Perfection in property marketing - what are we striving for?

For years in our industry, we’ve been chasing perfection, we have been creating environments where there is not a blade of grass out of place or a mark on the wall. It’s beautiful and perfect, but is it realistic?

 If, like me, you’ve spent a disproportionate amount of time on social media during various waves of the pandemic, it will not have passed you by that we’re in the midst of a fairly seismic backlash to the prevalence of photo editing online. The ability to completely distort reality using editing apps and filters is becoming problematic, as we create a generation of consumers who are comparing and upholding themselves to a set of impossible standards – and it doesn’t bode well not least for one’s mental health.

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Albeit an entirely different subject matter, this has to be a territory for discussion in the world of architectural visualisation given it’s at the very heart of what we do – I mean, we’ve been manipulating reality for years right!? So it got me wondering, is this push for a more real, unedited aesthetic online something that could creep in to real estate marketing? I think it might do and here’s why….

 

There is nothing glamorous about an unkempt bedroom, clothes scattered on the floor and the bed unmade, it’s not particularly inspiring and it’s not aspirational – right? For years in our industry, we’ve been chasing perfection, we have been creating environments where there is not a blade of grass out of place, not a leaf on the ground or a mark on the wall. It’s beautiful and perfect, but let’s be honest it isn’t realistic. So ironically, in our never-ending quest to produce content that’s indistinguishable from photography and film, actually what we’ve created is something that is so perfect it’s perhaps impossible to buy into.

 

“How can you expect the people of Manchester to look at this and resonate?” a fair challenge from our client Martyn Evans, Creative Chief at U+I when explaining that in Manchester it regularly rains, there may well be graffiti on the walls and that’s okay – in fact it’s not only okay its expected and it’s what makes the city their own. So he’s right to challenge whether the local community could connect with a gloriously sunny CGI of U+I’s new district Mayfield, where we didn’t have a leaf out of place or mark on the walls.

Of course this flies in the face of everything we’ve learnt, everything we have been taught and requested by most clients. Who’s going to buy in to an image of a scruffy bedroom with an unmade bed? But similarly, who could feel comfortable living in absolute perfection? And it’s real people that our imagery needs to speak to, the local community of Manchester, the young working professionals looking to buy in Battersea.

 

The answer as with everything seemingly has to be compromise, but how do we marry the two and provide imagery of an aspirational reality? I don’t claim to have the answers but we’re finding our way… the weather is helpful, introducing less than favourable weather conditions instantly injects a bit of realness to otherwise pristine scenes. We’ve also had great success producing cimemagraphs, moving images where a window left open means curtains blowing in the breeze, plants stirring. It’s not about just making interior CGIs messy, some fruit toppled from the bowl or a towel strewn on the sun lounger is all it needs – a suggestion of humanity in an otherwise perfect scene.

 

Jess Pinkham
Assembly Studios