A Coming-Soon Page for a Building That Does Not Exist Yet

The most common reason a new building has no web presence a year out is not budget. It is that nobody knows what would go on the page. There are no photos, the rents are not set, the opening date is a range, and the property management company has not been hired yet.

That is exactly the situation a coming-soon page is for. It is not a small version of the real website. It is a different thing with one job: start collecting interested renters while you still have a year to collect them.

Why a year out is not too early

Two numbers make the case. The first is how long a domain takes to become visible in search. New pages very rarely rank quickly, and a domain that has existed for a year with real content on it starts from a completely different place than one registered the month you open.

The second is absorption. In the most recent Census figures reported by the National Association of Home Builders in March 2026, only 47 percent of newly completed apartment units were rented within three months of completion. That was the fourth consecutive quarter below 50 percent, which had not happened before. Buildings are taking longer to fill, and the ones that fill fastest are the ones that arrived at opening day with a list.

What goes on the page

• Renderings, labeled as renderings. Say it plainly on the image. Renters understand that a building under construction is being illustrated. What they do not forgive is discovering later that the lobby looks nothing like the picture.
• Unit mix and approximate sizes. Studios through three bedrooms, square footage ranges. You almost always know this long before you know rents.
• The neighborhood. This is the part you can write today with total confidence, and for a building nobody has seen, location is most of the pitch.
• A delivery window, not a date. "Fall 2027" ages better than a specific day that construction will move at least once.
• An interest form that asks for very little. Name, email, and roughly what size they want. Every extra field costs you signups, and at this stage you are building an audience, not qualifying an applicant.
• Who to contact. Even if that is the development office for now.
• Equal Housing Opportunity language. It belongs on the first page you publish, not the last.

What to leave off

Two things are worth holding back, and both for practical reasons rather than caution for its own sake.

Firm rents, before pricing is settled. Publishing a number you later raise is the fastest way to sour the exact people who signed up early. There is also a growing patchwork of state rules requiring that mandatory fees be disclosed alongside any advertised price, so a bare rent figure is increasingly not a complete advertisement. A range, clearly labeled as preliminary, does the job with less risk.

Anything implying who the building is for. Fair Housing rules apply to a coming-soon page exactly as they apply to a finished listing. That covers the copy and the imagery, including who appears in the renderings. This is easy to get right when you are thinking about it and easy to get wrong when you are not.

The part everyone skips

Collecting the interest list is the easy half. Handing it over is where it usually falls apart.

Decide now, while the list has three names on it, who owns it and where it goes. It is being collected months before there is a property management company, and often before there is a leasing system to put it in. The default outcome is that it sits in a spreadsheet on a development analyst's laptop, and on the day pre-leasing opens the new leasing team starts from nothing.

Two decisions prevent that. Keep the list under the ownership entity rather than any individual's account, and agree in writing that it transfers to the leasing office at handover. Both take a sentence. Neither happens by accident.

How it becomes the real site

The coming-soon page should be the first section of the eventual website, not a throwaway. Same domain, same analytics, same neighborhood content, same interest list. When floor plans and pricing firm up, the page grows into the full site rather than being replaced by it.

That also matches how a development budget actually works. You spend a little in the phase where all you have is renderings, and the rest closer to delivery when there is something real to show. Nobody has to approve the whole thing at once.