they want it now and if they don’t get it, they move on,” said the owner of RE/MAX Prime Properties brokerage in Markham, Ont.

For Khan, it’s less about the fear of prop tech replacing realtors, and more about the job of realtors in the first place: helping clients.

“There’s a lot of people that are very old-school and they believe we should be the gatekeepers and that’s not where the industry is. That’s where we’re having the disconnect: Being able to come up with solutions for people that would satisfy their need for information.”

More From 3D CityScapes:

• 8 Cities Using Digital Twins to Help Residents
  
• 5 Real-World Examples of Digital Twins
  
• Metaverses vs. Digital Twins: Here are the Differences Between the Two
  

‘WE CAN’T GO BACKWARDS’

When asked about prop tech’s potential to make real estate agents redundant, Stapleton isn’t too worried based on what he’s seeing.

“It’s adding value to it but it’s not replacing it. I honestly think it’s making the whole experience better. It’s making it a richer, more engaging, sort of informative experience.”

He gives the example of how virtual tours can complement an in-person showing after the fact. If potential buyers want to revisit a room after they’ve left the physical space, property tech can help. “Augmenting [the experience is] probably the perfect way to put it.”

“I do think moving forward, technology is going to be a necessity in the industry. Covid-19’s really created a sort of fundamental shift. We can’t go backward.”

It’s a sentiment Khan echoes. “We’re not trying to reinvent the industry, but we’re trying to make it more efficient. If there are tools that help us make this more efficient then that will help us serve our clients in a better way.”

“There are a lot of people that are very old-school and they believe we should be the gatekeepers and that’s not where the industry is.” — Asif Khan

As for Varun Kochar, he’s taking a temporary break from the real estate market but doesn’t foresee agents joining him the next time he’s looking to buy or sell.  

“Millennials are going to take over this market. While they might not be able to afford a house right now, when dual incomes come into the picture or when baby boomers pass away, they’re either going to sell that property or use that equity to buy something else. And they’re not going to use realtors. They’re going to use these technologies that are coming out.”

3D CityScapes is a Toronto start-up specializing in building digital twins and 3D visualizations. Interested in building a digital twin? Get in touch with us here or give us a shout at +1 416-477-6846