Virtual tours

From Real Estate

Virtual Tours seem to be the rage. Sellers demand them. Buyers say they use them. I've heard pros (they "sell" houses) and cons (they pose a security liability). A lot of Real Estate publications are singing their praises as sales tools. I'd like your opinion. Do they really help houses sell? I've searched the internet and cannot find any statistics regarding the percentage of home buyers whose purchase decision was directly influenced by the existence of a Virtual Tour. I did see some references to the number of home buyers who viewed on-line Virtual Tours, but nothing about how many of these viewings led ultimately to a sale.

[edit] Second Opinion

Having been on the bleeding edge of online real estate promotion I can safely say that the more information the buying consumer has the more likely they are to use your website to research properties. I believe that 90% of consumers when entering a real estate related website do a search and most of them are looking for photos on the properties. As we all know photos are single direction snapshot of a home and if they are posted to the MLS even consumers are smart enough to know that these are the best foot forward of a property not displaying potential warts which may lay just outside of the photo frame. Virtual tours (the 360 degree type) allow a consumer to see the room in its entirety. It stands to reason that if a consumer can look at properties on your website that feature 360 tours there is a higher likelihood that given similar properties in the price range they will pick the property with a 360 to tour because they know it is likely to fit their needs while other properties will be less known to the consumer. Consumers by nature don't want to visit 100 homes to find 1, they would like to do as much of their research online as possible and if it were possible to visit just 1 property, the property they ultimately wish to purchase. You can see the 360 tours on all of our listings at http://realestate.bellingham.net/ and then click on featured listings in the left hand navigation.

[edit] Response

Yes, it does stand to reason. I'd still like to see some statistics. Lots of buyers look at photos and virtual tours before going to see a home. I'd love to see some facts relating virtual tours to home sales.

My Mom recently added Virtual tours to her Real Estate Site, and I can't say Property Sales have jumped because of them. My feeling about photos or tours is that the more you show, the more it can turn someone on, but also off, depending on how it looks. Having said that, I think that customers are demanding them more and more when you list their house or property, so they end up being something that Realtors are going to have to do more and more of.

The other thing to note is that - unless you're up on the technology - most realtors are going to have to pay someone to do virtual tours for you. In my mom's case, she had one customer that wanted a tour on realtor dot com, which meant that she had to deal with obeo locally. They come and take the video, and you don't have much control of it, and there are typically no second takes. I want to get with my mom and help her find some good splicing softwares and do more of it herself, eventually learning more about how to make the tours ourself and post them on her own site, but until I get the time she'll likely be paying for the service.

[edit] Re:Response

Not all real estate virtual tours are technologically cumbersome. For example, Homesandland.com EZTour will create a video-like virtual tour from participating listings with 6 or more photos. If you advertise with Homes & Land and have many listings with 6 or more photos, each one of them has a tour auto-created for them. Most Homes & Land export partners including realestate.nytimes.com and Realestatejournal.com accept and display Homesandland.com EZTours.

More Information: EZTour Real Estate Virtual Tours