For every cleverly marketed development, its accompanied by an equally well-conceived project marketing and sales campaign. Accordingly, DisplaySweet has built close ties with some of Australia’s most respected and celebrated property agencies.
One of these is Flood, Australia's premier 3D rendering and animation company and a world leader in pre-built visualisations. We sat down with Daniel Flood, Founder at Flood, who shared with us his insights into the proptech and architectural visualisation industries.
Tell us a little about your company and what they do?
Flood is a company that has created architectural visualisations across the world for 22 years. We’ve been known as leaders in the field during this time. Our speciality is film work in the industry, which is why our immersive experiences are so important.
This is where much of our work with DisplaySweet ties in, for instance the creation of animated films and the way they interrelate with buildings. These animated films have helped to make our reputation over the last 20 or so years.
How would you describe your underlying philosophy?
Flood's underlying philosophy has always been to create amazing work, never about making money. It's about seeing a project, taking its essence, whether that be the architecture, brand, site or any number of other components, then making something amazing from it with the project team. The project team is the client obviously but also the architects, creative agencies, and companies like DisplaySweet.
From our point of view, its always about how we can be innovative, and finding a new way of presenting content. It’s about reinventing how people look at a space and how they’re experiencing a development. I’m an architect and I run the business much like an architecture firm, with more than 50 staff, we started out in Melbourne where our main office is, but we also have offices in Sydney, Brisbane and most recently in Perth.
What trends are you noticing at the moment in the property or technology industries?
I’ve generally noticed a homogenisation of visualisation across the board, as opposed to using different technologies to create unique outcomes. The majority of the render work out there is put through the same process and as such I’m noticing a very common aesthetic.
Flood are combatting this as every project we work on, we look at different colours and palettes to create unique outcomes.
What’s the most important part of an off-the-plan sales campaign to you?
The most important part of a campaign is how you present the visuals of the project. That’s all wrapped up in how the visualiser presents their work. It’s the combination of various types of mediums that work cohesively to help sell the aspiration.
There are different methodologies that you put into your scenario that will convince you to sell off-the-plan. The same can be done different ways. An example of this is in 2004, it was commonplace to have 3 CGI’s when launching a new off-the-plan development as the industry was still in its infancy.
Fast forward to 2023, and it’s now very common for a mid-size development to have at least 20 CGI’s, and over time this keeps growing more and more. I think that’s partly due to the quality of the work that is being produced by the industry. Australia’s architectural visualisation industry is probably the best in the world.
I don’t think that means renders are the most important part of an off-the-plan sales campaign. I think it’s a combination of the way in which various types of visualisations working together in a sales experience.
DisplaySweet and Flood are collaborating on some stunning projects. Why are our businesses so well matched?
I’ve watched DisplaySweet grow from a small start-up to what it is now, which is the eminent showroom creator in the industry, and the projects that stand out to me are the ones that utilise the methodologies put in place by DisplaySweet.
One that really stood out around 7+ years ago was Park House by Salta Properties, which used a really striking corner-operated view CGI within their projector rooms, and that was the first time I really took notice of what DisplaySweet was doing.
I then noticed throughout the journey that the name DisplaySweet would keep coming up when working with various developers. The most recent collaboration for us has been Paradiso Place by SPG Land and TOTAL Property Group, which is definitely the most striking collaboration that stands out.
Paradiso Place is important from Floods’ point of view as it’s a fully immersive 3D spherical projection that requires the hardware implementation and the back-end systems to all work together to create the perception that you are standing there in the space.
Most immersion rooms are built very simplistically when it comes to how perspective is working, and there’s a lot of false claims. What we built is something that actually allows you to stand there and feel like you’re actually in the space – like you’re wearing VR goggles – and that technique that we’ve developed over the last few years meant that when we had the implementation done right, the projection strength felt a lot better and more realistic.
At the end of a project, what does success look like?
Contrary to popular belief, its not always sales that makes a project successful from my point of view. In the end, there’s a whole bunch of reasons as to why a project is a success. A successful outcome for me is surprising everyone with a better outcome than they expected, and actually feeling proud of the work that you’ve made.
Success to me is a project that I’m proud of, a new way of working and by producing something entirely unique and exceptional, like our recent collaboration with DisplaySweet on Trielle by Mirvac, a beautiful 45-storey development in Melbourne’s Docklands that’s just launched.
Why is using sales technology important to the success of a project?
There is a bit of a blurring the lines between all the different types of technology that are used and the types of deliverables out there, for example AR (Augmented Reality), VR (virtual reality), immersion rooms and much more.
How it’s important is that it allows the audience to engage with something that is not yet built, something that doesn’t exist yet, and without those ways of delivering that experience – regardless if it’s still CGI’s, animation, immersion rooms - this entire market barely existed 20 years ago (it was very minimal).
Off-the-plan proptech and the visualisation of it has now become its own industry. That’s not just because people are more willing to buy off-the-plan in 2023, but because they can now visualise it so much more clearly and accurately.
