Behind every off-plan launch is a spreadsheet the sales team calls the unit schedule: one row per apartment, and more truth per line than the whole marketing suite. Ask for it before you reserve. Then read it like this.

Start with the columns. A proper schedule shows unit number, type code, floor, orientation, internal area, external (balcony or terrace) area, total area, price, and price per square metre. If balconies are folded into a single "total area" with no split, that is your first question — a €720,000 T2 quoted on 96 m² total with a 12 m² terrace is really an 84 m² interior, and the honest price per square metre is 8% higher than the printed one.

Compare within stacks, not across the brochure. A "stack" is the same unit position repeated up the building — the 04 line, the 07 line. Within a stack everything is identical except floor, so the schedule reveals the developer's own floor premium: typically 0.5–1.5% per floor in mid-rise, more where a view line breaks. If floor four and floor seven of the same line are priced 12% apart, the developer believes the view changes at floor six; go and check what actually appears at floor six.

Then compare across types on interiors only. Strip external areas, recompute price per internal square metre, and rank the types. It is routine to find the "entry" one-bedroom carrying the highest internal rate in the building — small units usually do — and occasionally the reverse: a corner two-bed priced off its big terrace that is, on interiors, the cheapest space in the tower. That is the unit the schedule is hiding in plain sight.

Watch the "from" price. The published "from €465,000" unit is often a single ground-floor row, already reserved, whose real function is the advert. Count how many rows sit within 5% of the "from" price; if the answer is two, the effective entry price is whatever row ten costs.

Finally, read what is missing. Sold units greyed out in clusters tell you which stacks local buyers took first — they know the light and the noise. A schedule with 40% of one type unsold late in a launch is quietly telling you that type is mispriced.

Ten minutes with the schedule beats an hour in the show apartment. The show apartment is furnished to distract you; the spreadsheet is not.