Ophira is a $60 million, nine-storey luxury beachfront apartment building on Jefferson Lane at Palm Beach on the Gold Coast, Queensland, comprising eight full-floor residences and a two-storey penthouse priced from $6.95 million. Developer-builder 5Point Projects and its marketing agency, ARC Project Marketing, judged a traditional display suite too slow and too costly for a boutique project and sold the building without one.
In its place the sales team used an interactive display and virtual reality tours from Australian proptech EnvisionVR, whose Enviz platform turns architectural models into XR experiences delivered through a VR headset app, iOS and Android apps and a desktop browser. Architectural visualisation studio ARVI Studios produced the photo-realistic 3D content. Buyers put on a headset and walked through an entire apartment at real scale, stepped out to the balcony, checked the ocean and hinterland outlook from each window and reviewed the finishes, all before construction began. Because the kit travelled, appointments happened on site, in cafes, in buyers' homes, in the agency's office and online with overseas buyers, rather than in a showroom.
The approach did not slow sales: more than half of the $7 million-plus residences were under contract by February 2024, and EnvisionVR reports 85 per cent of the building sold off-plan before construction was finished. 5Point also used the same virtual experience internally, walking its design team and sub-contractors through the apartments so they could quote more accurately and interpret expectations on joinery, kitchens, painting and tiling.
