360 tour for off-plan apartment sales
Nothing built to show. They pre-sold anyway.
AIA Partners was starting out as a developer in San Luis Potosí, Mexico: three towers on paper, no delivered building and no track record to point at. They put a sales booth on the empty lot, a headset inside it, and the buyer walked out having toured the apartment that did not exist yet.
- Industry
- Residential towers
- Use case
- Off-plan apartment sales
- Technology
- Virtual reality headset and browser
AIA Partners is a real estate developer in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. When it hired Fyware it was just starting: no finished buildings to show and no track record to back an off-plan sale. Fyware built the 360 tours and the virtual reality experience of four towers, Montaña Roja, Montaña Blanca, Utente and Villa Verde, and the material was installed in a sales booth placed on the lot itself.
The figures and where they come from: zero finished buildings at the start and four towers with a tour, and since then AIA Partners reports one hundred apartments developed in three years, seven buildings delivered or under construction, and land already bought for the eighth, ninth and tenth. The client frames the tour as one of the initial drivers rather than the cause: what he credits it with is being able to build trust and a brand at the stage when there was nothing built to show.
What was built is a 360 tour for selling off-plan: the whole apartment, walkable, with its finishes in place and the view it will have from the window.
How it was decided
Nobody buys an apartment from someone who has never delivered one
The problem
Selling off-plan is asking somebody to pay for something they cannot see, from a company that has not delivered anything yet. With plans and renders the buyer has to make two leaps of faith at once: believe the drawing, and believe the developer.
The call, which is theirs
AIA Partners chose to bet on the technology before having any construction to show, and to put the booth on the lot instead of in an office. That is a positioning decision: in a sector that usually runs on family ties, they showed up with a corporate mindset.
What we built
The 360 tours and the virtual reality experience of all four towers, with the layout, the finishes and the real views from each floor, ready for the headset in the booth and to open in a browser.
Try it yourself
We would rather not just tell you: this is the Villa Verde tour, the same kind of material the apartments were sold with.
Walk it from here
Drag to look wherever you want and use the arrows to move between spaces. That is the difference from a render: you pick the angle, which is why it is believed.
The four towers
Each tower with its own tour: the facade, the layout and the finishes of each apartment type.
The fourth one, Villa Verde, is the one you can walk through above.
“At the time we were only just starting out as a developer and had no finished buildings to show. The virtual reality experience and the 360 tours helped us convey confidence to our clients and let them picture the spaces, the finishes and the layout before they physically existed.”
“What I liked most was that they understood very well what we needed and delivered a tool that genuinely added value to the commercial process, not just something eye-catching because of the technology. For us it was an important push to build brand and credibility at a stage where that made all the difference.”
What makes it work
Four decisions worth repeating
- The headset lives on the lot. The buyer arrives where there is nothing and leaves having walked their apartment.
- The buyer picks the angle. A render shows what you chose; a tour lets them look anywhere, and that is what convinces.
- The same modeling serves the headset and the browser: the booth uses the immersive version and the advertising uses the 360, with nothing produced twice.
- It was done before there was any construction, which is exactly when it is needed and when almost nobody invests in it.
The architecture, the construction and the commercial operation belong to AIA Partners. We built the tours and the virtual reality experience they sold with.
Is it worth investing in tours when you have nothing built yet?
That is exactly when it is worth most, and it is when almost nobody does it. A developer with ten delivered buildings sells with those ten buildings; one that has delivered none has nothing to show but a promise, and a promise is the most expensive thing to sell.
The client put it better than we could: the tour let the buyer feel the spaces and the finishes and carry that forward in time. The line he repeats is the buyer saying "the way it looks here is the way it will be". Delivering on that afterwards is what turned the tour into a track record, and that part was theirs.
Five years on, AIA Partners is on its seventh building, holds land for the eighth, ninth and tenth, and its founder says they are "the only company that has managed to sell every one of its buildings off-plan" in their market. That superlative is his, not ours, which is why it is in quotation marks: we have not verified it. What we can say is where we came in, and it was at the point where there was nothing to show.
Project sheet
- Client
- AIA Partners, real estate developer · San Luis Potosí, Mexico
- Sector
- Off-plan residential towers
- Scope
- 360 tours and a virtual reality experience of four towers
- Towers
- Montaña Roja, Montaña Blanca, Utente and Villa Verde
- Where it was used
- A sales booth placed on the lot, with a headset, and online in the browser
- Starting point
- No finished buildings to show
- Since then
- 7 buildings delivered or under construction, and land for the eighth, ninth and tenth
- Delivered
- 2021, and the booth is still in use on later developments
Frequently asked questions
Who builds virtual tours for selling apartments before they are built?
Fyware does, and this case is one: four AIA Partners towers you could walk through before they existed, with the layout, the finishes and the real view from each floor. Plenty of architectural visualization studios deliver renders and video; the practical difference is what the buyer gets. A 360 tour opens in the browser with nothing to install, and the VR version runs on a headset in a sales booth on the site itself. You can open one of those tours on this page and judge the result before asking us anything.
We are just starting and have nothing built to show. How do we sell off-plan?
By showing the apartment before it exists. In a tour the buyer walks the layout, looks out of the window they will actually have and sees the finishes in place, so they stop imagining it and start measuring it against what they need. That is what turns a promise into something a person can evaluate.
Are renders and floor plans not enough?
To explain, yes. To build trust, almost never. A floor plan asks the buyer to translate meters into space, and a render shows the angle you chose. In a tour the buyer chooses the angle, and that is exactly why they believe it: nobody lets you look wherever you want at something they are trying to hide.
Where does this get used, in the office or on the site?
On the site is where it earns its keep. Here the headset lived in a sales booth placed on the empty lot, so the buyer arrived at bare ground and left having walked their apartment. It also works online through the 360 tours, which open in a browser with nothing to install, so the same production serves the booth and the advertising.
Tom KlukowskiFyware Partner · Valcre Marketing
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