Sell the building before it is built. The 3D off-plan sales platform for developers in Saudi Arabia and the GCC.

Where off-plan sales are won or lost

Off-plan sales has a hard problem. We ask people to commit to a home that does not physically exist yet, and we give them floor plans and still renders that most of them cannot read spatially. Increasingly they are doing this from a screen, far from the sales suite, often from another city or another country.

Property buying now starts online. At the National Association of REALTORS' last count, 97% of buyers searched for homes online, a share NAR now simply describes as "nearly all". And immersive media is what holds attention: Zillow found that listings with 3D Home tours earned 81% more views and were saved by buyers 53% more often than listings without them.

So the moment that decides an off-plan sale is usually a private one. The buyer is on their phone, comparing projects, with nobody from your team in the room. By the time they call, they are usually down to two projects. The question for a developer is simple: what does the buyer see in that moment, and can they do anything with it beyond looking?

A render answers the first question and not the second. It is a picture. The buyer cannot turn it, cannot go up two floors, cannot check whether the kitchen window faces the street. And it cannot tell you which unit they liked.

What is an off-plan sales platform?

An off-plan sales platform is a browser-based 3D experience in which a buyer explores a development that is not built yet, from the surrounding city to the inside of each unit, compares unit types and registers interest in a specific unit. It differs from a virtual tour in two ways: the buyer navigates the whole project rather than looking around a fixed room, and the output of a session is a named unit attached to a named buyer, not a view count.

TwinMaq is Design Zone's off-plan sales platform. It turns a project's drawings into a navigable digital twin of the building that runs entirely in the browser: aerial flythroughs, an interactive masterplan, floor-by-floor unit selection, photoreal 360° interiors and side-by-side unit comparison, all from a single link. No app, no plugin, no download. English and Arabic, with a day and night interface. Any buyer, in your sales suite or in another country, walks the project at their own pace and registers interest in the exact unit they want.

From the city to the bedroom in five steps

The buyer's path is the same on every project, because it follows how people actually decide where to live. Select a step.

The buyer loop

What matters commercially is not a single visit but the loop a buyer goes through, often several times, before they commit. TwinMaq keeps the whole loop inside one link, and gives the sales team something to act on at each turn.

One twin instead of three workarounds

Most off-plan campaigns assemble a patchwork: a CGI film for emotion, a brochure for specifications, a show unit for trust. Each covers a gap in the others, and none of them tells the sales team which unit the buyer liked. TwinMaq replaces the three with one twin; the second view shows what it replaces.

Why the 3D is modelled to construction standard

This is the part that is specific to Design Zone. The 3D in TwinMaq comes from the same BIM team that modelled King Salman Park, AMAALA and Four Seasons Jeddah, and that runs TwinMs, our digital twin platform, live at Dar Albadriyah in Riyadh. The geometry is BIM-derived, with photoreal lighting and materials, exterior and interiors, plus the surrounding context. Your buyers see a building modelled to construction standard, not a marketing render.

The build happens under the same ISO 19650 information management as every Design Zone engagement, in four steps:

1. Intake. We start from your 2D CAD package. Existing BIM models or 3D assets slot straight in and speed up the build.
2. 3D production. BIM-derived geometry with photoreal lighting and materials: exterior, interiors and up to 4 km of real surrounding context.
3. Platform build. Masterplan zones, floor switchers, unit data and comparison views are configured in the TwinMaq web platform, responsive and touchscreen-ready.
4. Launch. Delivered in English and Arabic with day and night themes, deployed to web and sales-suite kiosks, with unit-level lead capture wired to your CRM.

For a developer this has a practical consequence: the sales material is right because of where it comes from, and the same modelling discipline carries through to the as-built model and, if you choose, to operating the building on TwinMs after handover. See BIM vs digital twin for how those stages fit together.

What the sales team gets

A sales manager does not care about geometry. They care about who is interested in what, and whether the team can act on it today.

• Unit-level leads. Every registration arrives tagged to a specific unit, with session analytics and dashboard reporting, ready to sync into your CRM. The team calls back about the apartment, not an apartment.
• One link for first contact. A shareable link replaces the site visit for first contact, and international buyers tour the project without flying in.
• Sales suite, launch event, phone. The same experience runs on the sales-suite touchscreen kiosk, at the launch event and on the buyer's phone afterwards, so a conversation that starts on the kiosk continues at home.
• Arabic and English, properly. Full right-to-left Arabic and a day or night interface, so the platform is usable by the buyer in the private moment described at the start of this guide.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and the wider region

The off-plan buyer is rarely standing next to the plot. In Saudi Arabia, a buyer in Riyadh is weighing a project in Alkhobar or on the Red Sea coast. In the UAE and Egypt, a large part of the audience for a new development lives in another country. Across the GCC, families decide together, often across cities. A sales tool that only works in the sales suite misses all of them.

Is your project ready to sell online?

Answer six questions to see where your sales setup stands and the best next step.

Live today: Aleen 152, Alkhobar

Aleen 152 is a residential development by Aleen Company in Alkhobar, in the Eastern Province. Six residential floors, four unit types (Roof A and B, Floor A and B) from 140 to 229 m², 7,950 m² in total.

Its TwinMaq is live in production and open to the public: the aerial view in the real Alkhobar context, the interactive masterplan, the exterior flythrough, the floor switcher and comparison across the four unit types, 360° interiors and unit-level interest registration, in English and Arabic, day or night. It sells six floors and four unit types off-plan through the same twin.

Open the live platform and judge it yourself.

What it takes to start

A standard 2D CAD package is enough. Our team builds the 3D from it, and any BIM or 3D assets you already have speed up production. Timing depends on scope: a single building with standard interiors is fastest, multi-building masterplans take longer, and we confirm a schedule against your CAD package. Each deployment is scoped to the project: building count, interiors and integrations.

If you are launching an off-plan project in the Kingdom or the region, request a demo. We will walk you through Aleen 152 and what a deployment on your project would involve.

Glossary

Off-plan

Selling a property before it is built, from drawings, models and marketing material.

3D sales platform

A browser-based, navigable 3D experience of a development with unit selection and lead capture built in.

Interactive masterplan

The project layout with zones, amenities and a clickable pin on every building.

Unit selector

Floor switcher and 2D top-view layouts that let a buyer pick a floor and unit type.

360° interior

A photoreal walkthrough in which every room can be looked around and moved between.

Unit-level lead

An interest registration that carries the specific unit the buyer was looking at.

BIM-derived geometry

3D built from, or to the standard of, the project's building information model.

Digital twin

A living digital model of a building. TwinMaq is the sales stage; TwinMs is the operating stage after handover.

Questions and answers

Sources and further reading

• National Association of REALTORS, Real Estate in a Digital Age (2021).
• Zillow, 3D Home tours announcement (May 2022).
• Design Zone, TwinMaq product page and Aleen 152 case.