Immersive technology has transformed the old-school world of real estate where you had to book an appointment with a real estate agent just to figure out your initial impression of a space. In today’s millennial-driven market, what the customer can discover and view online beforehand is what will drive them to make contact with a real estate agent. As the type of customers and the real estate industry itself shifts and changes along with today’s technology, companies and agents working in this business must also adapt themselves as well.
Thanks to 360 and immersive content, the playing field has completely changed. 360 or immersive content is video and imagery where a view in every direction is captured at the same time, providing a 360-degree panorama. When looking at 360 content, the user is able to enter an immersive environment and experience a place without physically being there.
Virtual tours make it possible for interested customers to view a property before deciding whether to rent or buy it. Over 50% of young, first-time buyers begin their property search online. Immersive virtual tours can help provide them with an initial sense of what a home really looks and feels like. This helps build trusting relationships with your customers and also showcases your innovative and digitally adept approach in a highly competitive market.
Virtual viewings are a proven marketing method that help double the number of qualified leads for your listings by attracting new business that is likely to close, and bring non-resident buyers or busy prospects closer to conversion.
Virtual tours receive 40% more clicks than listings without virtual tours. Properties featured with virtual tours get 95% more phone inquiries and overall generate 49% more qualified leads.
Engagement metrics for 360 video content consistently outperform 2D video, with higher click-through rates and increased dwell time. Clicking on a hotspot button and teleporting to new scenes in a highly realistic environment heightens the richness of a fully interactive experience for the user. These scene links are especially relevant to real estate, as the client is able to transition from one room to the next, just as they would in real life. You can easily highlight specific aspects of a space by adding text or a voice-over. You can even add a hyperlink directing them straight to your website.
Real estate company, Bubble Student, helps university students find their ideal accommodation during their studies. They needed an exciting way to showcase the variety of their rental properties and to engage with prospective students, who often have unpredictable schedules and find it difficult to attend property viewings in person.
After seeing how successful virtual tours are at driving engagement and encouraging people to book viewings, they decided to test it out by creating a tour of one of their large student properties in central London. Blend Media worked with Bubble Student to create the tour, ensuring that it was easy to navigate and showed-off every area of the property in stunning 8k quality.
Our team took images of each area of the building with a 360 camera and built them into a virtual tour using our editing platform, 360 Stories. The experience begins in the entrance hall with Bubble Student’s logo and a short explanation of the property. Viewers can easily navigate between rooms by clicking on interactive hotspots, and if they are interested in renting the property, they can simply click to request a viewing.
Bubble Student showcased the virtual tour at events in VR headsets, on phones and on a laptop by simply using a shareable URL. Viewers were blown away by the immersive experience, with many commenting that house hunting would have been much easier if their estate agent had used virtual tours to showcase their properties instead.
Bubble student have since signed up for a 12 month contract so that they can continue to build virtual tours seamlessly using Blend Media’s immersive experience building platform, 360 Stories. The platform allows them to easily create their own virtual tours by linking rooms together, adding property information and their logo to the images, and creating point of sale links which lead viewers to their site to book viewings. These virtual tours can be viewed on a headset, as well as on all desktop and mobile devices, and easily shared across all networks with a simple URL link.
“The support from Blend Media has been amazing, from getting the project underway, all the way through to editing and explaining the features, everyone was great!” - Michael Kyriakou, Head of Growth at Bubble Student
Make sure to also check out the virtual tour we made for the sensational, all gold superyacht M/Y Khalilah here! We have also created virtual tours for Deloitte and The Macallan, among others.
Ready to start creating your own virtual tours? Yes! Here is some helpful information about the best 360 cameras to use to film content for your virtual tour.
Our friendly team is always happy to assist whenever you need. We also offer, for a basic one-off cost, to film, edit and produce a virtual tour for you via our extensive 360 creators network.
Get in touch with us at sales@blend.media