A pre-construction project's website has exactly one job: convert interest into registered, contactable leads. Everything else — the animations, the awards, the drone footage — is in service of that conversion or it is decoration.
Most project microsites fail this test. They are built as digital brochures: beautiful, complete, and leaky. A visitor consumes everything, forms a vague impression, and leaves without the project ever learning they existed. In a presale campaign where speed to the lender threshold has a direct dollar value, that leak is expensive.
Here is the anatomy of a microsite built to convert, section by section.
The Strategic Choice: What to Gate
The single most consequential design decision is what visitors get freely and what requires registration.
Give freely: the project vision, location story, amenity overview, exterior renders, and the neighborhood case. This content builds desire and costs nothing to share.
Gate behind registration: floor plans, pricing, availability, and deposit structure. These are the assets a serious buyer must have — which makes them the natural exchange for a name, email, phone number, and intent signal.
The gate must be worth crossing. "Register for updates" converts poorly; "Register to access plans and pricing" converts because the value exchange is explicit. Projects that publish everything ungated routinely see beautiful traffic numbers and empty CRMs.
Section-by-Section Anatomy
1. Hero. One lead render, the project name, the location, and a one-line positioning statement. One primary CTA: "Plans & Pricing." Resist the urge to say everything; the hero's job is to make scrolling feel necessary.
2. The location story. In Quebec pre-construction, the neighborhood often outsells the building. Walkability, transit (metro proximity moves Montreal buyers), schools, and the trajectory of the area. This is where lifestyle photography and honest local specifics beat generic city-skyline stock.
3. The building and amenities. Renders with intent — each image should answer a buyer question (What does the lobby feel like? Where do I work from home? Where do guests park?). Label conceptual imagery as illustration; see the disclosure rules for renders.
4. Plans and pricing — gated. After registration, buyers should see plan PDFs, starting prices by unit type, and availability status. Keeping this current is non-negotiable: stale availability data teaches registrants to distrust every other claim on the site.
5. The deposit and timeline block. Quebec buyers are increasingly literate about pre-construction risk. Stating the deposit structure (typically 10–15% staged), the protection framework, and the realistic delivery window directly on the site signals a developer with nothing to hide — a genuine differentiator. Buyer-side concerns are detailed in Pre-Construction Condo Risks in Montreal; a microsite that answers them preemptively converts the cautious buyer segment competitors lose.
6. The developer track record. Past projects, delivered units, years active. For first-project developers: the team's credentials, the construction partner, and the financing status carry the credibility load.
7. FAQ. The questions buyers actually ask — occupancy dates, parking pricing, condo fee estimates, rental restrictions, assignment policies. Every question answered here is a sales-team hour saved and a schema-markup opportunity for search.
The Lead Capture Machinery
Progressive forms. Ask for name and email first; qualify (buyer vs investor, unit type, timeline) on the following step or in the confirmation flow. Front-loading six fields suppresses registration; asking nothing produces unqualifiable lists.
Instant follow-up. A registrant should receive the plans within sixty seconds, in their language, with a booking link for a sales appointment. Automated, bilingual follow-up infrastructure is standard in our builds — the mechanics are covered in AI Tools for Real Estate Marketing.
CRM from day one. Every registration lands in a pipeline with source attribution (which ad, which channel), so that when the campaign is optimized mid-flight, decisions rest on cost-per-registration by source rather than intuition. Lead economics by channel are broken down in What Lead Generation Really Costs for Quebec Projects.
Law 25 compliance. The registration flow collects personal information from Quebec residents: it requires explicit consent language, a privacy policy that discloses how data is used (including any AI processing), and a named privacy officer. The requirements are summarized in our Law 25 guide.
Bill 96: The Requirement Developers Keep Missing
French is not a translation task to schedule "after launch." Under Bill 96, a business serving Quebec clients must offer French-language content and service equivalent to the English version — and in practice the French version should lead in a Quebec market where the majority of buyers are francophone.
What this means concretely: the microsite launches bilingual on day one, French URLs and metadata included; automated follow-up emails exist in both languages keyed to the registrant's choice; and the sales team's booking flow respects the language preference captured at registration. Penalties for non-compliance run $3,000–$30,000 per violation, but the larger cost is positioning: an English-first project site reads as an outsider's project.
Performance Is a Conversion Feature
Pre-sale traffic is majority mobile, arriving from Meta and Instagram ads. A microsite that takes four seconds to render its hero loses a meaningful share of paid clicks before the first image appears. The technical floor: static generation or edge rendering, optimized images with explicit dimensions, sub-second first contentful paint on 4G, and forms that work flawlessly on iOS Safari. Our web studio builds project microsites on this stack as standard.
What a Microsite Costs — and What It Replaces
A conversion-built bilingual microsite for a Quebec project typically runs $8,000–$25,000 depending on scope (registration machinery, CRM integration, content volume, custom interactive plan tools). Set against a single co-op commission on one additional unit sale — or against the carrying cost of a project that reaches its lender threshold a month later than it could have — the microsite is among the cheapest levers in the campaign budget.
FAQ
Should floor plans and pricing be public or gated? Gated, for most projects. Plans and pricing are the highest-value assets a serious buyer needs, making them the natural exchange for registration. The exception is late-phase inventory clearing, where friction removal outweighs list-building.
Does the microsite need to be in French? Yes. Bill 96 requires French-language digital service for Quebec clients, with content and functionality equivalent to any English version. For most Montreal projects the French version should be the primary experience, not the translation.
How long does a project microsite take to build? A conversion-focused bilingual microsite with registration and CRM integration takes 4–8 weeks from brief to launch. It should be live before the teaser campaign starts — the teaser's entire function is to fill the registration list.
Can we use the developer's corporate website instead of a dedicated microsite? It consistently underperforms. A dedicated microsite gives the project its own URL for advertising, its own analytics, its own conversion funnel, and a focused narrative. Corporate sites bury the project two clicks deep and dilute paid traffic.
Related Resources
- Pre-Sale Condo Marketing in Quebec: The Complete Strategy
- AI Architectural Renders for Developers
- What Lead Generation Really Costs for Quebec Projects
- Quebec Law 25 and AI: Compliance Guide
- Our Web Studio
- Website Building Services
Launching a project and need a site that registers buyers, not just impressions? Let's talk.
Jeremy Soares — OACIQ H2731