The project was built in Spotlight Property Viewer to simplify the preconstruction sales process.
3D CityScapes is proud to present Spotlight Property Viewer, its custom visualization platform solution for preconstruction developments. The software debuted in conjunction with the Elegance, a 72-unit luxury condominium in Vaughn, Ont. and developed by Avalee Homes.
One part marketing tool, one part sales asset management system, the Avalee Homes team selected Spotlight Property Viewer given that the Elegance was their first solo residential development and wanted a 3D visualization application backed by an experienced team.
“You can see multiple points of view, different suites, and floors. The actual colours are more true than just a model that sits on a table. It gives you more of a feeling of the building than a [traditional] model,” said Lino Tatone, one of Avalee’s founders.”It’s going in a more digital way so it’s more in tune with the times.”
In addition to providing an immersive 360-degree view of the Elegance’s exterior and the surrounding area, Spotlight Property Viewer allowed the sales team to take customers inside the upcoming development, highlighting specifics like the interior views of the penthouse unit, the front-entrance lobby, and even give a sneak peek at the views from the terraces.
“I personally like the daylight-night time [function] so you could see what it was like during the day or night. The biggest thing was the views from certain parts of the building, the location of the building, seeing the building itself, the way it looks, the terraces, and the walk-through,” said Tatone. “The walk-through helps with the amenities and the 3D application helps you get a real feel for the amenities and the outsides, too.”
Additional features also provided with Spotlight Property Viewer include:
-A walkable avatar mode to simulate a first-person point of view perspective of the building and area
-A unit selector to compare, contrast, and filter units based on square footage, pricing, number of bedrooms, bathrooms, and or orientation
-The ability to compare multiple floor plans side by side
-Distance circles to highlight what’s walkable within five, 10, and 20-minute increments.
-Finish selector to give customers the ability to swap between builders’ fit and finish packages.
-A built-in render generator to provide picture-perfect images for social media and marketing purposes
For 3D CityScapes, Spotlight Property Viewer represents the culmination of four years of work in the prop-tech industry, combining the company’s expertise in 3D modelling and meeting the needs of developers looking to showcase the best of what their projects have to offer.
“The Avalee team wanted to make sure the application represented luxury and that’s something that we did. They were very conscious and aware that they wanted to make this thing look great. And that really helped us achieve our goal,” said James Borst, CEO and founder of 3D CityScapes. “This application became basically our flagship for small developments. I’d say it’s our highest-quality development to date.”
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
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
3D CityScapes’ team put together exterior, interior, and interactive applications of the SIX88 Residences
The 3D CityScapes team is proud to present its first project located in Sarasota, Fl.’s Golden Gate Point community.
Set by the corner of Gulf Stream and Golden Gate Point on the waterfront that nestles Sarasota Bay and the Gulf of Mexico lies the future site of Vandyk Properties’ SIX88 Residences.
“There is genuinely something really nice about SIX88,” said Salman Hussain, 3D CityScapes’ Director of Digital Experiences. “This project is special to us because of where it’s located in Sarasota, Fl., with its ambiance, natural scenery, community, dock, and waterfront area. It was a lot of fun to work on this environment.”
To help bring Vandyk Properties’ vision to life, the 3DCS team created an interior tour of SIX88 Residence’s penthouse suite, followed by a full exterior tour of the community to aid in the sales and marketing of the project. An interactive tour of the Golden Gate community was also created to showcase the neighbourhood for potential buyers unfamiliar with the area.
“The penthouse 3D tour is an immersive visualization of the space and showcases the incredible views. It has become a great tool for our sales team and has enriched our digital marketing program,” said Andrea Wong, Vandyk Properties’ VP of Marketing. “For a product of this caliber, we thought it was important to provide the end-user a clear picture of the living space.”
For the team at 3DCS, SIX88 represents an opportunity to continue its relationship with Vandyk Properties.
“The great thing about Vandyk Properties is that they understand where they are now and they understand where they need to be in the next decade and more. They understand the value and importance of integrating the right 3D technology to help them create that digital brand presence,” said Hussain.
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