Listing Homes with a Virtual Tour
Currently, 122 Linda Court is listed with a virtual tour showing off the home to potential buyers on my website and wherever it’s listed. Virtual tours help home shoppers experience walking through the home without actually being there. Buyers get a taste of the atmosphere of the home, the floor plan and potential layouts, and ways they could use the space.
With new technology and evolving social marketing, virtual tours are changing just like the rest of real estate. Included in these videos, we are seeing people, the activities, and the community provided for when purchasing the property. These techniques seem to pull in consumers as marketing trends towards social influencers. For example, resort properties will include footage of local skiing and snow boarding. Golf properties will include videos of the adjacent course and golfers enjoying it. Our website now features lifestyle videos, and buyers can actually search Sotheby’s site seeking properties by lifestyle. Home shoppers seeking ranch, mountain, golf, or beach living can now virtually check out properties all over the country based on the lifestyle that goes with the home.
Virtual tours can present a property in many different ways. 3D Matterport Virtual tours allow viewers to walk through the house room by room, floor by floor, at their own pace. It’s an excellent way for buyers to preview the home. 3D Matterport Virtual Tours actually create a printable floorplan which can be added to a listing providing the buyer with another resource. Another widely used tool is drone footage. These added videos give the onlooker a good feel for the neighborhood, surrounding amenities, and views. Additionally, videos can offer more real perspectives with details like a fireplace flickering, possible people enjoying the space, and more.
One property I listed had riding trails adjacent to the home. This feature could be a real bonus for the active lifestyle seeker, so we included people actually riding from the home to the trail system in the virtual tour. These videos should be a preview to the home and what living there would mean to the buyer and their household. Each property has something to feature, and there are many tools to create these experiences now.
For the seller, these videos require a lot of preparation but should operate as a great tool to assist in selling. Areas like Colorado have to consider seasons, limiting weather, and ideal times to capture each property – aspens in the fall, snow at a resort, spring blooms on hiking trails, etc. Even more so, as a camera walks a buyer through the home, it needs to look like a model home. It’s a hard thing to do well without council.
As part of our marketing preparation, I often suggest we use a staging service to update or complete the presentation, as well as a squeaky clean house and freshly cleaned windows. Exterior landscape does best when it’s spruced up as well. Yes, the whole virtual tour is a production! This video is the first place consumers will preview a home. It’s a buyer’s first impression, and that can make or break a home.
