Lafford Group: CGI-Quality Marketing Visuals, Delivered In-House
How a council-owned housing company in Lincolnshire uses Gendo to produce CGI-style imagery for new homes marketing — in hours, not weeks, and at a fraction of traditional cost.
Hours
Not weeks per visual
Significant
Cost savings vs CGI
In-house
Presentation imagery
Lafford Group
Team Size
10+
Location
Lincolnshire, UK
Discipline
Council-Owned Housing Developer
Focus
New homes for private sale & rental
Lafford Group is a council-owned housing company delivering new homes across Lincolnshire. The team works across private sale and private rental homes, with a focus on quality, community value and long-term place-making.
As a council-owned business, every marketing decision has to work within carefully controlled budgets — which means visualisation needs to be proportionate, commercially sensible, and fast.
Visit Lafford Group"Gendo has helped bridge the gap between basic AI image generation and traditional CGI production. It gives us a practical, affordable and adaptable way to create visuals that support marketing, sales and internal decision making."
— Lafford Group
See the live listing — Plot 36, McIndoe Way
The Lafford Group development page where Gendo-generated visuals are used alongside plans and photography.
Traditional CGI is too slow and too expensive for every requirement
Strong CGI imagery is enormously valuable in new homes marketing, but it becomes expensive quickly once you need multiple external scenes, internal room sets, brochure images, website visuals and social media content across a live sales programme.
For a council-owned business working with limited budgets, the traditional CGI route isn't always practical for every project or every image requirement.
The other limitation is flexibility. If a layout, material, viewpoint or interior style changes, it can mean additional cost and time — and briefs rarely stay still on early-stage developments.
Without strong visuals, communicating the full vision of a home relies on plans and elevations. Those are useful, but they don't help buyers, colleagues or stakeholders emotionally connect with the product — which slows decision-making internally and softens the marketing story externally.
A tool built for property visualisation, not generic AI imagery
General AI tools such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot showed the team what AI could do — but fine-tuning was always the issue. In property marketing, an image has to look good, but it also has to look right: the house, the room, the materials and the overall feel need to be believable. Gendo felt more suited to architectural and property visualisation, and gave the team a way to move from a general AI-generated image to something practical and usable for marketing.
"Gendo felt much more adaptable to the commands and direction we were giving it compared with more general AI tools. It allowed us to create and refine images quickly, test different visual approaches and get much closer to something useful for marketing or presentation purposes."
Ease of use stood out immediately on first use.
From plans and material references straight into Gendo
A typical workflow starts with a clear sales or marketing requirement — an external CGI for a new development, an internal lifestyle image, or presentation visuals for stakeholder discussions.
The team then gathers the relevant plans, elevations, material references, room layouts and design direction before using Gendo to create and refine the imagery. The main benefit is producing strong CGI-style visuals much more quickly and affordably, rather than relying solely on traditional CGI providers for every requirement.
Homebuyers, renters and internal stakeholders
Lafford Group's audience spans homebuyers, renters, local communities, internal stakeholders and partners. Because many homes need to be marketed before they are physically complete, visualisation is critical.
Gendo helps the team show what a home, interior or development could look like much earlier in the process — supporting customer engagement, internal approvals and marketing activity.
Where Gendo fits alongside traditional CGI
Gendo doesn't replace every traditional CGI requirement — particularly where highly technical precision is needed for final brochures or planning packages. It is, however, extremely useful for concept imagery, presentations, early marketing visuals and testing different design directions.
For a council-owned business, that combination means traditional CGI budgets can be reserved for the moments where they are absolutely needed, while everything else is handled in-house.
The Impact: Weeks of CGI work compressed into a couple of hours
With traditional CGI providers, the process can take weeks — brief the supplier, issue drawings, wait for drafts, review, request amendments, wait again for revisions. With Gendo, the team can often create and refine an image within a couple of hours. That efficiency gain means imagery can be produced on demand for presentations, websites, brochures, social media and internal discussions — and it has the potential to save significant sums of money by reserving traditional CGI budgets for the moments they are absolutely needed.
Key Outcomes
Create and refine an image within a couple of hours, rather than a multi-round supplier process
Traditional CGI budgets reserved for final technical packages — everything else handled in-house
CGI-style visuals for internal presentations, development reviews and stakeholder updates
Colleagues and stakeholders react to realistic images rather than plans and written descriptions
Better than some of the visuals from architects
Internal response has been very positive. The team has commented that some of the CGI-style visuals produced through Gendo are better than some of the visuals previously received from architects — a signal that the platform can produce imagery that is not only quick and cost-effective, but professional, engaging and genuinely useful.
For customers, the benefit is that visuals help bring homes and developments to life before photography is available — supporting early sales conversations, marketing activity and stakeholder buy-in on developments that are still under construction.
"Some of the CGI-style visuals produced through Gendo are better than some of the visuals we have previously received from architects."
"Gendo is well worth trying if you want faster, more flexible and more cost-effective visualisation. Software like this can save companies vast sums of money by reducing the need to commission external CGI for every image — letting teams create strong visuals quickly, test ideas earlier, and reserve traditional CGI budgets for the moments where they are absolutely needed."
Lafford Group
New Homes Marketing — Lincolnshire, UK
