A picture is worth a thousand words, but the right three-dimensional rendering of a new real estate development might be worth millions of dollars.
More detailed than architectural drawings, with more life than dry floor plans, these illustrations of lobbies, rooftop views and apartments that don’t yet exist represent a critical link in the chain that starts with a developer writing a check, continues with an architect creating plans and ends with a marketing group signing sales contracts.
Steven Charno, vice president of Douglaston Development, the development affiliate of Levine Builders, says investment in high-quality renderings has become the standard as opposed to the exception for pricey properties.
“Part of our development budget is a marketing budget and one of the line items in the marketing budget now absolutely includes renderings for both rentals and condominiums,” he says.
The demand for artistic renderings is providing steady and welcomed work for professional renderers. The New York Society of Renderers includes some 50 members, many graduates of some of the best art and design schools in the country, specializing in everything from renderings using marker, watercolor, and colored pencil to those generated by computer.
Kim Cooper, sales and marketing manager for Dreampix Design, which specializes in computer-generated renderings, believes three-dimensional renderings are easy for non-professionals to understand.
“Most buyers do not understand how to read floor plans, so 3-D images are something that most buyers understand because it looks like a photograph,” says Cooper.
Marketers of new developments understand how these bridge the gap between an architect’s vision and a resident’s reality. Highlyann Krasnow, executive vice president for The Developers Group, which specializes in new developments, believes artistic renderings are the only way to show a buyer what they are purchasing and “prove” the space, especially when a building’s façde and interior are still under construction.
She says that at 30 Bayard Street, one of three buildings included in a high-end, luxury
condominium project underway overlooking McCarren Park in Williamsburg, renderings have made the final vision come alive.
“The units are designed by Andres Escobar, all with magnificent views of the city, but without renderings, I really do not have much. Every picture in the marketing package besides shots of the neighborhood is a rendering. It is 100 percent critical to selling,” Krasnow says.
Because technology has advanced, these deal-closing aids can be generated on computers, though there’s a dedicated faction of both artists and marketers who opt for hand-drawn work.
Dreampix has offices in both New York and Korea allowing renderers to work on executing images practically around the clock.
“Clients usually provide us with plans in AutoCAD including elevations, reflected ceiling plans, material finish plans, sample images of light fixtures and furniture as well as actual material samples or scans of the actual materials,” Cooper says.
Matthew Bannister, one of the founders of dbox, which produced the renderings for the Freedom Tower at Ground Zero, the World Trade Center Memorial and the celebrity-filled 165 Charles Street condo tower in the West Village, has seen a demand for his company’s product skyrocket.
“The buyer demands it, they want to see real views, something that is realistic of what they are buying,” says Bannister. The renderings for the Richard Meier-designed 165 Charles Street featured what dbox calls a “photomontage.”
“Photomontage is when we use actual photographs and merge them with computer generated images. It actually creates something that is very believable very realistic,” explains Bannister.
It usually takes about a month for a company to execute a rendering package of eight to 10 renderings.
“We can work from any input -hand drawings, sketches. We have one client who works in Microsoft Word, providing us with only boxes and lines. Some clients just verbalize what they want,” according to co-owner Slava Priborkan.
Concept Visualization on average charges from $1,000 to $2,000 for an interior rendering and is capable of turning renderings around over a weekend.
Don Dietsche, vice president of the The New York Society of Renderers, says there’s a roughly even split between practioners using computers and creating images by hand. “We mostly started out as hand renderers, (but) now there is a pretty big split between hand and computer renderings,” he says. “With the housing boom, there have been a lot of brokers who have been contacting us, especially in the last two years or so.”
Louise Phillips Forbes, a senior vice president with Halstead Property, says choosing the by-hand route depends on the project. For one of the recent high-end buildings she marketed, she decided hand renderings were the right fit.
“We initially started out wanting computer generated renderings,” she says, “but I made a very conscious choice to use hand renderings because across the board they felt much warmer.
“The computer, while it is quite exacting and realistic, there is a coldness and lack of depth,” Forbes says. “I feel hand renderings can often communicate much more the modern, classic style of a building.”