Sponsored content written by Alex Shkliarska on behalf of ArchiCGI
My first lease-up was a twelve-storey rental in the east end of Toronto. It was just under 150 suites, and I went into it thinking renters would act like condo buyers with smaller budgets. I was wrong about that within roughly a week. The owner wanted the leasing office open eight months before the first move-ins, so for most of that winter, what I had to show people was a muddy fenced lot, a crane, a construction hoarding with the building's name on it in big orange letters, and a laptop.
Pretty, and no help at all
The developer had paid for a handful of images back when the project was going through planning, and they were mostly meant for investors. There was the tower at dusk from across the street, all glowing windows. There was the lobby, double height, with a light fixture that looked like a bunch of brass spaghetti. And there was the rooftop terrace, where people in linen outfits held drinks in front of the skyline, which I'm fairly sure nobody in the leasing office had ever done on a Toronto rooftop in April.
Then a couple in their late twenties sat down across from me, looked at the spaghetti light for maybe two seconds, and asked where the fridge went. After that it was the bed. Would a queen fit with a nightstand on each side, or would one of them be climbing over the other every night? Was the closet a real closet? Was the washer and dryer stacked in a cupboard in the hall, and was it going to be loud? Where do you keep a bike? Where do you keep four pairs of winter boots and the salt-stained mat they sit on? I had no images that answered any of it, so I started drawing furniture onto printed floorplans with a ballpoint pen while people watched me, which is about as far from luxury leasing as you can get.
A second set, made for people who'd live there
Before spring, the owner agreed to pay for new images, this time of the suites rather than the building. We hired a studio offering 3D rendering services in Toronto, and honestly the brief I sent them was mostly a list of questions people had asked me at the desk, cleaned up a bit.
Three layouts covered most of the building: a junior one-bed, a one-bed plus den and a two-bed corner. For each one, I asked for the view from just inside the front door, because that's what you actually see on moving day with a box in your arms.
The studio built every suite from the architect's drawings at real size, and I was a bit of a pain about the furniture. I wanted an average-sized queen bed, a standard-sized sofa and a table that seats four, not those spindly little show-home chairs that make a room look twice as big. I also asked for the finishes they were really putting in, the actual laminate, cabinet doors, and the fridge, since in a rental there's no upgrade package anyone can buy and I didn't want to show one.
The view, and a parking lot
Views were the hard part. Things get built fast here, and the empty lot next door can be a crane by next year, so I got pretty careful about what we put outside the windows. The studio used photos taken at the right heights for each floor, and for the lower suites we were straight with people: you're looking at the building next door and a parking lot that's zoned for something tall. I'd much rather someone pick a third-floor suite knowing that than move in on a grey February day and feel lied to every time they open the blinds.
The north-facing one-bed came out cool and calm, the south corner was bright, almost too bright in the afternoon, and showing both plainly meant fewer people asking to switch units six months later, which my property manager thanked me for more than once.
What tenants asked that I'd ask too
A lot of people browsing rental properties these days are looking at brand-new rental buildings, and friends ask me how to judge one from pictures. The tenant I think about most was a retired teacher who came in with a notebook. She asked whether the images displayed showed exactly the finishes she'd get, and when I said yes, she wrote it down and asked me to initial it, which I did. Then she asked for the floorplan of the specific suite I was offering, with measurements, and she sat there with a tape measure from her purse working out whether her late husband's armchair would fit by the window. It did, barely.
Another fellow, a software developer, cared about only two things: the view from his actual floor, not the one in the dusk picture, and where the bike room was and whether it cost extra. Good questions, all of them.
Keys
The first move-ins happened on a cold Saturday in early November. A nurse who'd signed for a junior one-bed on the fourth floor almost seven months before came through the door, dropped her bags and said it looked just like the picture saved on her phone, except her sofa was bigger.
I've done a few lease-ups since then, and that's still the reaction I'm hoping for. A rendering doesn't need to make a suite look like a hotel. It needs to let somebody choose their next home honestly while the drywall is still going up.