VR & Real Estate: Part One
An introduction to VR and AR in Real Estate, starting with its current usage in residential home-buying.
An Intro to VR and Real Estate
While the promise of VR and its influence has been globally appealing, widespread usage has seen a slow transition due to the barriers to entry in other markets.
Real estate, though, has been an early adopter of VR technologies and has been using it primarily to enhance the customer experience, leveraging ease of access to create a more advanced alternative in the name of property tours and prospective measures done online.
Open house visits are a crucial part of the homebuyer process that allow you to explore the prospective home and reimagine the space room by room. However, this can strain your imagination as you have to picture your ideal space sans the owner’s ugly furniture and questionable carpet choice.
Thankfully, real estate technology is filling this gap with virtual and augmented reality, giving new life to the experiential side of buying property.
In this series, we’ll highlight companies and specific technologies worth keeping a tab on as they continue to dominate in this space. Today, we’ll start with Matterport.
See Every Angle With Matterport
Companies like Matterport are able to create VR-ready experiences by simply piecing together photos and videos taken with special cameras and equipment that render real-time environments into 360 degree images with precision and clarity.
Instead of physically moving from area to area to see a handful of properties, homebuyers or investors can view a countless amount of properties inside and out without moving from their computer chair.
For example, homes listed on Redfin come with a Matterport-powered 3D walkthrough.
This interactive virtual reality experience is one that provides more than just a spatial novelty, it transforms the homebuyer process and homebuyer motivations allowing us to feel safer than ever before with our purchasing decisions, allowing clients to walk through realistic room layouts seeing everything from ceiling drops, the exact sizing of furniture and design features, and ultimately adding much more of an experiential component to the process.
While it is not exactly a replacement for physical showhomes, it still is the next best thing when it comes to influencing buyer confidence, and for remote buyers or investors in distant areas, it remains an incredibly powerful tool to evaluate potential investment properties that are unseen.
This is Part 1 of 3 pieces exploring VR and it’s current place in real estate technology. Part 2 will be available next week. Follow us if you want to read more.
