A new homes development in Cheshire you can fly into

Off-plan buyers are asked to commit to a home they can't yet stand in. And the toolkit for helping them has barely moved: a brochure, a site plan, a set of CGIs and a postcode, with the real selling left to the sales suite and a weekend visit.

That first look matters more than it used to. It increasingly happens on a phone, in the evening, weeks before anyone books an appointment. A development that feels real at that moment is already ahead.

So we built one to prove the point: a full village, every plot placed, and the homes for sale filmed from the air all the way to the front door.

Explore it below. Pan and zoom across the site, then choose a home for sale to fly down its drive.

Open it full screen (and turn the sound on, it's worth it).

What you're looking at

Hartsmere is a new village of 17 homes in Cheshire. Except it isn't. We made it up. There's no Hartsmere, no developer, and nobody is going to sell you plot 7. Every house, tree and lamp post was made for this experiment.

You arrive at dawn, flying in low over the fields as the mist lifts and the village wakes up. Then it's yours to explore from the air. 13 of the homes have sold. The 4 that are still for sale each have a film: pick one and the camera flies down its drive and lands at the front door.

From there you can see everything a buyer would want to know:

• Step inside the show home, room by room
• A floor plan for every floor, drawn to match the house you just flew to
• Stamp duty and a monthly mortgage figure, worked out live as you change the deposit and the rate
• The full specification, the energy rating and what's nearby
• A link to just that home, which opens on the street and flies straight in, so you can send it to whoever you're buying with

What it's for

Housebuilders sell off plan all the time. A new phase goes live long before the show home opens, and for months the only way in is a brochure and a website that looks like every other website.

This is the bit in between. A launch site for a new development that people actually want to explore. A site plan buyers can use without a key. A screen for the sales suite that works just as well on a phone at 11pm, which is when most people are actually looking.

There's a bigger shift behind this too. More and more buyers now start in AI search, asking ChatGPT or Google's AI Mode which new developments near them have four bedrooms, a good school and a garden that gets the sun, and they get a shortlist before they've opened a single website. So by the time someone lands on your development page, their mind is often already half made up. The site isn't there to introduce you any more. It's there to confirm the decision, and it gets one visit to do it. That's the moment you need to impress.

And it's a sector we know well. We've worked with housebuilders for years, including Redrow, where reworking their regional development pages brought a 61% rise in non-branded organic traffic, and Castle Green Homes, where we built a record-breaking lead pipeline. Getting people onto a development page is half the job. Giving them something worth staying for is the other half.

How we made it

1. One village, from the air

Everything starts with a single picture: the whole village from above, at golden hour. Every film in the experiment begins on exactly this picture, so it had to be right before anything else could happen.

It took 3 goes. The first had one house in the middle that looked older and grander than everything around it, like the manor house the village had grown up around. Lovely, but not a new development. The second put the homes in a neat circle around a green with an oak tree in the middle. Also lovely, and nobody in the UK builds like that.

The third is the one we kept: an estate road off a country lane, a cul-de-sac, private drives, a pond at the entrance and gardens backing onto open fields. All the homes look like they came from the same architect. Which is the point.

2. A film down every drive

Each home has its own fly-in. The film starts on the aerial, drops down over the rooftops, turns into the drive and lands at the front door. Then the page swaps the film for a sharp still of the same frame, and the panel slides in.

The trick is that you never see the join. The first and last frames of every film are locked to the pictures either side, so the village becomes the film and the film becomes the house without a flicker. Fly back out and you're watching the same film in reverse, landing on the village exactly where you left it.

Every film was made in 4K, then rebuilt at 60 frames a second so the camera glides rather than steps.

3. The dawn arrival, filmed backwards

We wanted the opening to start in the countryside before sunrise and arrive over the village as the day comes up. That's a hard thing to ask for, because the film has to end on our exact daytime picture.

So we asked for the opposite. We gave it the daytime aerial and asked the camera to rise and pull away into the blue hour: mist on the fields, lights on in the windows, the lamps along the road still lit. Then we played it backwards. It finishes on our picture because that's where it started.

4. The show homes

Every home has a show home to walk round: 20 rooms in all, from a vaulted kitchen with oak beams to a hall with a black and white tiled floor. Each home has its own scheme, so the four don't feel like the same house with different curtains.

5. The numbers

The floor plans are drawn to match the films, so the garage is on the side you saw it and the garden room is where it was. The costs are real sums: stamp duty at today's rates (with the extra for anyone who'll still own another home), and a monthly mortgage figure you can play with.

6. The music

The opening has its own score, a short piece for strings in an English pastoral style. The credits are cut to it, so each name arrives on a note and the strings swell just as the camera comes to rest over the village.

Would this work for a real development?

Yes, and it would be easier. We had to invent the village, the houses and the interiors. A real development already has a masterplan, house types, CGIs and, sooner or later, a show home to photograph. All of that can go straight in, and the experience can open before the first brick is laid, then switch to the real photography as each phase is built.

It also doesn't have to be a whole village. One apartment block, one street, one phase. The bit that matters is the same: let people look around before they drive out.

Built by Sprint

Hartsmere is an experiment from Sprint, the web development studio that's part of Clicky Group. It's one of a series we're building to show what's possible now when a good idea, a small team and the latest AI tools get some time together.

Of everything we've made in Labs so far, this one is my personal favourite.

AI made the pictures, the films and the music. People designed the village, directed every shot and checked every frame.

Got a development to launch?

If you've a new site or a new phase coming, talk to us. We'll show you what your buyers could be looking at.