Virtual tours, also called 3D tours or 360 tours, enable visitors to tour a current or assembled property vaguely. Think of it on Google Maps as a street view, except for the exterior and interior of a house. Digital tours are compatible and accessible via laptop, tablet, smartphone, and VR. Virtual tours has become the standard in the residential, commercial, retail and hotel industry.
Digital tours have several types but typically fall into 3 promotional marketing sections:
- Immersive 3D tours: For property built
- 360 interactive tours off-plan: for unbuilt real estate developments
- Interactive hybrid tours: a mix of designed and unreconstructed lands.
3D Virtual Tour for Built Property
- 3D virtual tour of the built-in assets, consisting of a series of physical location scans/360 images usually generated utilizing Matterport innovation. Real estate agents, agents, distributors, hotel owners and management companies use Matterport 3D virtual tours to display their properties for sales and marketing activities. 3D virtual tours enable for off-site inspections resulting in broader viewership penetration and eventually faster completion of commercial and residential real estate contracts.
- Matterport 3D interactive tours give prospective buyers and renters an open-door feature that enables guests to remotely walk around the property from anywhere in the world day or night at any time.
- The research also indicates that in attracting more ‘skilled’ real estate agents saved valuable time leads to a home.
- They have also shown a marked rise in property rentals. Matterport claims that these figures benefit from enabling prospective customers to experience in-depth space to engage in regular physical screening.
The in-tour features of a Matterport 3D virtual tour include:
- In-Tour Tags: Incorporate annotations and mainstream press into the tour to illustrate a property’s key features.
- HD Photographs: automatically generated 4 K print quality photography.
- Guided tours: inevitably create video tours highlighting the property’s qualities
- Floor plans: develop a property’s schematic floor plans.
- Measures: potential to quantify any part of space including walls, windows, furniture, etc.
Off Plans 360 Virtual Tours for Unbuilt Property Developments
- A virtual 360 off-plan tour is a rendered virtual world that incorporates a set of 360-degree CGIs from outside and inside a custom-built application that is compliant on desktop, smartphone, tablet and VR.
- Off-planning 360 virtual tours allow a user to travel from point to point across an unbuilt area, such as a Google street view. These virtual tours provide users with a fully immersive experience and are built to a level of photo-reality.
- 360 virtual tours have been used off-plan throughout the property sector, most common becoming urban, office and tourism. They enable developers, real estate brokers and interior decorators to highlight their unconstructed estate to prospective buyers
- Such 360 tours are often used to achieve pre-sales of housing units, housing projects, apartments for students, office projects and hotels.
The in-tour features of an off-plans 360 virtual tour include:
- Integrated floor plans
- Information hotspots
- Integrated in-tour sharing on social media platforms and email
- VR capability
- Thumbnail gallery
- Autorotation of each location
Tours is a mix of 360 images of social structures and 360 still CGIs, where both can interact and engage in a virtual tour. Within the one guide, users can travel seamlessly through both the built and virtual world at the same time.
- Housing associations and real estate brokers use hybrid virtual tours to demonstrate future stages of an ‘under construction’ project.
- Within interactive hybrid tours, the exteriors usually have full CGI while the interiors can be 360 images. The same developer will take these 360 images from completed display units with identical or similar schemes.
- Hybrid virtual tours enable developers to secure pre-sales by bringing their display units to the market well ahead of completion. For innovations where a display unit is not yet complete, they are a quick and cost-effective promotional approach.
The in-tour features of a hybrid reality tour include:
- Integrated floor plans
- Information hotspots
- Integrated in-tour sharing on social media platforms and email
- VR capability
- Thumbnail gallery
- Autorotation of each location
Benefits of Virtual Tours in Property Marketing
Skilled Leads: By presenting prospective buyers with the in-depth view of a house, they are much more inclined to buy assets in which they have a serious interest. That will save real estate agents both time and money.
Global Reach: Virtual tours are available 24/7 and can draw a foreign audience. Potential customers can make rational buying purchases without having to drive long distances for physical inspections.
Safe Pre-Sales & Pre-Lets: Virtual tours for unbuilt areas are the ideal tech-driven option for well ahead of completion to bring a scheme to market. Developers can use reliable and photo-realistic CGI to highlight their properties and offer potential buyers authenticity and immersion
Interactive Experience: Virtual tours that incorporate advanced capabilities within the tour will enhance the viewer’s experience. These may involve mortgage calculators, data on similar properties and neighbourhood details can be added as in-tour tags.
Competitive Edge: In an increasingly competitive global economy, and with content flooding online platforms, having that competitive edge is crucial. Virtual tours are the best and most impactful type of content in use in the real estate sector. Digital tours offer the spectator a specific, striking and interactive image of a house.
A virtual tour is a representation of an actual venue, generally made up of image sequences or still images. Other graphical components like special effects, audio, description, and text can also be used and are important. It will not only visually engage your potential clients or customers on virtual tours, but will also give them the opportunity to get a much better understanding of what you are doing and what you can deliver as a company. Digital tours support all types of businesses who need to increase the visibility of their brand, create morale, boost their online results and reach their objectives offline. A virtual tour improves hotel and restaurant bookings online and deals with real estate.
