Virtual tours in the time of COVID-19
To everyone reading this, I hope you and your loved ones are safe and well.
These are strange days to be making virtual tours.
Strange because, on the one hand, there’s lots of things to be anxious about right now. The coronavirus, the economy, our favorite local restaurants, our families, the picture above… and yet.
For virtual tour makers, there’s a lot to be optimistic about too.
Before
Virtual tours used to be just a nice-to-have addition to a business’s usual marketing and communication tools.
Everyone already had pictures and videos, so some companies figured that virtual tours would be a nice way to distinguish themselves from the competition.
The tours added a premium feel to their products & services.
They made browsing more convenient and personal for their customers.
Some industries have found them to be the best way to convey spatial information.
And there are several companies that have come to depend on virtual tours, and are willing to pay a lot to have them.
But ultimately, virtual tours were seen as a cool gimmick. Most businesses thrived just fine without them, and it’s been a bit of a struggle to get potential clients to try them out.
During
Now that we’re stuck in the largest quarantine the world has ever seen, virtual tours are fast becoming crucial to many industries.
They’re the only way to visit museums…
…attend open houses…
…take campus tours…
…trek through national parks…
…or visit most places these days.
Based on conversations with other virtual tour creators, we’ve seen demand go up 5x in the last few weeks. One of them even reported seeing a 10-fold increase.
If you’re living somewhere that’s not yet in lockdown, you’re likely drowning in business and churning out virtual tours as fast as you can make them.
If you’re like me and you’ve already been forced into quarantine though, your experiences are probably much grimmer.
The first step to making your standard virtual tour is to go on location to document the space. Can’t exactly do that if you’re housebound.
Your clients may have been greatly affected by this shutdown too. They might not have the budget for virtual tours, even if they want them.
It’s not clear how long each community’s lockdown is going to last. It could take a year or even up to 18 months for a vaccine to come out. No country on earth can afford to put their economies on hold for that long.
China lasted about 59 days before its dipping economy forced its government to relax restrictions and let people go back to work.
Governments and industries will quickly need to figure out a way to keep the world going without sacrificing its most vulnerable people.
And so far, the best balance we’ve found seems to be an overnight adoption of Remote First policies. That includes working from home for anyone who can, online delivery instead of retail shopping, teleconferencing instead of in-person conferences, etc.
It’s not the perfect solution. Many jobs can’t be done from home. And many new WFH policies were rolled out so quickly that several companies and employees have found themselves struggling with this new mode.
But Remote First is the best option we have right now, and it’s likely to remain that way as long as we’re still grappling with this virus.
And as we’ve already seen, virtual tours are one of the essential online tools people have been using to communicate with, educate, advertise to, and entertain each other during this outbreak.
Much of the Real Estate industry, one of the first industries to start incorporating virtual tours in their sales cycle, has completely shifted to virtual open houses.
“Over the last weekend of March, the real estate brokerage firm Redfin found that 30 percent of all home tour requests it received were for live video tours, compared to just 0.2 percent the first weekend of the month. But the company has seen a rise in virtual tours since 2018. One in 5 homebuyers made offers on properties sight unseen, according to a May 2018 survey commissioned by the company.” — NBC News
So even after your community’s lockdown relaxes, as long as social distancing remains in place, we’ll see the demand for virtual tours remain sky high.
In the meantime, if you’re housebound, now’s a good time to hone your photography skills, or research ways to make virtual tours faster and cheaper, or start exploring other industries, or scout potential new clients.
But what about after the virus?
After
Once the dust has settled, and we’ve finally found a cure or at least a manageable treatment for COVID-19, are virtual tours still going to be in demand?
There’s no way to know for sure, but I think it’s very likely that the answer will be yes.
The world after COVID-19 is going to look very different from before.
For one, we can expect a lot more people to keep working remotely after the Great WFH Experiment.
“If employers see no dip in productivity, analysts expect they may more widely accept working from home or rethink the way their workplaces run. Instead of working all day in an office, employees and their bosses may find, instead, they split their jobs between the tasks that must be done in the office and all the others at home. Teams may rotate or stagger when they come in, thinning the number of desks and potentially removing whole offices entirely.” — Washington Post
With regards to the RE industry, by most accounts, it’s looking like virtual tours are going to be part of their new normal.
VR and AR are also going to keep on gaining widespread adoption, especially with the 2020 iPad Pro’s new Lidar camera, and Valve dropping the long-awaited Halo: Alyx for VR into our laps.
These are all good trends for virtual tour makers.
If this crisis is teaching us anything, it’s that our normal way of conducting our businesses and lives can be upended at any given moment.
Smart companies will want to invest in tools and platforms that will keep them functioning even through the most devastating and unexpected of circumstances. And virtual tours are going to play a big part in that.
So stay strong virtual tour creator. It may not seem like it just now, but brighter days are on the horizon.
