Three Affordable Housing Wins from Four Competitive Bids
How a five-person Revit studio replaced expensive outsourced rendering with in-house imagery, and used it to help developers win city and county selection processes.
3 of 4
Competitive affordable housing bids landed
Hours
Saved on every image produced
5 people
Whole studio now working in Gendo
REPRTWÄR
Team Size
5 people
Discipline
Affordable housing, luxury residential, commercial
Toolchain
Revit, Rhino, SketchUp, Gendo
Replaced
Outsourced rendering teams
REPRTWÄR is a five-person studio working primarily in Revit, with Rhino and SketchUp used for diagrams. Realistic imagery is produced in Gendo from those models.
Affordable housing is the core of the practice, alongside high-end single family homes for luxury developers and a smaller run of commercial, retail and community projects.
"This is a five-person studio and we usually do most of our work on Revit. Then we move to Gendo to produce realistic images."
— Dimitri Kheirallah
Rendering that priced out iteration
Working with an external rendering team meant coordinating materials, lighting and the general feel of a project through someone else, always against a deadline.
The prices were high enough that shot selection had to be highly specific, which meant the studio simply did not show many options or iterations.
A deadline that forced a better answer
The studio went looking for alternatives under deadline pressure and found Gendo. What made it stick was how quickly the team could work in it, and the fact that imagery no longer had to be commissioned before it could be seen.
"Coordinating with the rendering team was the toughest challenge. Time was always against us, and the prices were astronomical."
Dimitri Kheirallah, Project Manager and Architect
Options generated internally, then used internally
The studio does not present every option to the client. Variations are generated and reviewed internally, and where an option surfaces a detail worth keeping it feeds back into the design.
Materials and finishing details are where that shows up most, with the imagery acting as a design check rather than only a presentation output.
"Multiple hours per image."
Imagery that carries a competitive bid
Most of the studio's affordable housing work runs through developer-led selection processes, where a city or county chooses between competing developers and their architects.
Of the four such projects the studio has designed, three have been selected. Being able to bring the scheme to life visually is part of how those bids were carried.
The Impact: In-house imagery, at bid-winning quality
Rendering moved from an outsourced line item with a lead time into something the studio produces itself, in hours, for every project stage.
Key Outcomes
No rendering team to brief, schedule or pay per shot
Turnaround measured in hours rather than rounds of dialogue
Competitive affordable housing selections landed
Everyone in the practice now uses it
A tool the whole studio picked up
Client reaction to the imagery has been straightforwardly positive, and internally the change was quick: the tool spread across the practice rather than staying with one person.
For a five-person studio, that matters more than a single impressive image, because it removes the bottleneck of one visualiser.
"Everyone uses it now and it has helped us tremendously."
"Gendo helped us bring those projects to life. You have to try it."
Dimitri Kheirallah
Project Manager and Architect, REPRTWÄR
