(Webinar Summary) Condo Finish Selection Reimagined: Boosting Efficiency with Online Design Centers

During a recent webinar, our President, Mr. Frank Guido, delved into the transformative journey of visualization and configurators within the real estate sector. Drawing from over 32 years of industry expertise, he shed light on the formidable challenges encountered by production builders and unveiled the profound impact that visualization technology can bring to the field.

1. The Evolution of Technology:

• The speaker shared their journey, starting with renderings and virtual tours on VHS tapes in 1991.
• Virtual Design Center (VDC) technology was introduced in 1995, enabling online selections.
• The latest technology, based on the Unreal platform, offers high-end graphics.

2. Challenges in Condo Selection:

• Establishing a physical design center can be costly, with some reaching up to $4 million.
• Maintaining staff and operational costs for design centers pose a significant overhead.
• Buyers often struggle to visualize condo finishes, making decision-making difficult.
• Non-local buyers, including investors, face inconvenience when making selections from afar.

3. Millennial Homebuying Trends:

• Millennials are increasingly dominating the real estate market, with Gen Zers following.
• 80% of millennials prefer online shopping, including home buying.
• 59% of millennials are confident about buying a home online, a growing trend.
• Transparency in pricing, mortgage impact, and deposits is essential for buyer confidence.

4. The Value of Visualization:

• Photos and renderings are highly valuable to buyers, aiding in decision-making.
• Visualization tools create convenience, allowing buyers to explore properties remotely.

5. VDC Packages for Condo Selections:

• VDC packages cater to condo projects with fewer options.
• Developers can manage selections and send invitations to buyers through a dashboard.
• Buyers can customize color packages for different rooms and review their selections.
• The entire process, including payment and document signing, can be done online.

6. Case Studies:

• Successful case studies highlighted the effectiveness of online condo selections:
• 95% of buyers completed selections online, generating substantial revenue.
• Chateau Condo achieved 120% of its targeted revenue and improved its Net Promoter Score.
• A 2-tower condo project with 1,200 units saved over $1 million in construction costs and time.

“Digital online studios are becoming more of an expectation for homebuyers because of the increase in visualization tools available in other industries.”
“Transparency is important. Showing the price, mortgage impact, and deposit helps people get comfortable. Nothing is hidden, everything is clear.”
“If you can get your project ahead of schedule, that can save you $1,000,000 in carrying costs.”

If you want to see more information using this technology, feel free to give us a call. We’d love to give you a demo, and of course, you can actually try this. We’ll give you a link where you can try this online yourself.

Andrew Lett:

So good morning, everyone, and welcome to today’s webinar and condo finishing selections reimagine boosting efficiency with online design centers. I’m Andrew. I’m the sales team here at areas interactive either host for today. Before we get started, let me set the stage. Allow me to present our touru in the field of real estate technology and innovation, President and CEO of areas Interactive. This is Mr Frank, widow. He brings over 30 years of experience in the field of real estate technology. Years of experience allowed him to lend a lot of weight to this discussion. So without further ado, I’ll pass the discussion on to Frank.

Frank Guido:

Great introduction. Welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining us. I think this is gonna be the first of many different webinars that we have set. We started off with an agenda to help share as much knowledge as we can in the industry. We haven’t done this for over 30 years. We have a lot of experience using technology to help sell and market houses and condos across North America. With that, let me share my screen, and I’m hoping that everyone can learn something from today’s presentation. So condo finishes. We have a headquarters in the Toronto GTA market that has a tremendous amount of condominiums being built in the area, and we put together this presentation to help any developers and builders using condos to understand some of the technology around helping to selection specifically for condos. And we’ll have other series for other different products as well, but this one is constrained, not a how to do condo selections very fast and efficiently. So a little bit about us, and we’ve been around since 1991. This is our 33rd year in business. We have a tremendous amount of experience, and we first started off with renderings and virtual tours done on VHS tape. So that was the origins of where we started our first technology VDC’s. We started in 1995, so we almost have 30 years, and VDC is just an acronym for Virtual Design Center. Design center, whatever you want to call it, helps people be able to do selections online. Yeah, and that started in ’95. So we have almost 30 years of experience putting this technology together for customers. In the first one was done in Flash, and we’ve done everything and anything in their latest technology that’s based on Unreal platform, which is one of the highest-end graphic engines in the business today. So let’s start by talking about some of the challenges in that field there’s a face today, and then we’re gonna talk about some of the industry trends. We’re gonna look at some of the actual software, how it works, some case studies, and we’ll have some question and answer question Q&A session at the end. So what are some of the challenges? You know, the biggest one, especially when you’re building a new condo and you may not have a physical design center set up anywhere, is actually building one. It’s creating one building. One can be very, very expensive. You know something like a 4000 square foot, half-decent, a design center. A builder can spend $1,000,000 putting that together very easily with some builders have spent three $4 million putting together some really nice design centers, so they can be expensive. And they’re expensive to staff and run, right? Like you build a 4000 square foot design center, you’re gonna have to have a team of five or six people inside there on a permanent basis, and depending on how many units you build, it can be quite costly and you have this fixed overhead. As for the consumers on the consumer side, buyers struggle to visualize and see what their products are gonna look like. They can be very challenging for people can be very difficult for them to understand what it’s actually looked like. ‘Cause when you’re looking at these little samples, sometimes even just looking at a little sample of the tile, you don’t know how the pattern is going to stretch across an entire room, so it can be quite challenging. Visualization can now help with that, and then you have non-local buyers. You know, you have investors from overseas, other provinces, other states that bought a condo or home and now they have to make selections. It’s very time-consuming for someone to get on the plane, fly in or drive a couple of hours to this design center to actually make those selections. So it’s very inconvenient. This helps a lot with those other state out of non-local buyers to make those selections very efficiently. Just really quick. Wanna talk about some industry stats and where the market is going? This is a little chart that displays the different categories. Just for reference, you know what would the age groups between millennials and and boomers, etc., but what’s really interesting is when I go to the next slide here. Uh, the shared buyers and sellers by generation. So millennials right now are about 30% of the buying, buying your home force right now and it’s only growing and behind them. You got the Gen Z Ers, which are not quite in the market. You had or just started getting to market and that’s gonna be a much larger percentage of buyers. And you can see down when you’re looking at boomers, they’re still a very large portion, but they’re less about buying and more selling. So they’re selling right now more than they’re actually buying, and that is most likely because of age. People retiring, they’re downsizing. You know, they’re. Possibly Red Dean, etcetera, etcetera. So there’s more selling going on than actually buying than that age demographic. So when we look at some of the millennial stats, 80% of millennials do most of the shopping online. That’s incredible. I’m not a millennial. I’m older than that, but I probably do 95% of my shopping online, and I would say my family, most of my family, 80 or 90%. It changed a lot after the pandemic. Forced everyone to purchase more online, and the convenience never went away. It’s easy for someone to buy clothing online, try it on, like it, send it back. It’s become easy, and most people are comfortable doing it. As you can see, 80% of millennials, 59% of millennials said they would be confident buying a home online or virtually. 39% said they would be comfortable buying a home online, and that is a growing statistic. If you looked at it five years ago, it was probably close to under 5%. I think that trend will continue as more millennials get comfortable with big purchases. This is a great line from one of our clients. Digital online studios are becoming more of an expectation for homebuyers because of the increase in visualization tools available in other industries. Today, if you’re looking at purchasing a car, every manufacturer has online tools to view the car, build it online, see pricing. You don’t have to go to the sales office or the car center. You can do that online. For example, Tesla has done an incredible job selling cars online through satellite locations. The main thing is convenience. It allows people to do this from anywhere, giving them control. 50% of buyers had concerns or felt uncertainty in the home buying process, a large number. Transparency is important. Showing the price, mortgage impact, and deposit helps people get comfortable. Nothing is hidden, everything is clear. 87% of buyers found photos and renderings most valuable on a website. This makes a world of difference in helping people understand what a property will look like compared to simple color boards. It helps them make decisions quickly. Let me show you the application. We have different product variants. VDC packages are for projects with fewer options, primarily condo developments. VDC Pro is for more extensive selections. Some clients have billions of color combinations. VDC Pro also offers headset options. Today, we’re talking about VDC packages. Developers have a dashboard to manage selections and can send invites to buyers. Buyers receive an email, click to complete selections. They can choose color packages for different rooms, and there are add-on options. After selecting, they review their cart and can pay with a credit card. The money goes directly to the builder. Then, they can create a DocuSign agreement online. The workflow can be online or hybrid, depending on the builder’s preference. Once the buyer signs, the agreement goes to the designer or signing officer for review. If there’s any issues that can deal with them, otherwise they can sign and sign off on the contract and it’s completely rectified. And you know that dashboard helps. This is a sample report. You can look at different reports that the system generates in terms of what was purchased, how much was purchased by different per suite or for the entire organizations. There are many different reports, some Confederate and just one more point on the design or the dashboard will allow you know, if you sent out a project. I think whatever things is, can you do 300 units in 30 days? Absolutely. I could send out. Technically you could send out all your selections today, and if everybody logged in right now, if I sent out an email and everybody logged in within 1015 minutes, you can have your building done. That’s not reality. People are. Some are gonna go to spam, some are away on vacation. The designer, who has a back-end dashboard that can take a look at who’s logged in, who hasn’t logged in, did they do their selections? Maybe their emails went to spam. So you have to pick up, call them and say, hey, we sent you an email the other day, we see you’re logged in. Can you? We need your selections. And yeah, you might have a bad email address. I mean that’s more of the reality, but technically you could have I could send out an email today and have everything completed today. The software supports that. It really logistically, you’re probably take you 30 days, and some builders like to do a floor at a time, especially first time you’ve done this. You know you send out the 1st floor or second floor. Make sure that everything goes smooth. You don’t know how many people are gonna wanna make selections or come in, so that’s typically how they go off. But yes, you can do it very quickly. So let’s let’s run through a couple of case studies and trying to go through this quickly. So we had some time at the end to answer anybody’s questions trying to be respective everyone’s time. You know, one of our clients 600 unit condo, 95% of buyers completed their selections fully online. That’s an incredible number. 95% of buyers, 15% of them purchased the $5000 upgraded package, which helped generate 450K in revenue, and the selections were done in four weeks. So 600 units, 4 weeks in. Let’s say you’re at the 30-day mark. This is one of our real clients’ real statistics. Another one of her clients, you know, Chateau Condo 100 per 20% of the targeted revenue. So they had the rest of it, of how much revenue they gonna generate prior to engaging and using this technology. And they did 120% of the revenue was also fantastic, is they did 110% of their Net Promoter score. So that really helped them in the net. Promoter Score is very important to its builder, and it helped achieve 100% more of what they actually expected in their network score. And they saved 2/3 of their time. A lot of people not having to go into the design center, and some of our clients do things hybrid people are allowed to go into designs and you may have to book an appointment. They can actually touch and feel, talk to a designer, and then you go home and complete your selections online. So there’s lots of different ways that you can actually accomplish this. Another case study, 2 tower condo Project 1200 units, 80% of people selected made their selections online. I think all the selections were processed in 60 days. No design center was built. Saved more than $1,000,000 in construction costs, and the balance of the appointments were handled by one designer, so that’s an incredible cost savings, especially when they didn’t have an existing design center. They could put him through by doing this online; they were actually able to process everything. And one of the benefits they had is their construction was ahead of schedule. If you can get your project ahead of schedule, that can save you $1,000,000 in carrying costs. So that’s a high-level presentation today. I mean, we’re gonna have other ones about doing different products as well. If anybody scans this QR code, you can set up an online 101 presentation if you wanna meet with us to go into more detail. You could do that as well. Otherwise, at this point, I’m happy to try to answer anybody’s questions. Andrew, do we have any open questions right now?

Andrew Lett:

So we have one here just about non-local buyers. The limitations and constraints of using an online design center when dealing with non-local buyers. Are there any limitations we should be aware of?

Frank Guido:

Uh, no. Well, when you saw some of those stats, 88 percent, 95% of people, it doesn’t matter if you’re local or you’re remote. It’s essentially the same thing as long as someone has good Internet access. I mean, even then, for VDC packages, an access is not even that critical. I think the most important thing is, you know what monitor are they looking at in terms of the colors themselves. But there really is no difference whether you’re local or non-local. Go where you are, it’s extremely powerful. You get the most benefit for non-local buyers because if someone’s in Hong Kong and they wanna make a selection, a lot of times they’ll send the proxy, they’ll get the realtor system, a lot of someone to be a proxy to make their selections. Here, the person who can actually do it. So there’s a lot of benefits for non-local.

Andrew Lett:

Speaking of a non-local buyer, we have a John from Michigan here. John, do you wanna ask your question? You can turn on your mic. John Goodman, did I just turn off your mic there? Maybe you could type in the question John, and I’ll answer it.

Frank Guido:

Any other questions that you have for us?

Andrew Lett:

Well, Frank, I think there was one question that you didn’t really address that a lot of people have always been very curious about when we have sales meetings, and really that’s how long does it take to implement these? The software for a standard client that’s doing a big project.

Frank Guido:

It’s a great question. Timing for a condo project like this 300 units, it’s usually what we tell our clients is 8 to 10 weeks to implement. It could be less, it could be a little bit more, but usually around 8 to 10 weeks. And, you know, subject to how many selections and many packages they have. Most of the time, to be honest with you, is the design team still making decisions on how many packages should we have, what are the finishes should we have, there might be some value engineering that the builder has to do. So that typically takes the most amount of time, but if the client had, you know, this is it, this is my selections. These are what I wanna do. You can easily get this done in 8 to 10 weeks.

Andrew Lett:

OK, alright. So essentially, once they’ve communicated all their designs and what goes into packages, then 8 to 10 weeks from there, we can get it up and running.

Frank Guido:

Right, yeah.

Andrew Lett:

OK, we have another interesting question. Regarding… So can software be integrated with other existing tools or systems used by condos now? So let’s say we’re using an ERP system. How does that work, Frank?

Frank Guido:

Yeah, absolutely. So you can I am. Uh, yep, they’re to me the simple way. Where you just export your data and import it. Or you can do API integration so all our technologies all have open APIs that we can communicate with almost any other platform that also has open APIs. So we can import customer data. It can also, you know, your customers are the buyers, they can be imported with the just some imported tools that we have or there can be an API integration. So for customers that are doing this on a large basis or they’re doing many developments, we typically would do an API decoration with them. Other ones we can actually do that customization. So we’re completely open for that.

Andrew Lett:

And does that have implications for the project times?

Frank Guido:

Uh, it may. It may depend on what we’re integrating and how complex and whether the developer has already API and whether we have a May. It may impact the time. Yes, it might. It might be able to be done, it really depends. We would have to really understand the scope and what’s the platform to really answer that question accurately.

Andrew Lett:

Yeah, every situation’s a little bit different than that one, depending on the system they’re using. Using but OK, so we got the question from John here. He says the product is great and very visual biggest challenge he has is with his current vendors is setting up the visualization tool, and he said it’s a tremendous amount of work. I can definitely attest to that with our clients. There’s a lot that goes into it, so maybe you could speak on that a little bit.

Frank Guido:

Uh, yeah, that’s a great point. It can be quite involved. We have spent, you know, we’re doing this for 30 years, so we’ve really optimized the process, and we have a very large back end database of tens of thousands of 3D material-ready products that go into the system. So if a developer says, hey, I’ve got 3000 materials, I mean typically in these VDC packages which is today’s call, yeah, you’re looking at, you know, 100 or less materials. So it’s typically not a big problem. It’s rarely a problem for us. It’s it’s. This is typically really simple, especially become more complicated when you get into thousands of materials. And because of the platform that we have built with all these tens of thousands of already produced products, it actually expedites its speeds up the process, and nothing gets the. The technology here is all real-time rendering, so there’s no preprocessing. So if I created a A a particular tile that’s already in the database for six months, and the and the and the builder says hey, I wanna add this material if it’s in our database all I gotta do is look it up, hit link and boom it’s in their system, it’s being rendered and processed right away. There is there can be a lot of work to set up initially, but then the process can be very quickly thereafter like we have one client that you know it took eight months to a year to get everything set up and digitized, but they can spin out of building in 30 days, 30 to 45 days, then get the next building going. Once you’ve gone through that initial ohh effort, it can be done, but again we DC packages is typically much faster and easier simpler. We typically don’t have those kinds of problems with this product here because of the number of options.

Andrew Lett:

So this this this is more of an Ala carte issue. And but when things go, you know, let’s say they need to change things up for their selections. They’ve made a, you know, there’s a supply chain problem. How long does it take to get new skews up, essentially onto the product?

Frank Guido:

Umm. If it’s already in our library, the builder can go in, add the material, hit search. If it’s in our library link, it’s done like instantly. If it’s not a library, we need to add it and that you know, could be a day, two days tops. It’s not a long process. But the builder can actually start selling that product right away. It just won’t be visually displayed inside, so if they have a new countertop they could start to sell it right away. They can see the 2D images and they can start to sell it immediately, and then once we’ve produced that countertop material it can, it will start to be rendered visually immediately. The there is no additional work, it’s just we add it to the library and links to the products you with developer creates and it generates right away and it’s all web-based software. So soon as we updated one place, every single location that has this. Has this done?

Andrew Lett:

And so John has some continuing questions here just about our existing relationships with color and out Ansari tiles etcetera and maybe just to clarify this, you can speak to our our damn what that means and you know how that works with popular products.

Frank Guido:

It’s a damn it. Our damn isn’t a bad word. Stands for Digital asset management. It’s just an acronym for. It’s just an acronym for the for the platform where all the digital assets are maintained. That’s what it stands for. So we have a very large library.

Frank Guido:

We have products of both those manufacturers that it’s impossible for us or anybody to have everything. It’s just can’t be done because manufacturer constantly introducing new products and again, it’s impossible to have everything that they have. But as a client requests and they call their introduced, you know, 10 new faucets, usually most of the good manufacturers actually have those already in 3D. We basically have to download them, process them, bring them into our platform, and again in a, in a day or two days, they’re up and running. Hasn’t really been a major issue for us. It’s usually where we have the biggest problems when introducing product. Is it the manufacturer doesn’t have good digital assets, they don’t have good photos or renderings of their products. Some do a fantastic job, and some don’t. We already know who don’t. And then when as soon as a client says, “Ohh, we’re getting, you know, we need tiles from company X,” we’re like, “OK, we’re in the physical samples because their digital photography is horrible, and it’ll be misrepresentation if we use it and then others. They take the time to do it properly and it’s like, “Yep, we’re confident that we could use their digital assets because they take the time to do a really good job.”

Andrew Lett:

With them.

Frank Guido:

And because it’s online and there’s nothing to download, it becomes really, really, really fast and easy for and comfortable for a consumer to use. You can design device all our different platforms VDC Packages Pro except for VR. Obviously, you gotta have a headset for that, but it can be done online and it in seconds. Right, you can actually open it up and there’s nothing to download. It’s extremely quick. We’ve spent an enormous amount of time to make that process as efficient and quick as possible.

Andrew Lett:

I have. I want to respect everyone’s time here, but I wanna just a question that always does come up and let’s say you want to do an initial investment. What are the figures that you need to take into consideration and what does that look like?

Frank Guido:

So really see packages, you know, all in. I mean, there’s cost to produce the graphics, there’s cost to produce the materials, there’s some setup work, and there’s training that happens with the customer. And then there’s the software license itself. So there are like 5 different things that contribute to the price and the cost of this. A rule of thumb for VDC packages is around $100 per door. When it works out to, it can be a little bit less, it can be a little bit more, but if you use that as a rule of thumb, all and that’s typically what you would cost to set up a VDC packages. Yeah, some we’ve done in the 70s and some were in 100 and 10120, but usually on average around $100 per door for all, and it really depends, right? Depends on how many renderings you wanna produce, how many you know. If you said it, I gotta do, you know, 10 kitchens and 10 bathrooms and 10 living rooms and 10 dining rooms. Yeah, there’s gonna be additional graphics cost, but the average typical surround that $100 mark.

Andrew Lett:

OK, alright. You’ve kind of gone overtime a little bit by about 8 minutes here and so I’d like to thank everyone who joined us today. Thank you for your questions and your participation and we’ll send out a link to the seminar to all the people who registered and please we love follow-up questions. We want your feedback, so please give us more information. Please look at your email box and you can’t. You’ll check what’s coming up. We have another webinar from standardization to spectacular the power of mass personalization for production builders, and we’ll discuss. Essentially, you know, becoming almost a more of a customized experience for a production building scenario. So really interesting kind of throwing a much wider net. We look forward to seeing everyone for that. Thank you, Frank, for leading us today and we’ll look forward to seeing everyone in the next time. Thank you very much for coming. Have a great day.