Considered is fast become the most overused word in real estate marketing right now. And funnily enough, its the tag line for a few development companies.

Part of that is ChatGPT and Claude, ask either to write a caption about an apartment building and considered comes back nine times out of ten. But the reason it's everywhere is that it's pointing at something real, and the industry doesn't have a better word for it yet.

Step back. Mid-2010s, off-the-plan apartments were moving like nothing else. No BADS regime, a lot of stock going to Chinese investors, no real friction in the system.

At Melbourne Uni, we studied Docklands as the concrete prison. The buildings from that era are what bastardised the category, every buyer since has come in sceptical, and rightly.

Cladding that's now a problem. Kitchens that fell apart in three years. Tap fixtures that didn't last the warranty. Flooring chosen by whoever was cheapest that week. A project architect, not an interior architect, and you can tell, because nobody thought about how a person actually lives in 58 square metres. It was cash grab. fifty 1980s six-stack shitboxes wrapped in glass.

Yeah it was considered. Considered to be capitalism dressed up as housing policy.

What people are reaching for now when they say considered is the opposite of that and the best expression of that is with a real development team. Architect and interior designer, developer who isn't in it for the flip, and maybe some placemaking weaved through the process (although I would say that). The amalgamation of skill sets and experience pointed at a single outcome instead of a single sale.

One of the things very few buying their first apartment will articulate, but every one of them feels, is the small swell of ownership when they walk in for the first time. They start going to the local coffee shop. They find a new pilates studio they like. They start to create a life and routine. They explore the streets they live on instead of just driving through them. They have friends over and they show off the pull-out shelves in the European laundry. That sounds small. It isn't.

And you might argue this sounds silly, but this is the archetype of the most commercially valuable buyer in western world right now. An affluent millennial who spends on experience, and whose word-of-mouth and Instagram search history are worth far more than any campaign budget.

That feeling is what considered is supposed to produce, and it's why a flat-pack kitchen from China can be in a good apartment if the person specifying it knew what they were doing. Smart storage, genuine amenity, robust materials. None of that comes from someone playing Tetris on a floor plate trying to fit the maximum number of dwellings into the envelope.

The agents who are good at selling these buildings notice this stuff before the buyer does.

They walk a buyer through and pre-empt the question, "see how the kitchen sits, see how you'd move from here to here." Of course it's a sales pitch but that's just someone who's read the floor plan the way the architect read it

A hotel concept we did recently in the CBD had five micro restaurants tucked into the ground floor and check-in that felt more like arriving at a cafe than a hotel, that's what we mean when we say the word, and it's why throwing it into a caption without showing any of the work is wasted.

A developer we're working with at the moment. They're holding all the commercial downstairs and a handful of the apartments. Every buyer in that building is going to live above whatever café, providore, or supermarket the developer chooses, and the developer themselves are going to live with it too. That's the line that gives buyers confidence. Not the marketing copy. The fact that the people who built it are stuck with it.

I'd live above a coffee shop tomorrow. That's the actual point of apartment living, the bohemian thing, the woven thing, the bit of a city block where you don't have to drive to anything.

We've spent a decade selling that as a vibe in renders and some of it now is real.