7 REASONS WHY BUYERS PREFER VIRTUAL TOURS OVER VIDEO

iGUIDE virtual tours provide and intuitive way for buyers to tour through a home any way they’d like.

Before the pandemic, 360° Virtual Tours were a fringe element of real estate marketing, often reserved exclusively to market luxury properties. During this not-so-long-ago era, there was even confusion as to what constituted a Virtual Tour - some agents reported submitting images to a provider only to have a slideshow returned to them; some clients reported asking their agent to provide a Virtual Tour and discovering that the agent had posted a video walkthrough instead.

Now that the 360° virtual tour has become so crucial to real estate marketing, most buyers, sellers, and agents know the differences between a slideshow, a video walkthrough, and a Virtual Tour. And now that these differences are clearly understood, it has also become clear that property buyers and real estate agents prefer 360° Virtual Tours by a wide margin over the other options.

This divide seems to be growing. National Association of Realtors’ 2022 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends report revealed that only 28% of buyers found video to be a useful website feature in their property search - down from 47% the year before. In another survey, Zillow found that more than 80% of millennials would like to view 3D Virtual Tours and floor plans when shopping for a home. In yet another survey, Realtor.com has found that listings with a Virtual Tour receive 87% more views than those that don’t include one.

In this post, we’ll look at the many reasons why both buyers and agents prefer 360° Virtual Tours over video in their search for a home. 

1 - Virtual Tours Are Self-guided

One of the biggest and most important differences between a video tour and a 360° Virtual Tour is that 360° Virtual Tours are entirely self-guided/interactive. They are like the visual equivalent of a Choose Your Own Adventure novel for real estate, and this element of control and self-direction is one of the major reasons why buyers prefer them over video tours. 

On the We Get Around Network, which is a forum for real estate professionals, the issue of video versus Virtual Tours has been widely discussed. Most agents, like the following user from Argentina, recognize that the participatory nature of Virtual Tours makes them superior marketing devices to video:

“In my opinion, a virtual tour allows interactivity. The possibility of wandering around, going back and forth, and staying in a fixed point all the time you want. This is something that you cannot get with a movie.

“The possibility of having 360 views gives you the opportunity of seeing every detail, while the video can be designed to hide those very same details. There is no place to hide in a virtual tour. It is more real.

“So, in a single word: interactivity. This is the key advantage factor that virtual tours offer.”

2 - Virtual Tours Are Fully Immersive

“I would 100% rather take a Virtual Tour than watch a video walkthrough.” These are the words of Uche Ayologu, a millennial from Ottawa, Canada who is currently searching for her first home. 

“With a Virtual Tour, you feel like you are right in the home, almost walking around in it. With a video, even if it’s a good video, you still feel like you are just watching and that makes it hard to get a sense of the property or to decide if you actually want to see the place in person.”

The immersive aspect of the Virtual Tour is largely the work of the 360° camera required to capture one. It’s a technological shortcoming that even the best video cameras have not caught up to and buyers - especially millennial buyers like Ms. Ayologu - can detect, feel and appreciate the differences. 

It's similar to the difference between the experience of Google Street View (which uses the same technology as our Virtual Tours) and the experience of watching a video shot by someone in a car.

In both cases, the immersive 360° experience provides the sense of being there. This might be enjoyable for users of Google Street View but for people who are seriously looking for a home the feature can make the difference between making an offer sight unseen or moving on to a different property. 

3 - Virtual Tours Can Be Virtually Staged, Video Tours Can’t

Yet another massive advantage to the Virtual Tour over the video tour is that the Virtual Tour can be virtually staged with our 360 staging technology. This technology has not yet been adequately perfected for video tours.

One massive advantage to the 360° Virtual Tour is that it can be virtually staged. Video Tours cannot be virtually staged.  

You might remember Virtual Staging as being one of the early breakthroughs in the proptech revolution. 

Like the Virtual Tour, Virtual Staging was once a fringe element of real estate marketing, until agents discovered how well it works and how much more cost-effective (and time-effective) it is compared to the physical staging of a property. 

Now the benefits of Virtual Staging are well known:

• homes that are virtually staged sell 75% faster than those that are not

• 85% of virtually staged properties sell for the asking price or above

• Virtual Staging enables realtors to give different looks for the same space

• Virtual Staging eliminates (and stylishly!) that empty feeling that unfurnished listings often exude

If you opt for a video tour over a 360° Virtual Tour you are cutting yourself and your client out of such enormous potential benefits. 

4 - Virtual Tours Do Not Depend On An Extended Attention Span

The video experience is a linear one that begins and ends when the camera operator (and/or video editor) says it does. If a viewer is most interested in seeing the kitchen, they have to wait for the cameraperson to take them there, or awkwardly fast-forward the video until they locate it in the reel. 

Aside from providing zero interactivity, this can be problematic in this age of the ever-shrinking attention span. The average adult attention span is, hilariously, around eight seconds long (about the same level as a goldfish!). 

As AdAge reports, if you haven’t fully engaged your viewer within the first 30 seconds you will likely lose 33% of your audience. If you can’t engage your viewer after another minute you’ll likely lose over 60% of your audience. 

Most content creation sites recommend that your video be no more than two minutes long (realtor.com recommends 3 to 5 minutes) - this can be a reasonable and manageable target for many topics however this constrained time limit is by no means ideal for showing a house. 

If you've ever taken a video tour that feels rushed (and chances are you have!) this is probably the reason. Videographers, aware of the general public's low tolerance for videos over three minutes are pressed with the challenge of capturing all the rooms of a house in such a short frame of time that it's not uncommon to find video tours that barely show the minor bedrooms of a residence, or skip them altogether. 

The 360° Virtual Tour on the other hand is an entirely different arrangement. It places the controls in the hands of the viewer and allows them to explore the property as they see fit, within their time frames, and at their leisure.  Virtual Tours engage the viewer in the act of exploration - unlike with video, their unique interface does not lead the viewer to wonder what other videos they could be watching. Also unlike with video, buyers are not conditioned to click away at the first feelings of boredom. 

5 - Quality Virtual Tours Are Much Easier To Shoot Than Quality Video

One of the big myths about video tours of real estate is that they are easier to shoot than Virtual Tours. 

In reality, it is much more difficult to produce a quality video tour - especially one that’s going to retain the interest of a prospective buyer. 

True, anyone can walk through a property with their smartphone filming what they see. But if you’ve ever tried to capture quality, brief-yet-thorough, video footage of a residence you know this is easier said than done. This is likely why the quality of most video tours falls well below a professional standard. 

On the contrary, almost nothing can be easier to shoot than a quality Virtual Tour. 

For an average-size home, the 360° photo shoot time is only around 15 minutes. Then lodging a job with our 360° Virtual Tour platform is approximately two minutes. We do the rest of the work to produce your Virtual Tour.

6 - Virtual Tours Separate The Curious From The Serious Buyers

“Prospective buyers who contact an agent after taking an online virtual tour are far more likely to be serious about buying the property than the neighbor and their friends who show up at an open house for something to do throughout a weekend,” says Brad Filliponi. 

This is a reason why both buyers and agents love the Virtual Tour option. As a real estate agent,  when you include a Virtual Tour with your listing you are probably saving hours and hours of your life that you are NOT spending showing property to people who have no intention of buying it. 

Yes, Virtual Tours are valuable in that they can make people want to see a property. But they are almost as valuable in their ability to show people that they DO NOT want to view a particular property for whatever reason.

It’s not just agents who love this. Buyers value their time as well, they would also rather not meet an agent to physically tour a property only to discover that the property is not for them at all. 

It’s been an unintended blessing of the Virtual Tour upon the way real estate is sold - it has streamlined the buying process in a way that allows everyone to put their time to better use. 

7 - “Video Doesn’t Sell Listings, Virtual Tours Do.”

These are the words of Michael Bryden, a drone pilot, real estate marketer, and CGI Render specialist from Australia’s Gold Coast. Over the past two years, Michael has seen time and again the selling power of Virtual Tours. 

“I know another agent with LJ Hooker here on the Gold Coast," Michael told us in a feature.  "He had me take some pictures for him. I wanted him to include a Virtual Tour with his listing and he didn’t want to. 

“So I said to him  ‘Let me give you a free Virtual Tour. Just so you can see how powerful they are.’ Within two days, he had sold the property to an out-of-state buyer who had taken the Virtual Tour. 

Now he wants to do a Virtual Tour with every home he lists."

It's just one anecdote of many that we have received directly from our clients who have used our Virtual Tours to sell property. Time and again our clients have told us how Virtual Tours we compiled for them were directly responsible for either out-of-state or out-of-country property sales. 

We are not alone in such experiences. Within a week of this post being written UK website the Intermediary published results indicating that, since the pandemic, homes marketed with a Virtual Tour can command a premium averaging £15,648 - that works out to over $24770 in Canadian funds. 

There is plenty of indication that the housing market has begun to cool down in the third quarter of 2022. If these stats hold true Virtual Tours may become more important than ever as ways to attract interest and command value in real estate. 

In Defense Of Video

It should be noted that we're not suggesting that video has no value in real estate marketing. There remain many important reasons to use video as you seek to grow your brand. Social media is the perfect example, no form of content possibly works better than video on this medium. 

But offering a tour of a home is some of the most important listings marketing content you will publish and when it comes to this essential field video tours simply cannot compete with their 360° Virtual Tour counterparts. 

Buyers love them, agents love them, and because of this, sellers love them as well.

If you haven't done so already, take a virtual tour and discover their power for yourself.

If you are interested in a virtual tour, video walkthrough, virtual staging or photography please contact me and I’d be happy to help.

TOP FIVE REASONS A FLOOR PLAN WILL HELP SELL YOUR LISTING QUICKER

With all of the trendy real estate marketing tools out there today, the good old floor plan can be overlooked. Research shows that real estate floor plans remain among the most effective aspects of property marketing.

Any real estate listing that comes with quality floor plans is much more beneficial for everyone involved than one that does not. The floor plan helps the buyer, seller, and renter all the way through a transaction. A real estate agent equipped with a floor plan has a much greater chance of winning a listing, than an agent who courts a seller without one.

Interest rates (and inventory) have risen significantly across the globe, and reports of tumbling housing prices are emerging from almost every region: USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Some are reporting month-on-month drops above 20%. For the first time since the word Covid-19 entered the world’s vocabulary, real estate agents are having to fight to capture the attention of buyers. The old dilemma has returned: How do I market a listing so that it sells quickly?

FLOOR PLANS.

Here’s five reasons why using a floor plan can help sell your listing faster. Each one is grounds enough to include a Floor Plan with each property you list. When you add these reasons up, you might just discover that Floor Plans, though by no means a recent innovation in virtual property marketing, might just be the greatest weapon you possess in your quest to sell a listing quickly. 

1. Floor Plans Provide A Blueprint For The Imagination

Amazing images are without question the best way to stop an MLS scroller in their tracks. If there’s been one common finding over the past decade of NAR research, it’s that images are the most important feature to someone who is searching for property. But without a Floor Plan, buyers can have a hard time taking that next essential step - visualizing themselves, their possessions, and their lives inside a home. 

When you include a floor plan with striking imagery, you help the prospective buyer move onto the next phase of the purchase process: visualization. 

Without a Floor Plan, the buyer can have a hard time tying even the most well shot images together to get a sense of whether the layout of a home is right for them. And it is only when a home buyer can develop this sense that an emotional connection can occur. 

Once a buyer has gotten serious about a property, it is the Floor Plan they will return to again and again - both before and after they have viewed the property in person. 

2. Floor Plans Increase Clickthrough By Up To 52%

Credible research from both the US and the UK indicates that a Floor Plan will increase viewer clickthrough by over 50%. 

Research by Rightmove puts this number at 52%. But the significance of this stat is compounded by their additional finding that 1 in 5 property shoppers will completely ignore a listing if it does not include a Floor Plan. 

Perhaps in the hot property market over the past two years, some agents were able to get away with omitting a Floor Plan from their marketing materials. When buyers are climbing over one another to secure a property and purchasing places sight unseen, it can be tempting to cut corners in the marketing department. 

If you are an agent hoping to transcend the cooling new reality of the real estate market, this statistic alone should convince you to include a floor plan with every listing you post. 

3. Floor Plans Are The Perfect Portal To A 360° Virtual Tour

If the pandemic caused one lasting shift in real estate, it’s that it has made the 360° Virtual Tour an essential feature when it comes to marketing a home. 

The Virtual Tour has became so influential over the past two years that the New York Times declared “The open house is dead.” 

Buyers almost universally now prefer to visit a home via a Virtual Tour before asking to view it in person.  Over the past two years, those looking to buy a home have expressed a sharp drop in their desire to view a video tour of a house, in favor of the interactive, and self-guided Virtual Tour. 

Agents love Virtual Tours because they prevent them from wasting time showing properties to the merely curious. If you’re selling your home, allowing people to tour it virtually means that you don’t have to make yourself scarce every time some tire-kicker comes by and wants to tap at your proverbial wheels. 

And the perfect complement to a Virtual Tour? You guessed it: the Floor Plan. Have you ever taken a Virtual Tour that’s attached to a Floor Plan? This is the ultimate way to get a sense of a home’s layout, and no listing stands out quite like those that include this dynamic one-two punch. 

4. Buyers Want To See Floor Plans When Searching For Property 

Floor Plans are important to potential buyers. How’s that for a reason to include them when selling your house?

National Association of Realtor’s 2022 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends Report has once again determined that (after professional images and informative copy) Floor Plans are the third most important website feature among those who purchased homes for sale over the past year. 

When NAR asked buyers what they most wanted to see in a listing, Floor Plans outranked video tours, neighborhood information, agent contact information, information about recently sold properties, interactive maps, information about upcoming open houses, related real estate news or articles, and the ability to make a virtual listing appointment. 

Oh, yes, it’s easy to overlook the Floor Plan. But don’t underestimate its power. 

5) Your Competition Appears To Have Stopped Using Them

If you are a real estate agent looking to sell a house faster, perhaps this fifth reason to use a Floor Plan will be the most compelling - your fellow agents seem to have largely stopped using them. 

Despite the overwhelming interest of property buyers, despite the increased clickthrough that professional Floor Plans generate, only 16% of US real estate listings (from this time last year) included a floor plan. 

Perhaps you were aware of our 2021 US Real Estate Listings Analysis. It is the most extensive and comprehensive analysis of US real estate thus far conducted. Over 25 000 US listings were accessed for various attributes, including the presence of Floor Plans and Virtual Tours. 

The assessment was conducted during the peak of the housing market boom and did suggest that agents were letting up on their marketing efforts (possibly because everything was selling so quickly). 

These findings was picked up by many mainstream news outlets, including the highly regarded Realtor Magazine, which concluded: 

“Many real estate agents may be missing out on a big opportunity to market their listings online through virtual tours and best professional photography practices …”

Now that the cooldown has begun, perhaps it’s time to ask yourself, are you one of these agents?

If you're not sure how to acquire one for your listing, you’ve come to the right place.

Floor plans are included with every iGUIDE I provide.

Virtual Tours are here to stay

You are missing out on a huge portion of the real estate market if you are not offering these services

Book an iGUIDE Virtual Tour

Virtual Tours, Drone images, video walkthroughs are how people shop for homes these days. It started with the pandemic but it is here to stay. It’s more convenient (for the agent as well as the buyer) and a safe way to see a home without jeopardizing your health.

78% of home buyers say they are choosing to view more properties virtually with 3D tours because of safety concerns.

The longer homebuyers look at a property the more they’re likely to buy it. Eighty-three percent of real estate sellers tend to trust and work with agents who use drones to promote listings.

Video walkthroughs highlight unique features of listings but their main benefit is showing the floor plan of the home. It allows buyers to experience the space as if they visited the property in person. After all, 70% of homebuyers watch video house tours before going to the open house.

For more info on why these services are required for selling homes, check out this article in Forbes.

7 Reasons Why You Need a Virtual Tour Instead of a Brochure

Brochures have been around in business promotion for decades, but recently a more interactive and convenient method came into the picture, Virtual Tours. The 360 virtual tour is same as the brochure, but it does not get thrown out or refiled and reordered. Truth is that even people who have brochures still view the virtual tour. It is crucial for you to know the 7 main reasons to invest in a 360-degree virtual tour for your business:

1. Highly accessible 24/7 and on every portable device

It’s the best tool to show your hotel or venue. Hotels, for instance, can dress up their hotel rooms and provide their potential guests a preview of how the room feels in actuality. Such potential guests can visit and explore the hotel by themselves.

2. Lasts long

Brochures can easily be thrown out while a custom virtual tour can last for life unless you take the link down. This means that you only spend for initial investment, yet you can benefit from it for years.

3. Serves as a great marketing tool in trades shows and events

Many trade shows that have interactive 360-degree virtual tours that can be accessed through a tablet. This also enables sending a follow-up email with the company’s URL after the show. Nothing catches the attention of attendees better than the VR goggle on your company stand.

4. Saves a lot of money

You will spend less when you invest in a virtual tour instead of a brochure. It gets rid of the exhibition expenses since the virtual tour is available and accessible anytime and anywhere.

5. Helps in the company’s online presence and search engine performance

A virtual tour can easily send your site on top of the search engines. The stats revealed that sites that have virtual tours are more likely to elicit bookings. A virtual tour can also do wonders on the SEO performance of any business site.

6. Helps save space and filing concerns

If you are going to check on offices, many of them have libraries filled with brochures. There are even those who hire people to take care of the filing. In the advent of internet technology, more offices have reduced their office sizes which makes brochures difficult to store. Most hotels, restaurants, and shops also resorted to investing in online marketing initiatives.

7. Helps save paper and consequently the environment

With a virtual tour, you can help save more trees from being felled for paper production. Your establishment will not have trash bins filled with discarded brochures.

If you are interested in getting an iGUIDE virtual tour of your commercial space, book a session now and you will have all the media provided and ready to be shared with everyone the day following the tour. If you have any questions you can call or email me directly.