If you want to understand more about the benefits of virtual tours for real estate then you are taking your marketing seriously and looking for more effective methods of closing more deals.
Great news: you’re on the right way because 3D tours can greatly impact your business and bring you significant bonuses such as higher earnings. In case where you are still wondering whether creating a 3D tour of a building worth it, check this list and you’ll learn how useful it can be for your company.
Virtual tours are interactive digital panorama photographs of a house, apartment, or even a resort. Unlike 3D walkthrough experiences based on computer-generated content referring rather to VR, virtual 3D tours clearly reflect an interior with the high precision.
They are popular especially in the real estate industry so you also can benefit from this technology and get 7 major advantages of virtual reality tours when you offer your property for rent.
Generating more sales
Virtual tours increase interest in business listings for 100 percent because they provide customers with more detailed information about what they’re likely to purchase or book. According to the study conducted by Google in 2015, those website visitors who view an item with a 360-degree virtual tour are twice as likely to make a purchase or book a reservation since motivated on this tour.
Interactive panoramas have an important advantage over traditional photographs: virtual tours ensure more freedom for those who’re contemplating your property for buying. Compared to a 3D walkthrough, the cost of creating a virtual tour is a lot lower which makes this technology affordable even for individual property owners.
Helping customers make a decision faster
Virtual tours are becoming an inherent part of promoting real estate businesses. Most consumers prefer listings using interactive panoramas. According to the 2017 Real Estate at a Digital Age Report published by the National Association of Realtors (NAR), 54% of buyers will not even think about a property unless it has a virtual panorama.
Interactive images clearly increase customer confidence and encourage them to make a purchase. Users appreciate interactive panoramas because they get a more precise image of what they’re going to purchase. Within their 2019 report, NAR concluded that virtual tours assist users make a decision since about 47% of respondents had found 3D tours useful.
With a virtual tour, website visitors can explore your apartment or house from different points of view as if they travel through it in reality. They can move from 1 room into another by clicking panorama hotspots that correspond to physical doorways instead of swiping separate images unlinked to real-world accommodations.
These features help potential customers make a decision faster because they operate more visual representations to leverage all the pros and cons. The Trend Study by Home Planet showed that 75 percent of listing website visitors consider virtual tours are the main decision-making driver before making a purchase.
Increasing attention and loyalty
Aside from the advantages of virtual tours for real estate, they also bring benefits to buyers who, at the same time, understand that this technology helps them better visualize what they’re likely to purchase. That’s why they may abandon property listings using traditional images in favor of these using virtual ones.
The above-mentioned poll by Google also found that 67% of respondents want more businesses to offer their property online utilizing virtual tours. This is not merely about keeping up with the times, this is about caring about your customers and supplying them with additional information to help them make a decision, thus increasing their interest and loyalty.
Engaging your audience
The main difference between a virtual tour and panorama is that the former is interactive. It means. Your customers can smoothly rotate an image in 360 degrees in different axes and many users won’t miss an opportunity to interact with this. Furthermore, they are likely to share this experience with their friends via such social networks as Instagram and Facebook that, by the way, allows posting 360-degree videos right in the news feed.
Because of their interactiveness, panoramic tours and 3D photographs are a whole lot more engaging on Facebook than ordinary images. In their report, Social Bakers revealed that 360-degree content gains more reactions and shares than conventional images by 45%. As a consequence, you will expand your heart of potential customers and generate more sales, thus increasing your earnings.
Keeping your business in trends
Virtual viewings become one of the important marketing tools across various businesses. If you operate in the real estate industry, then you should understand that your competitors are already doing it.
They post panoramic tours in their property listings and gain your sales. Social Bakers also told in their study that 63 percent of companies related to traveling and accommodation rent had published at least one 360-degree image or movie.
Furthermore, the automotive sector also benefits from virtual tours with 54 percent of social media business accounts posting this kind of content. On the other hand, the fashion and beauty sector has the lowest adoption rate with just 10% published at least one 360-degree movie or photo.
Increasing the Amount of reached people
Today’s users might rather consider a property with a virtual tour than without it. Many factors impact whether a visitor will become a customer, panoramic tours, however, guarantee more people will view your offer. A research conducted by Realtor.com demonstrates that listings with a virtual tour generate 87% more views than people with conventional images only.
In addition, Property Week found that this technology reduces the amount of wasted viewings by 40%. In other words, virtual viewings can greatly increase your conversion rate and earnings as a result.
Improving your SEO
One of the important Google ranking factors is how long users remain in your website. The more they stay, the more useful your content is from Google’s point of view.
Virtual tours can significantly improve your search engine optimization by increasing time users spend on your listings through profound engagement also called by Moz one of the major ranking factors. On of the ways how virtual viewings increase engagement is additional meaningful content like helpful videos, descriptions, and hotspots.
Viewing a conventional image despite it is panoramic takes a couple of seconds as a virtual tour is interactive and displays a limited part of space. To explore a complete room or apartment, users have to move an image in different directions with a cursor or using a touchscreen.
Furthermore, interactiveness encourages them to do it more than 1 time to see more precisely certain objects while when it comes to traditional image, they can only move their eyes which takes a couple of milliseconds. As a consequence, virtual tours maintain users on your site more from 5 to 10 times.
One of the amazing benefits of virtual tours for real estate is that consumers spend more time on your website wisely rather than just entertaining.
Instead of attempting to unite a floor plan using photos in their imagination, your potential customers will be able to research a property in 360 degrees while seeing an interactive floor plan with a user viewing angle and location indicator. This feature significantly simplifies the property estimation process for a buyer.
Having a virtual seeing together with a floor plan, users get a much better comprehension of the property interior. A 3D panorama provides context into the construction layout: where a certain room is about the given floor plan and how rooms relate to each other.
The other important advantage of virtual tours becomes extremely useful in the current lockdown times. The COVID-12 pandemic сhallenges almost all kinds of businesses, especially real estate where agents are accustomed to physically show properties to their customers at real meetings.
Because of social distancing, face-to-face viewings are at present impossible and agents lose their money. According to statistics published by Realtor.com, April of 2020 has come to be the worst time for deals in the last decade fell by 17.8% from March.
