IN the marketing of any product, packaging is important as this is an integral marketing strategy to glamourise a product to attract the potential buyers’ attention. This applies to property buying as well.
Realising that potential buyers and investors may sometimes be tempted to book a unit on the spot, developers have since 2010 increasingly put in place grand sales galleries, making them mega size and designed to reflect the concept of their projects and corporate values.
Furthermore, when China property developers entered into the Malaysian market, they raised property galleries to a whole new level.
Using sales galleries as the platform to impress and lure buyers a well as investors, the developers attract these potential buyers by overwhelming them with dazzling displays of larger-than-life scale models and show units that display attractive interior designs, fittings and furnishings.
For more reputable developers have invested in making their galleries take up enough space to house dozens of apartments just to impress buyers and investors. Thus, millions of ringgit were spent every year on property galleries as developers banked on the impressive structures to pull in potential buyers and investors.
Is it really necessary to spend so much cost on building majestic sales galleries in this era of digitalisation especially when all these structures would be torn down once the development project is completed?
With the pandemic having changed almost everything – from the way we live to doing business – are sales galleries still relevant? With the ongoing movement control orders (MCOs) and lockdowns imposed, sales galleries are no longer deemed a necessity given potential home buyers would have no chance to step into them.
Being ahead of time, Malaysian property developers – even before the pandemic – have also been pushing the boundaries with the introduction of virtual reality and augmented reality technology to showcase their virtual showrooms.
“As this technology becomes more advanced, there is no need for large-scale galleries as this technology allows us to bring the ‘showroom’ anywhere,” UEM Sunrise Bhd’s former managing director and CEO Anwar Syahrin Abdul Ajib told FocusM in 2019.
Anwar added that as technology becomes more advanced, there is no need for large-scale galleries as technology has allowed developers to bring their ‘showrooms’ anywhere’.
In fact, the pandemic has given virtual gallery a push as more and more developers are leveraging the advancement of technology. Gone are the days of 2D floor plans. Now, potential home buyers can walk in their future home virtually and explore its surrounding in full 360°even before it is being built.
So will virtual galleries replace physical galleries in the post pandemic era? Well, this will all boil down to whether buyers and investors are more drawn to technology or the sheer size of the physical displays. – Aug 26, 2021
Photo credit: DBI Concept
