Buyer's Guide: Virtual Tours--The Next Best Thing to Being There

Imagine how much more you could fit into your workday if the only properties you showed buyers were the ones that already interested them.

That’s the most compelling advantage of virtual tours, say the growing ranks of real estate practitioners who are using them to market properties.

A virtual tour is a photographic home tour online or on disk with descriptive text or audio that lets buyers do some legwork on their own time.

“Day to day, it saves me from having to do a lot of frivolous previews with other real estate salespeople or the public,” reports Lorraine Chiarella, a principal of the Chaney Chiarella Agent Team, Arvida Realty Services, Orlando, Fla.

New “immersion imaging” technologies make it possible to capture 360-degree images of a room or area, allowing viewers to take a self-guided walk-through and inspect rooms from corner to corner and floor to ceiling without leaving their computer.

Chiarella, a specialist in upscale home sales, equipped her assistant with an iPIX imaging kit. It includes a Nikon digital camera, a fish-eye lens, and software to create 360-degree panoramic images of new listings.

“The people who tend to buy the homes we sell want to look at all the tangibles--the fittings and finishings of a home,” she says. “We’re able to capture all that in the image.” After taking the photos with the digital camera, it’s a simple process to post them to her Web site.

At the other corner of the country, Rick Reimer, associate broker with Windermere Real Estate Northeast, Kirkland, Wash., has been showcasing listings using virtual tours created by bamboo.com (now a part of iPIX after a recently announced merger) and photos of properties and neighborhoods hosted at onlinevisit.com.

“Our office, our homebuyers, and our entire community are very high-tech, so you have to be at the leading edge of technology,” he explains. “Around here, if you aren’t already using those tools, it looks as if you were trying to play catch up.

“When you tell sellers you can put a tour of their home online, it’s something they find very intriguing,” Reimer continues. “Whether it’s actually helped sell any specific properties yet isn’t as clear.”

For residential sales specialist Fred Perry, RE/MAX Suburban Properties, Kansas City, Kan., 360-degree virtual tours have proved to be strong marketing tools. “They really make the phone ring and generate e-mail from buyers who’ve previewed homes online,” he says. “But so far their No. 1 value has been as listing tools.”

In fact, Perry adopted the technology after losing a listing earlier this year because he didn’t offer virtual tours as part of his marketing plan.

Virtual tour services range from a turnkey solution--call the company, specify the property’s location, and the company will take pictures and post them on the Web--to those that merely provide templates and host Web pages for images and text submitted by the salesperson. Prices range from $39 per listing when the salesperson supplies photos and text to $99 per listing for the total package.

For those who want complete control of the process, there are do-it-yourself tour packages. In addition to their service packages, iPIX and CycloVision Technologies bundle digital cameras, special attachments, and software to enable you to create and upload your own 360-degree images. Pricing starts near $1,000 and climbs steadily, depending on the camera model.

Far less expensive is “image stitching” software, such as Enroute Imaging’s QuickStitch, and PhotoVista from Live Picture. Those applications take several photo scans or images captured with a digital camera and merge them into a single, seamless panoramic image that can be added to a Web site.

Chiarella purchased an iPIX system for her office so that she wouldn’t need to rely on services from an outside vendor. “My assistant can take the pictures and have the virtual tour on my Web site within 24 hours,” she says. “That’s the kind of service my clientele expects.”

She’s also free to post as many images as she thinks the property requires. “We had a man here very interested in a particular home but his wife was in France,” she says. “We put eight iPIX images of the property on our Web site. She looked them over and felt they gave her a good enough idea about the home that she could tell him to go ahead and buy it.”

Perry, however, prefers to leave the job of creating virtual tours to someone else.

“The ultimate benefit is that it’s relatively inexpensive and they do all the work,” he says. “I’d rather pay to have it done than learn how and have something more to do.”

He relies on an area photographer who works for iPIX to produce his tours. For $99 per listing, the service includes property photos, digitizing and combining them into a 360-degree image, and posting those images to the Web.

No one’s proposing that virtual tours replace the experience of walking through a home, but the tours are becoming the preferred means for previewing property. “They already have a tremendous impact with Internet-savvy buyers,” says Perry.

“Here’s a tool that lets people eliminate the houses that don’t interest them. It’s unbelievable how many people have already taken the virtual tours before they call us.”

Virtual Tour Software(ranked by price)

For more information from any manufacturer, visit the company’s Web site or circle the Reader Service number for the manufacturer on the bound-in, preaddressed REALTOR® Magazine Reader Service Card and mail the card in.

This list isn’t comprehensive; NAR doesn’t evaluate or endorse these products and isn’t responsible for changes in company information.

Variety in virtual tours

Ask around, and you’ll quickly learn that all virtual tour solutions are not alike. In fact, vendors are appropriating the “virtual tour” label for a variety of services and solutions.

The common ground: All convey something about the look of a place without the need for buyers to visit it. But such a broad definition could even encompass a printed brochure loaded with pictures.

Some virtual tour solutions are little more than that: the digital equivalent of a slide show. The important point, though, is that the images, or pictures, plus audio and text, are universally accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on the computer screen, over the Internet, or on disk. Vendors of the most basic type of virtual tour provide templates to combine images and listing information into a tour and may even host the Web page.

A more expansive meaning is 360-degree panoramic views of a property. The tours immerse the viewer at the room’s center. Using a mouse, the viewer can visually explore the room’s perimeters.

Although 360-degree tours do evoke a sense of place, it’s a somewhat distorted view and often fails to convey the full dimensions of the space. But that hasn’t stopped virtual tour technology from emerging as a new standard in real estate marketing. What’s next? Digital technology will make it easier for practitioners to put video home tours online.

Win-win-win

Virtual tours are one of those rare technological advances that benefit everyone involved in the real estate transaction.

For sellers, virtual tours promise maximum exposure around the clock for their home or property. While prospective buyers preview the listing, sellers can go on with their lives without worrying about keeping the property primed to show. And when they do host a tour, they know it’s for someone already serious about buying.

For buyers, virtual tours provide the means to spend far less time viewing far more properties. Before engaging the services of a real estate practitioner, buyers are able to learn what they can afford and where they want to live.

For you, offering a virtual tour as part of your marketing services says you’ve taken the initiative to put the latest technology to work for sellers and buyers. In exchange for the effort, you’ll spend less time doing real, and often fruitless, neighborhood tours. That’ll give you more time to prospect—or perhaps to search out some virtual tours of vacation destinations.

This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of the products in this category. NAR doesn’t evaluate or endorse these products and isn’t responsible for changes in product info. Prices are the vendors’ suggested retail prices and are subject to change.