Looking for Easy Ways to Get More Eyeballs on Your Listings?

Trying to send a listing? Looking for a way to get more people engaged in looking at the fine details of the property? Virtual tours are a great way to accomplish these goals. Virtual tours can be a great way to break through and get attention to the properties you are trying to sell while standing out from your competition.

Virtual tours are a very popular tool for real estate consumers. They believe virtual tours can give them a much better feel for a home. Studies have proven that listings with virtual tours are viewed more often and for a longer period of time.

Interestingly, though, studies have shown that only 2 to 5% listings include virtual tours currently. There’s a large opportunity to increase the attention to a listing by featuring virtual tours.

So if virtual tours are so popular with consumers, why don’t more agents offer them? In interviews we’ve conducted with agents, they tell us they understand the marketing value of virtual tours, but they don’t have the time or budget to deploy these valuable tools.

The common perception is that most virtual tour companies burden the agent with the heavy lifting of taking the photos, uploading them and then creating a time-consuming end product. Fortunately, there are several virtual tour companies that have recognized this concern and are finding ways to make it easier and more affordable to feature a virtual tour on every property.

Previsite, for example, offers an inexpensive and easy to use camera that requires you to take only one photo of a room. The patented lens of the camera creates a panoramic, nearly 360 degree view of a bedroom, bathroom or kitchen with just one photo. Walk through the home, take one shot in each desired area, upload them to the website and away you go.  Users do not need to use Previsite's camera to use their software.  You can load any image you want and create a tour for the property or comingle images taken with their camera kit and images taken otherwise.

If you would like to learn more about the Previsite Solution, click here.

Click here to read about the following product from Previsite:

• Previsite Virtual Tour Package

Another company, Property Panorama has just launched another approach to make it easier for agents to leverage virtual tour technologies too. They tell us that their new “Insta-View” product suite can take any listing with at least three pictures and generate virtual tours nightly. If an agent lists a property and uploads 3+ pictures, Insta-View Virtual Tour will flag it and that night will create a virtual tour and load this to the listing. The agent does not need to do anything.

They also offer the Insta-View PRO that provides the same overnight, automated virtual tour service, but agents have the option to pay an additional charge for personal branding on the virtual tour.

Like many virtual tour providers, the Insta-View Pro product allows agents can select to also make a video and which will automatically upload to YouTube.com, a site which is growing in popularity with real estate consumers.

Many virtual tour offerings now include easy ways to send your virtual tour to third party property search sites. They also include the ability to include floor plans and virtual flyers. Be sure that the virtual tour provider you are working with has a relationship with your local MLS so that it is easy to place your virtual tour inside the MLS system and be sure they can upload the virtual tours to YouTube and other locations where you would like to promote your listing.

To learn more about Property Panorama, click here.

Click to read more about the following products:

• Insta-View Virtual Tours
• Insta-View Virtual Tour Pro
• Insta-Print Virtual Templates

If you would like to learn more about the value of Virtual Tours in your real estate practice you can also download a free paper from the WAV Group, a leading real estate consulting firm by clicking here.

• Tool or Technique?
• Just Because You Can Doesn't Mean You Should
• Tell Us! How Do You Use Social Media to Further Your Business?