Virtual Tours—Are They Worth It?
Virtual tours have become very popular, and many clients are asking their Realtors to provide them. Yet some considerations are worth making when deciding how to offer them. Your clients may have heard or read about video virtual tours and want one without knowing the pros and cons.
What (really) is a virtual tour?—A "virtual tour" has different meanings. This is important to know because when your clients ask for one, you need to both be on the same page.
Video Loops—For some a virtual tour involves having a company come out to the client’s home, setting a camera on a tripod, and shooting panoramic photos. These photos are electronically stitched together to create video loops that are played back on the company's website.
Slide shows—It's also perfectly valid to call a slide show of a home a virtual tour, because it is. Some slide shows involve movement, often called the Ken Burns effect. By panning or zooming and through transition effects, the show looks more video-like. Another style of slide show lets viewers choose from thumbnails what they want to see next. Still others have a rapid scroll feature to navigate among a series of annotated photos.
Video versus slide show—Video virtual tours created from stitched photos often give a very distorted view of the home. Straight walls take on weird curved angles. Flat ceilings bow. It often creates strange, alien-looking environments. Tours like this also show everything, including things you'd rather not highlight, like how close the neighbor's patio view deck is to your seller's master suite bathroom window. Slide shows, on the other hand, consist of specifically selected stills. If the photographer is skilled, the 25 or so shots of a property will show exactly what you want to show.
Do you really want to show the neighbor's view?
Slow to load, hard to navigate—Picture the person looking for homes via the Internet. Say she's initiated a search and come up with 38 hits. She wants answers fast. She wants to click and see the highlights. She doesn't want minutiae. She doesn't want to wait, wait, wait for videos to load or for a video stream to show her the feature, like the back yard, she's most anxious to see. The virtual tour format you choose should be very user friendly. People only want to get enough information to decide whether or not they'd like to see it in person. That's all.
Who's got creative control?—Virtual tour companies don't automatically plan for that day's weather or where the sun will be in the sky. They usually schedule their photo shoots based on how many homes they need to visit that day. The company might say, "How does next Wednesday at 9am sound?" You agree. But what if it's raining or overcast that day? Or what if no one planned on where the sun would be in the sky at 9am? If the home faces west and the sun is in the east, the front of the home will be dark.
The real purpose of a virtual tour—Virtual tours should have just one purpose—to intrigue someone enough to motivate them to request a tour. How do you best do that? Show them everything, flaws and all, or show them selected visions that intrigue? You will always have to confront a home's weak points, but I think there are better ways to do that than highlighting them in video.