Valuing a site before you buy it

A real estate project is won or lost long before the first crew arrives. It is won when someone gets the site right, gets right what fits on it, and gets right what people will pay to live there. And that decision is still made, almost always, with a site plan, a zoning study and a good deal of intuition.

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A model that answers questions about money

At the annual NAHB show, Epic Games laid out how home building companies in the United States are using real-time visualisation. The most interesting case for anyone buying land is IMERZA and its work on the Maverick project for Discovery Land Company.

What they do is not a pretty walkthrough. They visualise the terrain in 3D and analyse daylight, sight lines and even traffic noise on it, so they can calculate the real value of the land before a single brick is laid. The model stops being a marketing piece and becomes, in the article’s words, a financial instrument.

Dorian Vee, founder and chief technology officer at IMERZA, frames it like this:

“The Maverick project for Discovery Land Company is a clear example of what can be achieved when digital twins are conceived as living assets rather than as final products.”

And on what the model lets the buyer do:

“What began as a design evaluation tool now allows buyers to make key decisions, such as checking lot availability, enjoying the views and getting familiar with a different lifestyle without needing to visit the site.”

Vee adds that after a decade in the sector and more than two hundred deployments — from large master plans to luxury developments — the result is that the model evolves with the project instead of freezing at the sales stage.

The same idea, at city scale

Bedrock Detroit applies the principle to an entire urban portfolio. There the digital twin is no longer for showing an apartment: it is for modelling insurance risk, running weather simulations and managing assets long term. Same tool, answering management questions rather than marketing ones.

What this means for a project in Colombia

Almost all of the above translates into a question any project manager recognises: which apartments in this tower will sell first, and which will sit?

The answer depends on things a drawing does not show well: which floors get afternoon sun, which ones look at the mountain and which look at the building across the street, which facade faces the noisy avenue. All of it can be checked on a model before the unit mix is fixed and before the price list is set.

The arithmetic is simple. Camacol estimates that around 60% of new housing in Colombia is sold off-plan. If 60% of your sales happen before there is any construction, the model you use to decide is, literally, all you have.

This is exactly what we do at the project verification stage: cross the model with the real surroundings so design and pricing decisions are made by looking, not by assuming.

Sources

Unreal Engine — Long live the decision engine: how UE is powering the future of home building (February 2026) · Camacol — Colombian construction sector statistics