Today’s residential buyer expects a rich digital experience when shopping for their next home, and if you won’t give it to them, they’ll find someone who will.
Providing potential clients the ability to compare unit attributes and view floorplans with the tap of their finger is no longer a luxury; it’s the bare minimum for professional developers, property owners and marketers looking to close deals. That’s why real estate marketing veteran Laurent Cardinal created Planpoint, an easy-to-use, fully-integrated software that brings your portfolio’s web presence into the 21st Century quickly and efficiently. TRD sat down with Cardinal to learn the inspiration behind Planpoint and where he’s taking the software as a service in the near future.
The New Digital Sales Standard
Cardinal has been at the forefront of digital real estate marketing since 2013, when he founded his award-winning boutique firm Agence SIX in Montreal. As more buyers began researching potential home purchases online instead of walking into a sales office, developers and brokers started putting more information about the units they were selling on their websites, and the now-familiar list of units sorted by square footage, number of bedrooms, or price with links to a .pdf of the layout became common.
Keeping this information up-to-date became a major headache for the Agence SIX team.
“My main concern was keeping the plans and availability up to date on all of our different projects’ websites,” recalls Cardinal, who explains that, before Planpoint, the information on each project’s page had to be manually updated by a programmer.
This manual process created numerous issues, not least of which was outdated information on a project’s website creating unrealistic expectations for buyers. Cardinal remembers clients calling him up “screaming” because they had raised the price on a unit but the change had not yet been reflected on their website, forcing them to make a deal with a potential buyer who had seen their desired unit listed online for as much as $50,000 less than its true price.
The solution was obvious, but would take some work. Cardinal set out to design and build a bridge between brokers’ CRM and their client-facing website, and in the process, Planpoint was born.
Making Digital Marketing Easier
When Planpoint v1 launched in 2020, it provided clients with the ability to give buyers up-to-date unit listing and layout information on their website with fast and user-friendly backend updating. The release couldn’t have come at a better time: while the trend toward buyers investigating listings online was fully established by this time, the pandemic shifted all buyers into the digital space, making websites with accurate and robust listings a necessity.
“March of 2020 came around and everyone was scrambling, asking ‘How do we sell these condos?’” says Cardinal.
With the wind at their back, the Planpoint team began adding features at a breakneck pace to meet the growing demand for advanced digital listings. Their first major addition was the ability to integrate 3d unit tours into the plan viewer, combining two existing features in a single streamlined feature.
“That was a really big request,” he recalls. “If you’re looking at the plan for Unit 101, you’re about to visit that unit, virtually, right in that unit page.”
Cardinal stresses that his team didn’t invent any of these features, but rather they combined them into a plug and play system that was available to clients as a subscription service with a wealth of documentation and tech support on the Planpoint side. Instead of developers and marketers spending five figures (or more) on bespoke solutions, Planpoint offers them a ready-to-use version at a fraction of the price.
Always Evolving
As its list of users ballooned, Planpoint poured resources into innovating new features, which were then rolled out to existing customers at no additional cost. From Next-Gen 3D tours and more efficient lead gen systems to a mobile app release to CRM integration with commonly-used platforms including RealPage, SalesForce, and Spark, Planpoint continued to evolve every few months to meet its clients’ ever-evolving business needs.
“Pretty much everything that we do comes from a customer,” says Cardinal. “They’ll say, ‘I absolutely need this,’ and we’ll add it to the pipeline and build it.”
As part of an effort to democratize access to the plan viewing tech that has become crucial for all residential marketing, Planpoint’s pricing model adjusts based on the user’s needs. Because plans are priced by how many units are available in a project and not on the raw number of units in the building, the cost goes down as more units are sold or rented out, keeping operational overhead low without sacrificing the features a property owner relies on to fill vacancies down the road. Whether you’re selling a whole building in pre-sale or trying to fill out a few vacancies every year, Planpoint has a plan that will fall within your marketing budget.
Going Big
While Planpoint’s main plan viewing tech continues to evolve, Cardinal showed us two new additions that expand the platform’s reach into the real world.
“Projects are seeing more demand at the sales office as people come back,” explains Cardinal. “It’s a Windows application that you install on your own hardware in your sales office.”
While major luxury developers will spend six figures on customized 3D renderings that show off their buildings in Unreal Engine, the vast majority of buildings don’t need something quite as flashy. Planpoint for Windows gives marketers the ability to show potential buyers plans and 3D tours on a touchscreen in their sales office for a sliver of the cost of a customized solution.
“They need those tools in the sales office to look sharp, to be different from the competition,” says Cardinal.
The most recent Planpoint update that Cardinal showed us was Enterprise, which is aimed at developers who manage properties across a wide geographic area. In the same way that a plan viewing page has become an expected part of an individual building’s website, a map with pins representing a developer or management company’s many projects has become a required aspect of their sites. Enterprise is a free solution for Planpoint users that gives them the ability to create just such a map, complete with all the bells and whistles like dynamic centering based on IP address and filters based on unit type, with the same ease that they have come to expect when working with Planpoint’s plan viewer.
“It encompasses everything that they have in their portfolio,” says Cardinal. “Developers love it.”
In the end, all of these new features drive more users to the Planpoint ecosystem, giving them the ability to deliver the kind of digital experience their customers have come to expect.
“It makes no sense that only big projects with big budgets could have plan viewers,” he says. “Everybody can afford one with our technology.”
To learn more, visit planpoint.com.