Looking for that competitive edge?  Check out VR.

What is VR?  It is an artificial, computer-generated environment that you experience as if you were inside the image, or in this case the home. Put on a virtual reality headset and you can go on a tour of a home without ever setting foot inside the door, not only making house hunting more efficient, but also helping to reduce stress in a relocation situation.  As far as the selling process with VR, distance doesn’t matter. You can offer the same experience to a client in the United States and a client in Hong Kong, 24 hours a day.

One problem that has plagued real estate agents for decades is that an empty home is a difficult sell. Without furniture and all of the other little touches that turn a house into a home it can be very difficult for a potential buyer to imagine themselves living in a particular property. With technology, the virtual solution solves this dilemma and ‘staging’ a home, just got less expensive and easier than lugging in actual pieces of furniture to fill a home when it’s open for inspection. FloorPlanOnline’s 3D floor plan solution allows anyone to drag and drop furniture onto a “clean slate” floor plan model and virtually stage it with furniture.  Better yet, they can virtually change wall colors, flooring, or even experiment with removing a wall to see what an open concept might look like.  Click a button and see it in 3D from the top, or go all in with immersive First Person view. Our 3D plan enhances some of the other cool 3D tours like Matterport, which show all of the sellers’s stuff in the property, as well by converting any Matterport tour into a 3D model that allows you or the owner to do anything, all virtually and in real time.

But is this really what consumers want?  According to Coldwell Banker’s 2018 Smart Home Marketplace survey (download PDF here), the answer is YES!  Th CB study reveals insights on how smart home tech and VR (Virtual Reality) are set to benefit consumers in a myriad of ways.  Their survey included responses from 3,000 adults revealing that:

• 77% of homebuyers would like virtual reality tours before seeing the listing in person.
• 84% agree they would love to see video footage of homes before visiting
• Another 68% would like to use technology to see how their current furniture would actually look in a new home.
• Further, 62% of Americans said they would be more apt to go with a real estate agent, that offered VR Tours over an agent who did not.

Click Here to view an example 3D Space Planner, standard with all FloorPlanOnline Tours and HomeDiary users.

When it comes to Smart Home products that could make or break a sale, the table below shows a percentage of Americans who already own, or plan to purchase, Smart Home products.

The following Smart Home Products were picked by respondents to be the most important pre-install in a listing:

• Smart Thermostat  – 77%
• Smart Fire Detector – 75%
• Smart Cardon Monodie Detector – 70%
• Smart Camera – 66%
• Smart Lock – 63%
• Smart Lighting System – 63%

While some of the changes expected to hit real estate technology may be a decade out to be fully felt, the movement is taking steps forward every day. Virtual Reality has proven its worth and it won’t be long before it transforms the property-buying experience for home buyers all over the world.

FloorPlanOnline’s HomeDiary PRO service is the perfect online tool to help showcase your listings, and well as provide a unique homeowner management tool to all of your clients for one low annual fee. With HomeDiary PRO, you can provide an HGTV-like 3D floor plan tool to all of your clients to they can Dream, Manage and Do more with their home.   To learn more visit HomeDiary PRO.  Existing FloorPlanOnline customers, please contact sales for special options.