The economics of a pre-construction tower are a bet on a buyer who, at the moment of sale, cannot walk the floor, feel the finishes, or watch the sun move across the living room. Increasingly, that buyer isn't even in Florida. We sat down with a developer reshaping downtown West Palm Beach to talk about designing for exactly that person.
The video walkthrough is the new model home
"We used to build a sales gallery and wait for people to fly in," they told us. "Now the first impression happens on a screen. So the renderings have to be honest, the walkthrough has to feel like a private tour, and the person on the other end of that call has to be able to answer every question in the moment. If they can't, you've lost the buyer."
The buyer decides on the video call. The showroom just confirms what they already felt.
On the shift to remote-first sales
It's a shift that rewards a specific kind of representation — one that knows the deposit structures, the delivery timelines, and the allocation cold, and can present it as clearly over video as across a table. For the buyer, it collapses distance. For the developer, it widens the market to anyone, anywhere.
