Judging by the X/O Condominiums sales center, we’d say Riha Design Group president Kenneth Riha is ahead of the design curve, so we figured he’d be a good guy to talk to about the design trends that are pulling customers into sales centers in a crowded market.
“In today’s climate,” Riha says, “it’s all presentation. The need for communicating information is so critical today. It is a crowded field, and this is the only chance that you have to attract the customer to make a major purchase. The key thing is conveying as much information as possible.”
A high-rise building, Riha says, is the most difficult to sell because it usually hasn’t been built yet, so buyers are expecting to be presented with more and more information to make an informed purchase. “You have to show the person more than just a logo,” Riha said. Buyers need to be presented with an image, and the presentation must match the market profile. “If you’re at a high price point, you want to intimidate the person who can’t afford it and make the person who can afford it feel at home,” he said.
Buyers have come to expect to see floor plans, materials and available upgrades, but Riha predicts a greater level of interactivity between the buyer and the product in the coming year. Buyers want to see more than just static images or renderings– actual views from different floors, movies, and virtual tours generate excitement, and a scale model provides a three-dimensional image that they can look at and touch from all angles. A video presentation for X/O features a virtual cruise down Prairie Avenue and moves from a historical time period and its architecture to X/O’s striking, modern glass towers.
Riha upped the interactivity ante at X/O with a floor-to-ceiling, interactive glass panel on which buyers can narrow down the development’s daunting 102 floor plans and print the ones they’re interested in. Further down the road, Riha predicts the future use of an “interactive fog” onto which images can be projected. For instance, the walls of a condo that buyers are looking at can be projected onto a thin, vertical screen of water vapor, allowing them to move around inside.
“Developers are going to have to make sure that they have all the tools to present the product properly,” Riha said. “You shouldn’t have to sell, you should only present.”