For a small residential development, the render count is driven by the number of distinct dwelling types, not the number of dwellings. A project with ten townhouses across three floorplan types needs roughly the same imagery as a project with four townhouses across three types.
The second driver is surface. A portal listing, a project website, a brochure and a hoarding all need different images, and two of them need images in different shapes.
Start with dwelling types, not dwelling count
If three of your townhouses share a floorplan, they share renders. Buyers are choosing between types, and the differences that matter to them — orientation, outlook, which level the living space sits on — are type-level differences.
Where individual dwellings genuinely need their own imagery is when something material differs: a corner unit with a different facade, the end townhouse with a larger yard, the ground-floor apartment with a courtyard. Those earn a dedicated image because a buyer who can't see the difference assumes there isn't one, and then buys the cheaper one.
What we typically scope for a small development
For a project of three to ten dwellings with two or three floorplan types, the working set is usually:
- One streetscape exterior — the whole development in context, showing scale and approach. This is almost always the lead image on the listing.
- One facade exterior per dwelling type — the individual home or unit as a buyer will experience arriving at it.
- One open-plan living and kitchen per type — the space buyers spend the most time evaluating.
- One bedroom — usually the main bedroom, often only for the largest type, because bedrooms differ less between types than living spaces do.
- One bathroom or ensuite — buyers look for finish quality here more than layout.
- One outdoor or alfresco space — particularly important in Queensland and anywhere the outdoor room is part of the offer.
That lands most small projects somewhere between six and twelve images. Fewer than six and the gallery feels thin next to completed stock; beyond twelve you're usually producing variations rather than new information.
Floorplans sit alongside this and aren't renders, but they're not optional — buyers who are seriously considering a dwelling will go looking for them.
The portal caps what you can show
This is the constraint most developers don't anticipate. Listing portals limit how many images a listing can display, with realestate.com.au capping at around twenty.
That cap sits awkwardly against buyer behaviour. Research commissioned by REA and independently validated by Deloitte found that eventual buyers view substantially more images than non-buyers — the people who end up purchasing are the ones working through the gallery in depth.
Compounding it, realestate.com.au doesn't permit clickable external links in listing descriptions. You can't point a buyer from the listing to a fuller gallery, a walkthrough, or a project site.
The practical consequence for an off-the-plan campaign: the portal is where buyers find you, but it can't be where they make the decision. Your project website is the only place you control that can hold the full image set, the floorplans, the inclusions schedule and the walkthrough together.
Different surfaces, different images
The same render doesn't work everywhere, and this is where budgets get wasted through re-exports rather than through re-modelling.
- Portals need 4:3. Renders are usually composed at 16:9.
- Your project website wants the wide crop, plus a full-bleed hero.
- Brochures need print resolution and often CMYK.
- Hoarding and signage need very large output, frequently at unusual ratios dictated by the fence panel.
None of these require building the model again. All of them require being told about it before the renders are finalised, because composing for a ratio is different from cropping to it.
What to decide before you commission
Three questions, answered up front, prevent almost all of the rework:
- How many distinct dwelling types are you actually selling? Not how many dwellings — how many products.
- Where do these images need to appear? List every surface, including the hoarding, before anyone starts modelling.
- What's the one image that has to carry the listing? Decide it deliberately. It's the only image most buyers will see.