Change the way you experience property with Virtual Reality for Real Estate!!

Since we can’t touch and feel everything, a film was born to bring the experience closer to us. Add graphics and computer-aided design, and the quest for bringing imaginations to life was conquered as well. Recently, the two forces combined to create a whole new industry: virtual reality. Most importantly, its adaptation as a virtual reality of real estate is helping it grow at around 54% per year. 

Both buyers and sellers benefit from this shiny new tool that is quickly growing to become a sales weapon and an interactive tool for various use cases across the multi-trillion-dollar industry. While the most obvious benefits that fuel a 54% growth are the ability to save time and make the sales experience more appealing, we will look at how virtual reality for real estate can be leveraged to recreate the post move-in phase, and how customers love this new frontier of the property evaluation process.

• Letting VR Do All The Talking 

Having a VR enabled headset like an Oculus, or Google Cardboard is needed to experience the virtual reality for real estate, but there is cost rationalisation that is a given on both the hardware and the software front. While we detail further along in the article on the kind of experiences that can be leveraged, virtual reality is this whole new technology that puts the customer at the centre of the action, way early in the marketing conversion stage.

Equipping sales employees or property managers has now made their routine tasks much more comfortable, like taking prospects to different properties or solving for customer’s niche requirements. They can do this with lesser number of interactions, using the various advantages of virtual reality, which goes beyond just recreating the target property environment. VR helps agents move to higher cognitive tasks, while prospects spend less effort evaluating their properties.

• Configurable Changes To Suit Your Preferences

Contrary to an industry expert’s view that virtual reality for real estate is becoming the be-all-end-all once it reaches its end potential, we know that technology’s evolution never ceases. In fact, beyond the current assumption that virtual reality puts a user in a virtual home s/he is evaluating, there are additional features that are coming into real estate software technology.

For instance, when customers plan to assess a few target properties, they come with different expectations, and this can be easily translated into home experience rendering through virtual reality. Customers could request for changes in the architecture or build and make a planned renovation from scratch.

Additionally, virtual stores can be created, where consumers can pick items and incorporate them into the landscaping. Additionally, property managers who use real estate management software can combine virtual reality for real estate by connecting their APIs and synergising their existing forces. 

• Bringing AR, Interactive and Graphical Tech To The Experience

The beauty of new technologies that become mainstream are the fundamentals on which they are built on speed, agility, scalability and more. Developers understand how software is eating the world, and customer’s expectations of a flatter experience: fewer silos, better integration between the technology portfolio of the business, and a seamless experience by the sales teams.

Here, if organisations have already dabbled in some interactive experiences through marketing videos or experimented and found interactivity grow with 360-degree photos on their website, these can be translated and built into the virtual reality experience for real estate. Moreover, all of this comes at a fraction of the cost, having much higher reach than typically expected.

Realtors and property managers bolster their chances of success with augmented reality that adds objects into the existing virtual environment or perhaps use graphical features in gaming to gamify the experience for prospects. They must begin to move beyond the turnkey VR solution model offered by the vendor today, as customers now pay a closer look to make their dream a reality.

Staging Helps Adapt Your Current Home Elements Into The New Home

Home or property staging is the method of sprucing a property to make it appealing to the most number of buyers possible. It helps to increase the property’s saleability while helping to quote competitive prices as well. Staging techniques are widely used, usually incorporating lights, artwork or furniture to ‘fill’ the house, rather than showcasing the property with its bare essentials.

Virtual reality for real estate takes not just the capabilities of AR, but other essential features of filmmaking or interior designing, to create the most desirable look and feel. This ‘homestyle’ could also be taken a notch further. Players could go a step further using virtual reality for real estate by incorporating existing elements and highlights from prospect’s current homes, into the latter’s shortlisted properties before the time of evaluation.

• Previews & Crowdsourcing Inputs For Large Properties Yet To Be Constructed

In the age of customised campaigns and one-on-one marketing, why should the real estate market be any different? Even before properties are constructed, but bookings are confirmed, we could be slowly moving forward to an era where property consultants, builders and owners or tenants could co-create the property together.

While that could be possible in a few years with the power of virtual reality for real estate, current 2D models of displaying properties yet to be built are quite common, yet restricted in prospects satisfaction at the information shared. Move the scale up to talk about the construction of a mall or a large shopping complex, and we can see a proportionate shift in the marketing and logistical efforts needed to sell the properties. Besides, the turnaround time to get back profits is stretched as well.

Here is where virtual reality could again save time, resources and more, by offering the same visual environment on a tablet connected to a VR headset. Prospects can then share their opinions, ask for changes and move closer to realising their dream property.

The numbers in recent surveys show the changing mindset among real estate professionals, who are increasingly using the online medium to search, list, and sell properties. The opportunities to leverage this platform and incorporate add-on elements like a guided tour of the property, focusing on areas that stand out, are all possibilities only limited by human imagination.

As people across age groups purchase or lease homes, especially in this sharing and open economy, virtual reality for real estate will be a viable, low-cost and universally adaptable option anywhere in the world. Up your user experience and streamline your customer game.