The stacking plan: show availability without confusing buyers

The stacking plan is a familiar sales team tool: a grid where each cell is an apartment, rows are floors, columns are unit stacks, and color is status. A sales manager reads it at a glance. A buyer, not always.

When a stacking plan is moved onto the website one-to-one, you get a dense, multicolored table full of numbers and abbreviations. Someone choosing an apartment in this building for the first time sees hundreds of cells and has no idea what to do with them. Even though the idea itself, showing all availability at once, is very useful.

Who needs it on the site, and why

A stacking plan answers questions a regular list of floor plans can’t:

• what’s actually still for sale;
• which floors have the unit type you want;
• how the price changes with height;
• which units are next to each other and which way the windows face.

It’s most useful to people who have already chosen the building and are comparing specific units. Those just getting to know the project do better with a simpler way in: search by criteria or a floor plan gallery. So on a website the stacking plan is usually not the only way to choose, but one of several views.

Statuses: fewer colors, clearer meaning

In a CRM an apartment can have many statuses: available, reserved, paid reservation, pending approval, sold, off the market. Buyers don’t need that level of detail. They just need to know whether they can buy it.

Three states are usually enough: available, reserved, sold. It’s better not to hide sold units entirely, since the grid would lose its shape and it would be unclear what’s where, but to make them visually quiet. Available units should stand out immediately.

Decide separately what to do with reserved units. A reservation can fall through, so it helps to let people send an inquiry about such a unit too: the manager will get in touch if it becomes available.

Color shouldn’t be the only signal. Some people have trouble telling colors apart, and a phone screen washes out in sunlight. Labels, hatching, different saturation and a legend in plain view help, rather than fine print somewhere at the bottom.

What to show in a cell

A cell is small, and the temptation to fit everything into it, unit number, area, price, bedroom count, is understandable. But the result is an unreadable jumble of numbers.

It’s wiser to show one or two key parameters in the cell, such as the number of bedrooms and the price, and the rest on hover or tap. It’s handy to be able to switch what’s displayed: price, area or price per square meter. Filters should highlight matching units and dim the rest without removing them from the grid.

The card that opens on tap should answer the buyer’s next question: what the layout looks like, where the unit is on the floor, which way the windows face, how much it costs and how to reserve it. The inquiry button in the card passes the unit number straight to the manager, so the buyer doesn’t have to read it out over the phone.

The stacking plan on a phone

The hardest part. The grid for a twenty-five-story building with eight units per floor doesn’t fit on a phone screen in readable form. Shrinking it down to tiny cells is pointless.

What works in practice:

• show one section or entrance at a time;
• scroll through floors without losing the header with stack numbers;
• apply filters first, then show the grid;
• open the unit card on top of the grid, not on a new page.

It’s important that after closing the card, people return to where they were, not to the top. Otherwise comparing two options becomes torture.

Accuracy matters more than looks

The most beautiful stacking plan does harm if it shows units that are already sold. The buyer picks one, sends an inquiry, and the manager replies that it’s gone. Trust in the site drops sharply after that, and the buyer will double-check their next find with a phone call.

So the data should come from the CRM or ERP system automatically, not be updated by hand once a week. If a full integration isn’t in place yet, at least show the date of the last update and be upfront that availability should be confirmed with a manager.

For a buyer, a stacking plan isn’t a sales report. It’s a quick way to find their apartment among all the others.

If the stacking plan on your site raises more questions than it answers, or you have yet to build one, we can work out together how to present availability so it’s easy to navigate on both desktop and phone.