Buyers choose a home from a screen long before they visit a sales office. On most developer websites that choice dies in a PDF: a brochure of floor plans, a phone number, and a form that says request availability.
We build sales websites for residential projects, and the apartment selector is the part that does the actual selling. Here is what we learned shipping them for projects in Dubai, Israel and Georgia.
What an apartment selector is
Other names: unit selector, availability chart, interactive floor plan. It is the section of a project website where a buyer narrows a building down to a specific unit: floor, layout, view, price, status. In its simplest form it is a grid of floors and units. In a richer form the buyer clicks a building on a render and drills down to a single apartment page.
The trick itself is not why it works. It works because the buyer qualifies themselves. Someone who arrives at a sales call having already picked unit 14-07 is a different lead from someone who saw a nice render.
The path that works
Across projects we keep coming back to the same four steps.
- Entry from the whole building. A render or a schematic cut of the building, with floors as clickable zones. Buyers trust a picture of the actual building more than an abstract table.
- Filters that match buyer questions. Budget, bedrooms, floor range, view. Not the developer's internal block codes. Every extra filter that answers no real question costs conversions.
- The chart. A grid of floors and units with honest statuses: available, reserved, sold. Buyers read the chart as social proof. A half-sold building sells the other half.
- The unit page. Floor plan, orientation, the real view from the window if you have it, total price and price per square metre, and one clear action: reserve or ask.
On mobile the same path has to survive a 375-pixel screen. Half of the traffic to a project site is a phone in the evening. The chart that works on mobile is usually a list grouped by floor, not a pinch-and-zoom grid.
Mistakes that kill leads
We audit developer websites before we redesign them, and the same problems come up again and again.
- Every price hidden. The form filters out serious buyers first: they have three other projects open in tabs where prices are visible.
- Stale statuses. A buyer who picks a unit and hears it was sold last month does not pick a second one. The chart must read from the same source your sales team uses.
- The selector behind a request access wall. That is a brochure with extra steps.
- PDF floor plans instead of pages. Search engines and AI assistants cannot recommend a PDF. Every layout deserves its own indexable page.
- No English version in a market full of foreign buyers. In Georgia and Dubai this is the difference between a local audience and the whole world. Statuses, prices and the reservation flow have to be translated too, not just the marketing copy.
What it costs and when a widget is enough
There are two honest ways to get a selector.
A vendor widget embeds into your existing site and reads your inventory. It costs little, ships fast, and looks like a widget: its own fonts, its own logic, a seam the buyer can feel. For a developer testing demand on a single small building, this is a fine start.
A custom selector is built into the website as one continuous experience: same typography, same speed, filters written around your project, reservation wired into your CRM with the unit number attached. This is what we build. As part of a full sales website it usually lands in the $5,000–12,000 range; a landing page with a simple selector starts at $2,500.
The deciding question is not budget, it is whether the website is your main sales channel. If buyers are remote, and in Georgia or Dubai they usually are, the selector is your showroom.
Two examples from our work
For Interstellar, a residential complex in Dubai, the selection flow starts from a cinematic view of the tower and narrows to a unit page with plans and terms an investor needs. The concept won an award, but the part that matters is that a buyer on another continent can shortlist three units without a single call.
For Agada, a private residence in Israel, the same site serves three audiences in three languages, including right-to-left Hebrew. The unit data lives once; the languages are views on top of it. That is the pattern we now use for every multilingual project.
Where to start
If you already have a website, walk it the way a buyer with money does: from the ad click to a specific unit. Count the steps and note where you had to ask the developer something the site should have answered.
We do this walkthrough for developers as a free teardown: fifteen minutes on a call, written notes within two business days. If you want one for your project, tell us about it or read how we build real estate websites first.
