Today I gave a demo to a real estate company with hundreds of units for rent. They’re also developing three new buildings—big projects, all for lease. These are people who know what they’re doing. They understand scale. They understand return. They were engaged throughout, nodding as we showed them how our product works—how it gives renters the ability to virtually walk through any unit, see the exact layout, and even the precise view from the west corner at the 7th floor, not a generic one, or the best penthouse in the building.

They got it. Every one of them saw the value.

Until we showed them the price.

It wasn’t even high—about $5.50 per unit, per month. But you could feel the air shift. One of them said, “I’m shocked.”

And I get it. If your benchmark is spending $10,000 on a CGI rendering, and doing maybe three or four of those to market 400 units, then yes, it seems expensive. But that’s the problem. The problem is the model.

Most real estate marketing still runs on a model built for a world that no longer exists. You spend a few thousand on some renders, maybe stage one unit, and use the same handful of images—kitchen, bathroom, a staged living room—to sell the entire building. Add a few stock photos: someone sipping coffee (relaxing lifestyle), jogging (active lifestyle), petting a dog (we love animals). That’s your campaign.

The problem is, everyone’s already doing this. They did it last year. They’re doing it now. So when you run the same play, you’re not standing out—you’re just another one to scroll past. What once might have signaled quality now just signals sameness.

Marketing is supposed to differentiate you. But this model has the opposite effect. It collapses every building into a set of clichés: sunlight on countertops, smiling people with dogs, someone holding a coffee mug. These signals are so overused they’ve become invisible.

Minimal effort, maximal projection.

But here’s the strange part: the people running these campaigns are also people. They buy homes. They rent apartments. They ignore Facebook ads, just like everyone else. They’d never rent a place based on five generic images and a dream.

So why assume others would?

This disconnect isn’t just ironic. It’s expensive. It’s the result of what I think of as the “marketing mirage”: the idea that a strong narrative and some lifestyle symbols are enough to sell a $2,000/month decision. It worked when there was no better option. But there is now.

What we’re offering is not more content. It’s not more renderings or another layer of lifestyle branding. It’s specificity. It’s the exact thing someone wants when they’re about to make one of the biggest decisions in their life: to see the real thing. Not a simulation, not an average—their future home, in its precise configuration, orientation, and context.

And that’s what makes this an investment, not a cost.

Because what does this unlock? Time. Time you don’t need to wait for construction to finish. Time you don’t need to stage a unit. Time you don’t need to book a tour, or lose a customer because they couldn’t make it in person. With our system, someone 3,000 kilometers away can tour the exact unit, right now, on their phone.

You’re not just improving the experience. You’re compressing the timeline. And in real estate, time isn’t just money—it’s velocity. Faster decisions, shorter lease-up periods, higher conversion. The ROI is not abstract. It’s immediate and measurable.

So when someone says “I’m shocked,” what they really mean is “I’ve never thought about it this way before.”

The hard part isn’t explaining the value. It’s rewriting the model they’ve been using for years—the one that says five renders and some vague lifestyle promises are enough. That model is deeply embedded, and in a way, it’s comforting. It worked well enough for long enough that it’s become the default.

But “default” and “optimal” are rarely the same thing.

The people who win in markets like this aren’t the ones who squeeze more out of the old playbook. They’re the ones who realize the playbook was wrong to begin with. That marketing based on abstraction can’t compete with marketing based on reality.

And the first step to fixing that isn’t more budget. It’s a better model.