The Market Has Shifted
A few years ago, plenty of new-build projects practically sold themselves. A site board at the entrance, an ad in the local paper, maybe a listing on a property portal — and the inquiries came in. Those days are over. Rising interest rates have pushed up financing costs for buyers, and new-build projects now compete much harder with cheaper resale homes, whose owners have become more willing to sell given the changed market conditions. The result: marketing periods for new projects are stretching out noticeably, and buyers are taking longer to decide.
According to immowelt-impuls, it's precisely these factors — higher rates, demanding prices and competition from more attractively priced resale properties — that are extending how long it takes to market new projects. Developers who still rely on the marketing playbook from a decade ago aren't just losing time — they're losing money. Every month a unit stays unsold ties up capital, generates financing costs and increases the pressure to eventually make price concessions.
The good news: the market may have changed, but it hasn't shrunk — it has simply moved. Buyers are still out there; they just research differently now, for longer, and across more channels than before. Understanding where that research happens is the starting point for everything else.
How Buyers Actually Search Today
The answer to where buyers search today is unambiguous: online, and early, and extensively. According to a Bitkom press release, around 70% of property seekers use the internet, partially or exclusively, when searching for a suitable property. The digital environment isn't just one channel among many anymore — for the overwhelming majority of buyers, it's the primary starting point of the entire search.
What's particularly striking is how long that search takes. Figures from the ImmoScout24 Newsroom show that more than half of all seekers — 54.4% — search for longer than a year, and 22.7% for more than two years. Buyers looking for a new-build apartment spend extended periods in a kind of digital watch mode: comparing projects, saving favorites, setting up saved searches, and waiting to be notified the moment something changes.
This trend also shows up in the sheer number of active saved searches. The ImmoScout24 Newsroom reports that the number of property saved searches nationwide has risen by 38.1% since 2019 — in Hamburg, by as much as 31%. More and more people are defining exactly what they're looking for online and getting notified automatically the moment a matching project goes live. For developers, that means: if you're not visible in the relevant digital channels at the moment you launch, you simply don't appear in those automated alerts — no matter how good the project itself is.
Saved Searches as a Built-In Buyer Radar
A technical detail that's easy to overlook is especially relevant for developers here: when someone sets up a saved search on a property portal, they aren't notified manually — the system automatically matches new listings against the saved criteria and alerts the searcher in real time the moment a fitting project appears. A developer who goes live at the right time with the right details — location, unit sizes, energy standard, price bracket — lands directly in the inbox of exactly the buyers actively looking for that kind of property. Classic channels simply can't replicate that level of automated precision.
The End of the Site-Board Era
Site boards, newspaper ads, flyers in the mailbox — traditional marketing tools haven't lost all their relevance, but their role has fundamentally changed. Today they mainly reach people who are already in the area or searching locally anyway. The overwhelming majority of prospects, however — including buyers from other cities, from abroad, or investors who never physically visit a project before purchasing — simply never see a site board.
The real problem with purely analog marketing is its lack of reach and lack of measurability. A site board can't be optimized, targeted or tracked. It doesn't generate leads that can be systematically followed up, and it doesn't reach anyone who doesn't happen to drive past. In a market where buyers research for a year or longer and do so almost entirely online, a site board is at best a supplement — never a strategy.
What's more, competing projects that are marketed digitally, early and professionally, capture buyers' attention throughout that long research phase. Developers who wait until late in the process — say, shortly before completion — to build digital visibility are competing against projects that are already firmly established in buyers' minds.
Developers who still rely almost entirely on traditional tools are increasingly competing with projects that are already digitally present — long before the first spade goes into the ground. In a market with more competition from resale properties and longer decision timelines, that's not a disadvantage you can afford.
The Advantage of Early, Visible Projects
This is exactly where the decisive strategic lever lies: early digital visibility. Projects that establish a professional online presence during the planning and construction phase — with a dedicated project website, targeted advertising and a thought-through content strategy — reach prospects long before the official sales launch. These prospects register, leave contact details, follow the project's progress, and build emotional attachment to it over months.
The effect is measurable. According to Ostend Digital, early, well-planned marketing sells 30 to 50% of a project's units before the official sales launch even begins. In other words, a significant share of sales success is decided not on launch day, but in the months leading up to it — through consistent digital presence, a well-maintained prospect list, and targeted communication with an already pre-qualified group of buyers.
This lead time delivers a double benefit for developers. First, the actual marketing period after completion shortens considerably, because a large share of units is already reserved or sold. Second, a well-filled prospect pipeline gives the developer a much stronger negotiating position — price concessions driven by sales pressure become far less necessary, because real demand has already been demonstrated.
An example makes the mechanism concrete: a 20-unit project that launches a dedicated landing page, regular construction-progress updates and targeted ads from the start of construction builds a growing prospect list over twelve to eighteen months. When the official sales launch happens, the developer isn't starting from zero — a substantial share of potential buyers already knows the project, has asked questions, perhaps taken a virtual tour of the show apartment, or signed up for the newsletter. The sales process shortens noticeably, because trust and interest already exist rather than needing to be built from scratch.
What Developers Actually Gain
The business case for professional online marketing comes down to three core effects that act directly on a project's return and risk profile.
Shorter Marketing Periods
Every unit sold earlier shortens the project's total marketing timeline. That lowers ongoing costs during the marketing phase — staff, show apartment, administration — and reduces the risk that market conditions deteriorate while the project is still being sold.
A Predictable Pre-Sales Pipeline
A digital prospect pipeline makes the sales trajectory more predictable. Instead of launching sales into the unknown, the developer already holds a qualified list of contacts whose interest, budget and timeline are known. That simplifies not just sales planning but also conversations with financing banks.
Lower Capital Tied Up
Unsold units tie up equity and debt capital, generate interest costs, and delay the realization of the project margin. Every month shaved off the marketing timeline has a direct effect on overall project profitability. Early digital pre-marketing is therefore not just a marketing tool — it's a tool for managing financing risk.
A Stronger Position with Banks and Investors
An often underestimated side effect of visible, well-documented pre-marketing is its impact on financing banks and investors. A solid prospect list with demonstrable conversion — inquiries, reservations, signed reservation agreements — is a tangible argument in financing negotiations. Where developers once had only a market analysis and a building plan to show, a digitally well-positioned developer can now present real demand data. That builds confidence with capital providers and can directly influence terms and decision speed.
Conclusion: Visibility Is No Longer Optional
The property market has changed noticeably in recent years, and buyer expectations have changed with it. A developer who forgoes digital visibility today isn't skipping an extra — they're cutting themselves off from a buyer base that researches almost exclusively online for months, sometimes years. The projects that embrace this shift sell faster, tie up less capital, and negotiate from a stronger position.
The logical next question is: which channels build that visibility most effectively — and how should a limited marketing budget be split between them? That's the question we turn to in the next article in this series.
At DOMOS, we build tailored digital marketing strategies for developers that address exactly this challenge: early visibility, qualified leads, and a sales process that minimizes tied-up capital and maximizes margin.