Seven apartments, seven tours, four to six stations each

Seven apartments in one development in Vlorë were delivered as seven separate tours of six, five, five, five, four, four and four stations. Not one job — seven. Between them they hold the three lowest connection densities in our whole archive, at 1.50, 1.60 and 1.67 destinations per station, because a flat is a star and not a mesh: every room opens off one hall and off nothing else. If you have stock rather than a single property, this is what the repeatable unit looks like.

A developer selling units is not selling a building. Six of these apartments are laid out alike — a kitchen and living room or main hall, one or two bedrooms, a bathroom and in most cases a balcony — and one, number 35, is furnished differently enough that a tour of it is not interchangeable with a tour of the others. That single sentence decided the entire shape of the job.

Seven tours, counted one at a time

Why seven folders and not one tour

1. A buyer is being sold one unit. The link they receive should open in the apartment they asked about and contain nothing else. A menu of seven near-identical flats invites the comparison the seller least wants.
2. Units sell, and stock changes. Seven folders means a sold unit can be retired without touching the other six. One combined tour means every change is a change to the thing all seven links point at.
3. They are not all the same. Six are alike and number 35 is not. A single tour would have had to either hide that or make a feature of it, and neither is what the client is selling.
4. Nothing is lost. They can still be published side by side; ours are, on the project page, with number 35 on its own page.

Four to six stations: what the range is made of

Across the development the tours draw on eight named places: kitchen and living room, main hall, bedroom with a queen or king bed, bedroom with a bunk bed, private bathroom, main bathroom, bathroom, balcony. The count for any one apartment is simply which of those it has.

Four stations is a one-bedroom unit — number 35 is exactly that: kitchen and living room, bedroom, bathroom, balcony. The units that run to five and six draw further names off the same list: a second bedroom, a second bathroom, a main hall that needs a position of its own. There is no interpretation in that and no room for a sales lever — it is a list of rooms. This is the clearest evidence in our archive for the argument made at length in why we price per photograph and never per square metre: the count is a property of the flat.

The lowest densities in the archive, and why that is correct

Number 14 sits at 1.50 distinct connections per station, number 15 at 1.60 and number 31 at 1.67 — the three loosest tours we have delivered, against an archive average of 2.15. Three of the seven have a median station offering exactly one destination.

In a flat, the hall connects to everything and everything connects back to the hall. A bedroom has one way out. Forcing more connections would mean placing arrows between rooms that do not open onto each other, which is worse than useless — it teaches a visitor that the tour's geometry is invented, and after that they stop trusting the layout entirely. A tour should be exactly as connected as the building is. The full range, from 1.50 here to 2.43 in a capsule hostel, is in 324 stations, 1,441 arrows, 696 connections.

The only apartment tours in our archive with an information layer

Every one of these seven carries information popups — two at the fewest, six at the most, in number 15. No other residential tour we have delivered has any, and neither of our two largest hotel tours does. In a flat with four stations, a popup is a cheap way to carry the thing a photograph cannot: what is behind a door, what the window faces, which floor you are on.

What we would do differently

• A consistent popup set across all seven. Two in one unit and six in another means a buyer comparing 31 against 15 gets a different amount of information about each, which is an accident of the build rather than a fact about the flats.
• A station on the approach. Every station in all seven tours is inside the apartment. Somebody buying from abroad wants the entrance, the lift and the corridor as much as the bedroom, and the seven tours between them contain none of it.
• Nothing on the counts. Four to six is right, and we would refuse to inflate them. A four-station flat shot in eight stations is the same flat with more photographs of it.

All seven tours are public and open. Every figure above was counted out of the delivered files, not estimated. What each unit cost to capture is between us and the client; our rates are published in full and a developer can work out the shape of a job from them in a minute.