Being solely a science fiction concept a couple of decades ago, virtual reality technology is nothing new today. It is widely used across a range of industries such as gaming, education and training, healthcare, manufacturing, and others. It is safe to assume that VR technology is disrupting real estate marketing, too. Not to mention, it has become a roaring success due to the COVID-19 restrictions that prevented people from actually visiting properties. However, this trend is sure to stay and grow.
For instance, a real estate virtual tour from VisEngine allows potential customers to see how the property will look in the future when it’s done and understand if the home is spacious and comfortable enough to invest in. Amazing, isn’t it? Still, virtual reality offers way more benefits for real estate. In this article, we are providing five convincing reasons to incorporate virtual house tours into your marketing strategy.
Virtual House Tours 101
Before we proceed with the incredible benefits of virtual reality for real estate, let’s take a closer look at the two major types of virtual house tours.
360 Virtual Tour
A 360-degree house tour allows you to look around the property from all angles. The tour of the existing property is created through stitching multiple camera shots or with the help of one continuous shot taken on a 360-degree camera. With homes under development, this type of virtual tour is made by merging computer-generated images.
As the name suggests, a 360-degree virtual tour provides a 360-degree view of a location. The immersive experience brings you inside the home, allowing you to examine the space as if you did it in person.
3D Tour
Like 360-degree virtual tours, a 3D house tour comprises 360 panoramas. In addition, they offer 3D navigation and depth, providing a more immersive experience. 3D tours can make your potential customers feel like they’re actually at the site, especially if they’re using VR headsets. What is more, this type of virtual tour makes it easier to estimate the dimensions of the place.
3D Walkthrough
While a virtual tour is a video, a 3D walkthrough allows you to view and move through a digitally represented property. Without any doubt, this is the best option when you want to let your prospective buyers learn more about the property, its layout, and key features.
Why Use Virtual Tours?
Regardless of the type of virtual house tour you choose, you’ll gain an effective marketing tool. Here are five compelling reasons why you might want to offer virtual tours to your potential customers.
1. Virtual tours are the best way to display homes for sale
Needless to say that a virtual tour is the most practical approach to promote your listings as it helps to present real estate in the most attractive and explorable way. A virtual tour does a perfect job highlighting all the rooms in the house, enabling the viewer to navigate through it, visiting every floor, and exploring every single detail. Furthermore, VR tours allow for adding clickable information points that provide viewers with more details.
2. VR technology can save you a lot of time
Listing a new property for sale usually leads to getting numerous phone calls, meeting potential buyers in person, and arranging property visits. However, all of these take a considerable amount of time. On the other hand, virtual tours enable customers to view the property from the comfort of their homes, on their laptops, or even smartphones. As a result, you’ll receive calls only from people that are really interested in making a purchase.
3. Customers have 24/7 access from any corner of the world
Your potential buyers might also find actual property visits time-consuming. Fair enough, as it takes a lot of time to view, evaluate, and compare homes they like. In addition, it frequently happens that customers have to wait to visit properties they are interested in, which often means altering their schedules and changing personal plans. Virtual tours help streamline this process by allowing your prospective customers to explore homes at any time and from any point of the globe. This feature benefits real estate agents as well: the constant online access lets agents work with more customers simultaneously and make more sales.
4. Virtual tours help to establish an emotional connection with customers
Facts: people are three times more likely to buy and recommend your product or service if you’ve managed to build an emotional connection with them, making this connection absolutely crucial for successful real estate marketing. Unlike the conventional 2D images and floor plans, virtual tours are sure to engage the viewers by providing true-to-life, immersive experiences. VR technology lets users explore the property independently, anytime, and anywhere they want, providing them with a feeling of autonomy and personal connection. Virtual tours help build a sense of ownership and create a strong emotional connection between the client and the property by creating the opportunity to visualize their future home.
5. Using virtual tours is a sure-fire way to boost your online presence
Again, virtual tours are currently the most engaging and efficient way to present real estate, meaning that if you add virtual tours for properties on your website, you’ll very likely attract the attention of multiple buyers. Smart and state-of-the-art VR tours will not only help you stand out among thousands of similar websites. More clicks mean higher traffic and a better ranking on the search results page. Plus, engaging content is sure to reduce your website’s bounce rate: without any doubt, people will want to see more and browse other pages of your site.
The Bottom Line
With the incredible advantages they offer, virtual house tours are really worth giving them a try. Apart from true-to-life representation and significant time savings, virtual reality can help you drive more customers and grow your business. So if you strive to gain an edge in the highly-competitive real estate market, consider including virtual tours in your digital marketing strategy.
