The case for 3D virtual tours
How do you showcase a space?
Let’s say you’re a real estate agent, and you’d like to help people find their dream home. How do you introduce them to potential properties?
Open houses definitely aren’t the best option. They’re costly and inconvenient for both you and prospective buyers, and not everyone who visits will put in an offer anyway.
You could try selling the house online. Now that’s much more convenient for everyone involved, and 50% of buyers are now finding their next house online. But there’s so much competition online, with millions of houses available for sale every single day.
What can you do to stand out?
You could try making your copy more scintillating. But honestly, there’s only so many ways you can describe a kitchen. It’s all been done before.
How about taking stunning photographs of the place?
Better. Photos are more eye-catching, and our brains process pictures faster than words. Adding images to your listing is essential if you want to attract the right attention online.
But here’s the thing: photos are basic. Everyone has them. The internet is drowning in them. You need photos, but having just photos won’t make your house stand out from the thousands of other options out there.
On the visual smorgasbord that is the internet, people will forget your photo as soon as they scroll down to the next one.
And pictures don’t even give all the information people need to know when buying a home.
If you see a picture of a room, can you tell for certain exactly how big it is?
Maybe the buyer has an heirloom cabinet they’d like to move into the kitchen.
Would it fit?
It’s really hard to tell. Still photos aren’t able to show depth that well.
So how can you make sure your listing is capturing people’s attention, and at the same time giving prospects enough information to practically close the deal?
Showcase your space with 3D virtual tours
Virtual tours are an up-and-coming medium that lets you host open houses over the internet.
Because most people haven’t seen them before, virtual tours can capture their attention the way photos no longer can.
And once they’ve taken notice, they won’t just be passively looking.
Virtual tours will have potential buyers exploring your house, room by room, zooming in and immersing themselves in the spaces that truly matter to them.
Prospects can take snapshots of important points within the tour. Measure spaces with virtual rulers. Get instantly linked to other online resources, like pricing pages and customer testimonials. And if they view your tour through VR headsets, it’ll be like they’re actually walking along the place.
This active engagement isn’t just more fun, it’s also going to make your property much more memorable. In the same way that people remember notes they’ve written by hand much better than if they had typed them, the added effort they’ll put into exploring your tour will cement that experience, and your listing, in their minds.
And unlike open houses, prospects can take a virtual tour of the property whenever they want, wherever they want. You’ll just need to send them the link from the convenience of your own home.
How can you make 3D virtual tours?
It’s easier to produce virtual tours than you might think.
Before, you used to need a 3D artist and expensive 3D software just to make one room. Making an entire house could take you weeks and thousands of dollars.
But now, as long as you can take 360 photos of your house, you can use simpler and more affordable software to turn your photos into 3D virtual tours. Some good options out there are: Matterport, Cupix, Everpano, and Metareal Stage.
As the makers of Metareal Stage, we may be biased, but we think our software is one of the best options for making virtual tours out there.
You can use any camera you like, generate floorplans and 3D models along with your virtual tours, and if you don’t have enough time to build the tours yourself, our production team can build them for you instead.
Go ahead and make a 3D virtual tour today, and see for yourself what a difference it can make.
