The client. HanseProp Entwicklungs GmbH, a Hamburg property developer with 42 apartments to sell and, at the time we started, a Revit file and a hole in the ground. Completion: 2028.
The challenge. How do you sell homes that won't exist for two years? Floor plans and watercolours work the way menus work — you can read about the meal, but you can't smell it. HanseProp wanted people to stand in the apartments, at the right hour, in the right light, and feel whether they could live there.
The approach. We built the entire building in Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen lighting, from their Revit model, and put the tour in their sales container on the actual building site — visitors stepped out of the headset and looked at the hole the apartment would rise out of, which is the best sales prop in the industry. Every unit in four finish variants (Nordic, Industrial, Classic, and one the sales team called "Wellness" and Ines called "spa lobby"), with real light simulation for morning, evening and overcast. Plus a downpour mode, because one sales director kept asking what it'd look like in bad weather. All 42 units sold before the topping-out ceremony. We're not saying it was all the VR. But it wasn't not the VR.
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5, Lumen lighting
- Scope
- 42 units, 4 finish variants, 3 weather states
- Runtime
- 04:03 guided tour per unit, or free-roam
- Result
- Sold out 3 months pre-completion