The Future is Now With the Virtual Experience of 3D Home Tours

In 1962, a television cartoon aired that imagined the world a hundred years in the future. In that future world, The Jetsons enjoyed the benefits of all sorts of high-tech gadgets, and through it many Americans dreamed of what it would be like to live in the 21st century.

Well, here in 2020, we are not yet travelling to work in flying cars or taking advice from our personal robot nanny named Rosie. But we do communicate via videophone and sport smartwatches on our wrists. We even have the ability to print food from a machine, or to swallow a small pill that sends pictures from inside our bodies, just like The Jetsons . And we haven’t made it to 2062 yet; jetpacks and flying cars may not be far off.

Right there with those space age technologies, advances in 3D virtual reality have transported the world of real estate into the future, too.

Show clients more of what they want to see

How many times should a buyer visit a property before making an offer? Two times? Three times? More? The memory can be a tricky thing; too often buyers leave a showing or an open house wondering, “Now, where was that closet?”, or “Is there enough space in the dining room for our table?” A single visit to a home may not be enough to answer all of a buyers’ questions or give them confidence to make an offer.

Sure, they could view a slideshow of pictures. But an array of creatively-crafted 2D high definition photographs tend to paint a portrait of a home in its best light – or better. Same goes for a cleverly-shot real estate video . Those can be great tools to generate interest in a listing, but beautiful images do not answer all of the questions. If anything, they lead to more questions.

Well, what if a client could tour every inch of a property as many times as they wished, any time night or day, without any undue stress to the seller? Now that would be space age. In contrast to traditional photography, 3D virtual showcases (such as the Matterport 3D Digital Twins ) offer an accurate representation of a home. Sellers can show off every detail, and buyers can see what a house is really like – every room and hallway, from any angle. They can even take measurements of the walls and doorways, read descriptions of highlighted items, and leave comments and questions. As many times as they like.

The ability to show and view a home’s digital twin is especially helpful when clients are unable to view a property in person, such as when they are buying from out of town or under orders to stay home during a national crisis .

The space-age advancement of 3D virtual tour technology allows your clients to see more of what they want to see: all of the nuances of a home in true to life form.

Seeing the bigger picture

A smart and savvy agent understands that people are not looking simply to buy a house, but to find a home in their ideal setting. Buyers hope for the perfect place in an amazing community, so those agents help their clients to see more of the picture than the property itself. 3D virtual twins of area schools, parks, restaurants and other notable features can be coupled with drone photography to lend a sense of what the surrounding community holds.

And 3D virtual tours, whether of a home or a community attraction, are highly shareable. Certainly they can be embedded on your website and attached to a listing. Or they can be sent out by email. But 3D virtual showcases can also be shared on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram. 

Now that Matterport for iPhone is available, it is easier than ever to capture the digital twin of any space that might be relevant and of interest to your clients. They can, in turn, view them from the comfort of their own homes and share them with friends and family.

Buying sight unseen

As the country and the world deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, sellers and buyers are looking to real estate agents for solutions. A 3D virtual twin of a property presents the opportunity for a 24/7 open house that does not require a seller to keep the doors open all the time (or create a steady stream of visitors through the house) or a buyer to make several trips to visit homes at a time when stay-at-home orders are in place and social distancing is the “new normal”. Instead, buyers can tour a property as many times as they want to, any time that they want to, and make an offer without even leaving the house.

That might sound strange to some, but times have changed here in the space age where most buyers and sellers prefer listings with 3D virtual tours . Online virtual tours are growing more common. In normal times, you would think that the only buyers who would consider purchasing a house sight unseen are out-of-state investors or those who need to relocate quickly for a new job. But the arrival of the coronavirus has widened that group to include, well, nearly anyone.

Today, a seller can list and feature a property with its digital twin, a buyer can visit virtually online and make an offer. An appraiser can do a drive-by appraisal, and a title agent can conduct a curbside closing. The only physical visit might be during an inspection just before the close. Or there might be no in-person visit at all. A quarter of agents surveyed by the National Association of Realtors (NAR) in April reported that their clients put contracts on homes without physically visiting the property.

In reality, the trend toward purchasing sight unseen was growing even before COVID-19 came on the scene. Led by tech-savvy Millennials in recent years, as many as thirty-three percent of people who bought a home made an offer without first seeing the home in person. 

Seeing better results

Social distancing has led some people to buy a home without seeing it, and technology has made that possible. But by some accounts, the number one reason for the increase in sight-unseen purchases is the speed of today’s highly competitive housing market, where more than ninety percent of buyers search for a house online.

There are plenty of reasons why buyers, sellers, and agents alike love 3D virtual tours . They are like a perpetual open house, yet staging is less of a chore for sellers. They certainly save time for buyers. They allow for social distancing to be maintained for everyone involved. And those homes that feature a 3D virtual tour sell faster and at a higher price . Matterport virtual tours even help with an agent’s SEO strategy .

3D virtual tours streamline the process from listing to showing to selling. Time on the market has dropped from thirty days to twenty one, and average sales to listing prices have risen four percent when the listing includes a virtual showcase. And an agent can track meaningful metrics: how many views a tour has had, how often it has been shared, and so on.

Who would have guessed that the world of real estate would become as “virtual” as it is tangible? That immersive technology would rank right up there with traditional and proven marketing strategies like print advertising ? Maybe The Jetsons saw it coming decades ago.

The post The Future is Now With the Virtual Experience of 3D Home Tours appeared first on Hometrack Real Estate Marketing .