Signing for a Perth Apartment From a Sydney Kitchen Table

My sister rang me on a Sunday night in March, slightly breathless, to say she'd just put a deposit on a two-bedroom apartment in Perth. She lives in Sydney. She has been to Perth exactly twice, once for a wedding and once for a conference, and the building she'd bought into was, at that moment, a fenced block of sand near the river with a crane on it. "It's fine," she said. "I've seen it." What she'd seen was a set of images on a sales website and a video call with an agent standing in a display suite.

She's not unusual. Perth's apartment market has drawn a steady stream of buyers from the eastern states and overseas over the past couple of years, many of them investors chasing yields that are hard to find in Sydney or Melbourne, and a good share of them buy off the plan without ever setting foot on the site. For those buyers, the marketing images aren't a nice extra. They're most of what they have to go on.

Where the pictures come from

The images my sister fell for were very good. A corner living room with floor-to-ceiling glass, timber floors, a balcony with a couple of chairs angled toward the river, and a sunset that turned the whole room gold. I assumed it was a photograph of the display suite until I looked closely.

Most developers now commission specialist 3D rendering services in Perth or further afield to produce this kind of material. The studio builds the building from the architect's drawings as a detailed digital model, at real dimensions, and then dresses and lights it. For apartment projects, the views out of the windows are often made from drone photography taken at the actual floor heights on the site, so the river in my sister's balcony image was the real river, seen from roughly where her apartment will be.

That's genuinely useful for someone in Sydney. It means the layout, the size of the rooms, the window positions and the view are, in most reputable projects, a fair representation of what gets built.

What the images don't show

The trouble is all the things a rendering can make look better than they'll feel. I spent an evening going through my sister's contract and the developer's documents with her, and a few gaps stood out.

The interior images were styled with the upgraded finishes package, including stone benchtops and a better appliance brand, which cost several thousand dollars extra. The base package was perfectly decent, but it wasn't what was in the pictures. The sunset view was taken from a higher floor than hers, and the view studies for her actual level showed a bit more of the neighbouring building and a bit less of the river. And the furniture in the living room image was the low, slim kind that makes a room look bigger than it is. Her real sofa, which she measured while we were on the phone, would take up noticeably more of that space.

Then there's orientation, which matters a lot in Perth. Her apartment faces west. In the rendering, that means glorious river sunsets. In January, it also means serious afternoon heat on that glass, and she hadn't thought about blinds, tinting or what the air-conditioning bill might look like.

Questions worth asking

Having been through it with her, here's what I'd suggest to anyone buying off the plan in Perth from a distance. Ask which finishes package the images show, and get the standard specification in writing. Ask for the view study from your actual floor and aspect, not the hero image. Look at what's approved or proposed on the lots around the site, because an empty block next door in the marketing photos may not stay empty. Check which way the main windows face and ask what shading is included.

If you can, get someone you trust in Perth to visit the display suite and the site for you. A friend of a friend walked through the display suite for my sister with a phone on a video call, opening cupboards and standing in the corners, and it told her more about the real size of the rooms than any image could.

Where she ended up

My sister didn't pull out. She was still happy with the building, the location and the price, and having gone through it all, she understood exactly what she was buying. She changed one thing: she paid for the upgraded benchtops, because she'd fallen for them in the pictures and decided she might as well have them. She also budgeted for proper blinds on the west glass.

The building is due to finish late next year. She has the balcony image as the wallpaper on her phone, and she says that when she finally walks in, she fully expects the sofa to be bigger and the sunset to be a bit less golden. She's fine with that. The point of the picture, she says, was never to be perfect. It was to let her decide from two thousand kilometres away.