24th June 2020 | Company News
The imposition of restrictions on the viewing of houses, followed by their recent relaxation has prompted a significant and rapid change in the way Agents present properties on behalf of their Clients.
OnTheMarket.com has introduced the ability to filter your property search by whether a virtual viewing is available and Rightmove highlight which properties have that facility also.
So, what is an online viewing or virtual viewing?
They come in many styles and use a wide array of equipment to produce them. Essentially, they fall into three broad categories:
Moving pictures. A number of Agents simply take their normal marketing photographs and “stitch” them together to create a short video. Typically, the photographs follow a fairly standard route around the property with some zooming in on particular photographs to highlight particular features of the room. This technology was first used by Agents around 5 years ago.
Videos. This category covers the widest range of styles of presentation and illustrates the range of attitudes and abilities of Agents. At the bottom end of the scale of technology requirement there are the Agents who simply walk around the property with a video camera or smartphone with or without a commentary. Some Agents even rely on their Clients to do the work for them. The quality can be poor with visible shaking and this can have the opposite effect to that intended. A step up from this is camera arrays or drones which remove the shaking.
A subset of this group is the Video Presentation. Again quality ranges from the Agent with a selfie-stick and a smartphone, all the way up to some quite professional edited and presented videos. They generally open with the Branch Manager or Valuer standing outside the property or beside a landmark in the town who introduces himself and his Agency. They then invite you to accompany them on a “personal tour” of the property as they point out all the outstanding features, whilst carefully avoiding those niggly little bits that nobody wants a viewer to see. Depending upon the star qualities of the presenter these can be quite successful at making somebody feel it is a property they would want to look at in real life.
Virtual tour. The gold standard for inviting prospective purchasers into your home is the virtual tour. Anybody can immerse themselves in the property, wander wherever they want, zoom in on whatever they want and discover everything about the property. The best virtual tours include external 360o views and a three-dimensional representation of the property (often referred to as a dollhouse view). The market leaders in this technology currently appear to be Matterport.
At Maxey Grounds we have always sought to adopt the latest technology to show our Clients’ properties in the most realistic light possible. Whilst many Agents use wide-angle lenses to exaggerate the scale of the room, we never have. We simply do not see the point in misleading people so that when they arrive at a physical viewing their immediate reaction is “its smaller than it looks in the brochure/on the website”.
Similarly, we have adopted the Matterport Virtual Tour system which accurately captures every aspect of the property. Many of those who have been on physical viewings with us in the last three weeks have commented how in real life the property is exactly the same as it was on the Virtual Tour.
Matterport’s own data shows that using their virtual tour technology increases views by 403% compared to normal listings, and improves the ratio of viewings to offers meaning that physical viewings of the property are more likely to lead to an offer. Matterport virtual tours have also increased the average value achieved for properties presented using the system from 93% to 97% of asking price.
The following highlight how, on average, the Matterport Virtual Tour increases interest in your property:
Virtual tours get clicked on 40% more than listings without virtual tours
Properties with virtual tours get 95% more telephone enquiries
Properties with virtual tours get 65% more email enquiries
Virtual tours generate 49% more qualified leads.
Contact us today to discover how we can help make your dreams of a new home a reality.