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How to market a townhouse development before the display suite opens

Opening weekend is decided months earlier. Here's what I run for townhouse releases before there's a display suite to walk through.

Written by Michael Nadalin, Founder · 26 Oct 2026

If you want to market a townhouse development before the display suite opens, my answer is simple. Use paid social and search to build a profiled buyer list early, send that traffic to a landing page that asks real qualifying questions, and follow up quickly so the people on that list are already booked in when the doors open. Don't save your budget for launch day. By then the buyers who matter should already know your project and have a time locked in.

Most developers treat the pre-display period as a holding pattern: put up a hoarding, run a 'register your interest' page, and wait. I think that wastes the most valuable months of the campaign. That's when you find out who your buyer is, which creative they respond to and what price point they'll actually engage with. You find all of that out while it's still cheap to change course.

Why the months before the display suite matter most

Townhouse buyers aren't apartment investors. They're mostly owner occupiers: downsizers leaving the family home, families upgrading, and locals who want to stay in the suburb but need more room. They take their time. They compare floor plans, check the school zones and talk it over at the kitchen table for weeks. If your first contact with them happens the weekend the display suite opens, you're starting that process far too late.

The early phase also gives you something money can't buy later, and that's data. Every enquiry tells you something about who's interested, what they want to spend and how soon they want to move. That shapes the sales script, the display suite layout and even which townhouse types you release first.

How to market a townhouse development before the display suite opens: the sequence I run

I break it into phases. They overlap a little, but the order matters.

• Weeks one to three: launch the landing page and a wide set of creative on Meta and Google. Keep targeting broad and let the creative do the filtering.
• Weeks three to eight: cut the losing ads, put more budget behind the winners and start calling every profiled lead.
• The final four weeks before opening: run a dedicated booking push to the existing list, then top it up with fresh paid traffic aimed at the buyer profile you've now confirmed.
• Opening weekend: the appointment book should already be mostly full, so walk-ins become a bonus.

You don't need finished photography for any of this. Renders, the architect's story, the street, the suburb and a clear starting price are enough to get serious buyers to raise their hand.

Start with a landing page that profiles, not just collects

A name and an email aren't a lead. They're a maybe. The page I build for every townhouse release asks a few short questions after the first form: budget, timeframe, whether they're buying to live in or to invest, and whether they have a home to sell. Buyers who answer those questions are the ones your sales team should call first. I've written more on why in lead profiling for property developers, and you can see how we structure the pages on our lead pages and profiling service.

Profiling works at the top end too. On Milli 3187 in Brighton East, with townhomes from $1.7M, 75% of buyers completed the profile. These are people spending serious money and they're still happy to tell you about themselves, provided the questions are relevant and the page treats them with respect.

Test creative hard and early

The biggest mistake I see is a developer approving one hero render and one headline, then running it for three months. You can't know in advance what will make a downsizer in Sandringham stop scrolling. Maybe it's the floor plan, maybe the lift, maybe the courtyard, maybe the price. So you test it.

On Early 3191 for DM Property we tested 52 creative variants across the campaign. That volume of testing is a big part of why the project generated 1,272 buyer leads at a $36 cost per lead for luxury townhomes from $1.099M. Most of those variants lost. The few that won carried the campaign.

What the numbers look like on real townhouse releases

Here are some townhouse campaigns I've run, all built on this pre-display approach. Each suburb, price point and brief was different, but the method was the same.

Look at Port Lane in particular. A 60% sales qualified rate means most of the enquiries were people the sales team actually wanted to talk to. The Port Lane case study also shows a 7.5% landing page conversion, and that comes from a page built around the buyer's questions, not the developer's brochure copy.

Turn the list into bookings before the doors open

A list only matters if it becomes appointments. On Loam House, an off-the-plan apartment project for Auyin in Sandringham, the same approach produced 2,398 sales qualified leads and 54 display suite bookings. Apartments sell differently from townhouses, but the lesson carries over: the bookings came from the work done beforehand, not from the opening itself.

What makes the difference is speed and persistence. Call new leads the same day if you can. Send buyers a real reason to book, such as a first look at the finishes, a private appointment slot or early access to the best positioned homes. Then confirm and remind them. If your CRM and sales team can't keep up with the volume, fix that before you spend more on ads. Our lead follow-up and CRM setup exists because I've watched good leads go cold in a sales agent's inbox.

Where developers get this wrong

• Waiting for the display suite before spending anything, then trying to build a whole buyer pool in a fortnight.
• Judging the campaign on cost per lead alone. A cheap lead with no budget and no timeframe is expensive once your sales team has spent time chasing it.
• Hiding the price. Townhouse buyers want a starting price, and leaving it out mostly attracts tyre kickers.
• Running the same creative for months without testing anything new.
• Treating the agency and the sales team as separate worlds. The feedback from sales calls should change the ads within days.

The pre-display months aren't dead time. Done properly, they're when most of the work of selling the project gets done, and the display suite becomes where those buyers come to sign.

If you have a townhouse project coming up and want a plan for the months before your display suite opens, book a strategy call with me and we'll go through your timeline, budget and buyer.

Written by

Michael Nadalin

Founder, Market Lead & Property Lead

Michael has run paid acquisition for Australian property developers across Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, from boutique townhome releases to $19.9M penthouses.