Thursday, September 27, 2007

Virtual Reality Tours Increase Real Estate Sales

We have two friends in the real estate business, and they couldn't be more different. Neither one wanted us to mention them by name (go figure) so we'll call them Marcia and Larry.

Marcia has been a real estate agent for 30 years and has a well-established business relying primarily on word-of-mouth and the occasional direct mail piece. Her idea of virtual reality tours is a few quality photos of each property on her Web site.

She told us her methods work well for her, and we can't argue with her success over the years through good times and bad.

Larry, on the other hand, is relatively new to the real estate game. He's young, eager, ambitious and very tech savvy. As expected he has quite a different view on the use of virtual reality tours in his quest to sell more homes.

He believes the use of video in virtual reality real estate tours is getting ready to revolutionize the home selling market and he plans to be in the vanguard.

Larry has statistic on his side, too.

Here's a couple of tidbits from Real Networks:
  • Visitors stayed at websites that used video 78% longer than websites that did not have video.
  • 86 percent of website visitors stay to listen to and/or watch a streaming media presentation.


Larry is as convinced of the benefits of using video virtual tours in his real estate practice as Marcia is on her tried and true methods.

Who's right? Our money is on Larry.

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