Making an off-plan property video without inventing the building

An off-plan property video can be made before a building exists, and it can be made honestly, but only from verified plans. Architectural drawings, written specifications, agreed finish schedules and the real site. Not an impression of what the scheme might feel like. Anything built that way carries a C grade, anything fully synthetic carries a D and says so on screen, and both are cheaper to defend than the alternative.

The cost starts at €299 for a single horizontal film, 30 to 45 seconds, mastered in 4K, typically working days. What follows is what that buys on a development that is currently a hole in the ground.

How do you make an off-plan property video if the building is not built?

You film three things that are real, in this order of preference.

The site and the surroundings. This is the part developers skip and buyers care about most. The street, the approach, the aspect, the walk to the station, the parade of shops, the park at the end. All of it exists today and all of it is photographable. A buyer purchasing off-plan is buying a location on trust; the location is the one thing you can show them without qualification.

Any built phase, show home or comparable completed scheme. If phase one is finished, phase one is real footage. A show home is real. Say which is which, and say when a shot is of a comparable unit rather than the unit being sold. That sentence costs nothing and removes the entire argument later.

A reconstruction from the drawings. Volumes, ceiling heights, window positions, orientation, the sequence of rooms. Built from the architect's plans and the specification, not from a mood board. This is grade C, and grade C means exactly one thing: every dimension in the shot came from a document somebody signed.

What you do not do is generate the building. A model asked to imagine a development will produce something beautiful, plausible and wrong, and the places it is wrong are the places a buyer will notice at handover.

What is allowed to appear in a reconstruction?

The rule is simple: if it is in the drawings or the specification, it can be in the film. If it is not, it cannot.

Allowed, given documentation:

• Room dimensions, ceiling heights, door and window positions
• Orientation and therefore the direction the light comes from
• The actual view from the actual window elevation, where it can be verified
• Specified finishes, taken from the finish schedule
• Landscaping that appears on the approved landscape plan

Not allowed, ever, regardless of who asks:

• A view invented because the real one is a car park
• Furniture, planting or fixtures not in the specification
• A room made larger, wider or brighter than the drawings state
• Any structure extended past what the plan shows

That last one has a specific technical form worth naming. A real photograph is never outpainted past its edge. If a frame of the site or the show home stops at the doorway, the film stops there too. Cropping in to reframe is the alternative, and it loses a little width rather than inventing architecture.

The same applies to facts. Floor area, price, completion date, service charge, distance to the station. Those come from your written material or they are not in the film. Nothing is measured off a drawing by eye and stated as fact.

Why not just use the developer's CGI?

Often you should, and if the CGI is good and honest it is a better asset than anything built from stills.

Two problems recur. The first is that development CGI is commissioned early, before value engineering, and the scheme quietly diverges from it. The balcony gets smaller, the glazing changes, the landscaping is reduced. The images stay in circulation. By launch, the marketing shows a building nobody is going to build.

The second is that CGI is almost never labelled. A buyer scrolling a portal cannot tell a photograph from a render at thumbnail size, and increasingly cannot tell at full size either. That ambiguity is fine right up until it is not, and where it stops being fine is a complaint about misdescription that names the selling agent.

A declared reconstruction fixes both. The grade sits with the shot, so anyone looking at the file knows what they are looking at. And because it is rebuilt from the current drawings rather than from marketing images produced eighteen months earlier, it reflects the scheme as consented rather than as hoped.

If your CGI is current and you are willing to label it, use it. We will cut it in as supplied material and grade it accordingly. Sending it is cheaper than rebuilding it.

Does a declared reconstruction actually sell?

The fear is always that the label undermines the sale. In practice the opposite is closer to true, for a reason specific to this buyer.

Somebody purchasing before completion is doing something uncomfortable. They are committing money to a thing they cannot stand in. Every piece of marketing that overpromises increases the suspicion they already have. A film that says plainly "this section is a reconstruction from the approved plans, this section is the real street, this is the completed show home" reads as a developer who is not hiding anything.

It also protects the reservation. Off-plan sales fall through at handover when the buyer's memory of the marketing does not match the room they are standing in. Every fall-through costs more than the entire marketing budget for that unit. A film that was accurate at launch is the cheapest insurance available against that conversation.

What does it cost for a development rather than one unit?

Developments buy volume, and the pricing reflects it.

A single horizontal film is €299, and €599 adds the vertical cut for social. The Three Property Collection is €1,299 — three properties, both films each, revisions included — which is the tier most schemes land in once each unit type, the common parts and the location film are counted separately.

Each film is 30 to 45 seconds, mastered in 4K, typically delivered within a few days, with the provenance record included. You own the films outright, with no licensing tail, which matters on a scheme that will be marketed for two or three years and then referenced in the next phase.

The finishing options are priced as finishing rather than as new productions: a 9:16 vertical cut comes with the €599 film and with the Collection and Private Client arrangements — usually the right pairing for the scheme-level film that has to carry location, amenity and unit types in one piece. A 48-hour rush comes with the Collection and Private Client arrangements, as do revisions.

No crew visits the site. The films are directed from the photographs, drawings and verified facts you already hold, which on a development is a large archive that has usually never been used for anything but a brochure.

A person reviews and approves every shot before delivery. Nothing is signed off by an automated check.

What should I send you at the start?

Send the architect's plans and elevations, the finish specification, the approved landscape plan, any site photography including drone stills, show home photography if it exists, footage of any completed phase, and the written particulars containing every number you want stated.

Send the things that are unresolved as well, and say so. A film that leaves out the undecided kitchen finish is stronger than one that guesses at it and has to be recut when the decision lands.