Marketing an off-plan launch, stage by stage
Five stages, each with its own deliverables. Get the order wrong and you pay for the same asset twice.
A development is sold in five stages and almost nobody commissions in that order. The brochure arrives before the name is settled, the CGI before the palette, the photographer eighteen months after the only interesting thing on site has already been built. None of it is anyone's fault. Each piece is ordered by whoever is under pressure that month.
What follows is the order the programme actually runs in, and what each stage is buying.
One: land, before you own it
Nothing gets made here, and that is the point of including it. What you need at land stage is the argument, not the assets: who the scheme is for, what it will be worth, and what it is called in the room.
The one thing worth commissioning is a position. Two pages saying who buys this, at what price, against which competing scheme on which road, and why. It costs very little and it is the document every later brief is written against. Without it, the designer, the visualiser and the agent each invent their own version of the buyer and you find out at launch that they invented three different ones.
Two: planning, while everyone else is talking about you
A planning application is a public conversation and you are in it from the day it is validated. Committees read, residents' groups organise, and the local paper runs whichever image it can find.
Commission at this stage: the name and a first identity, a consultation-ready visual set, and the boards. The hoarding goes up here too, and it is the single most-seen piece of marketing the scheme will ever have. People walk past it twice a day for two years.
The reason to name the scheme before planning rather than after is that the application is the first time the name appears in public, in a document that stays searchable for a decade. Changing it afterwards means the thing people found first is not the thing you are selling.
Three: launch, the twelve weeks that set the price
This is where the money goes and where the sequence matters most. Everything commissioned now has to come out of one brief or it will not match.
A launch is: the full CGI set, exterior and interior, built from approved drawings. A film, long for the sales suite and short for the feed. The brochure and price list. The microsite. The campaign to put a registered list on it. The agent briefed on all of it before they take the first call.
Run those in parallel from one position and one palette and they argue the same case. Run them in series, each ordered when the last one is late, and you get a brochure in one style, a site in another, and a film that was shot before the interiors were specified.
The reservation pace set in the first eight weeks is the number everything else is judged against, including by your funder. It is worth over-resourcing.
Four: build, the eighteen months nobody plans for
A registered list goes cold in silence. The build is the long middle where there is nothing new to say and the people who registered at launch quietly stop opening the emails.
Commission a monthly shoot day. It is the cheapest thing on this page and it does three jobs: it proves the programme is real to anyone deciding whether you will finish, it gives the social campaign something true to post, and it builds the progress library you will want at completion and cannot go back for. A frame and a crane disappear. Nobody has ever regretted photographing the week the top floor went on.
This is also when the show home gets specified, and the show home is a photography set as much as a sales tool. Being in that conversation early is worth more than being handed the keys afterwards.
Five: completion, and the thing that outlives the scheme
The last unit completes and the scheme identity has done its job. What carries forward is the developer brand, and the only way to carry anything forward is to have photographed the finished building properly before the hoarding came down and the dressing went back to the hire company.
Commission the completion shoot, the resident and buyer films if the sales period gave you anyone willing, and the case study. Scheme three goes to market with two finished buildings behind it or it goes to market with drawings. That difference is worth more than anything on this list, and it is the only one you cannot buy later.
What it costs to run it backwards
Two renders instead of one. A brochure reprinted because the name changed. A film shot in a specification that was value-engineered out. A completion with no photography because the budget was spent at launch and nobody left anything for the end.
Every one of those is a real invoice we have seen. None of them is a design problem.
Straight answers
Asked and answered
- When should we start marketing an off-plan scheme?
- At planning, not at practical completion. The hoarding, the consultation boards and whichever image ends up in the officer's report are all marketing whether you treat them as such or not. The practical trigger is the moment you have drawings good enough to name the thing, because naming is what everything downstream inherits.
- What is the most expensive mistake at launch?
- Commissioning CGI before the scheme has a name and a palette. The images come back in the visualiser's house style, the identity arrives six weeks later in a different one, and either the brochure looks like two schemes or you pay for the renders again. It is the single most common rework we are called in to fix.
- How long does a launch take to put together?
- Twelve weeks is comfortable for naming, identity, a first CGI set, a film and a microsite, running in parallel rather than one after another. Eight is possible and means fewer rounds of amends, not less work. Under six you are buying assets rather than a launch, and they will not match.
Put your next development in frame
Send us the site, the programme and the sales target. We will come back with what we would shoot, what we would name it, and what it costs.