Turning Real Estate Marketing upside down for good using Virtual Reality

Almost everyone in the tech biz understood: VR is great and will be the future — not only in gaming! But there are still a lot people out there who don’t really have an idea what VR is or what it could be for their buisness or product.

Quite a few of these people work in industries like real estate. They don’t feel the pressure to change things that worked and still work for them already for a looong time. Managers in e.g. planning offices are careful planners und usually deal with big sums and projects. Especially when it comes to prestigious projects of corporate clients or big housing projects. With the size of the project the budget for marketing grows at least poportional, too.

Today the chosen means for ever-growing real estate projects are still brochures, mini-scale models or somtimes some static tracking shot video if we talk about sophisticated status quo ways of marketing. Usally traditional real estate agents choose inexpensive marketing tools before the more complex and costlier ones because it’s often on their own account and shrinks their earnings.

But now we talk about options Virtual Reality (VR) brings to the market. VR has the potential to kill the middleman (real estate agents) if he doesn’t see the need to adapt to new means technology offers. Thanks to VR we are able to access offices, houses, falts, entire suburbs or other virtual worlds which are today not yet build in a very early planning stage or just for infrastructural or urban planningexperiments. Transfers needed from paper to thought-image are no longer dependend on the individual imaginative power of the potential buyer or other parties involved. And VR can do even more! It’s not only possibe to look at or access every kind of object individually, it’s also possible to customize and individualize it within the scope of predifined possible combinations of colours, floorings, furnishings, daytimes, lighting, etc. no matter where the user is located in the world. Even simultaneous, joint viewings, inspections or tours from different locations are possible.

It’s not mandatory to use VR-heatsets to present the created virtual world to the user. Also smartphones, tablets, TVs, etc. will do the job especially when the user doesn’t want his hairstyle messed up.

Thus smart and future-oriented players in the real estate and other business will consider VR as we do it at opusVR.com as the new must-have-marketing-tool at least for their premium segments or brands.

But how the the access of the virtual world looks and feels like? Who ever played a first person game might have an idea how it might feel if he or she haven’t used VR-heatsets yet. The real world is seperated or better hidden behind the virtual one. The more accurate in every detail the virtual reality is created the more immersive it becomes to the user. It’s possible to move in every direction in the VR if the input devices allow it and to experience a totally individual journey. Intuitve input devices cause a more natural and comfortable use and feel to the user and motion sickness will turn into a minor problem.

Apart from all these very individual journeys the inexperienced VR user can “just” be flown through an object on a track shot — a fixed predefined route — and watch around freely 360° in all directions and disconnect anytime he or she wants to run around independently.

What do you think: Is it time to turn real estate marketing upside down…for good?