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Companies such as Matterport, Toursler and iGuide offer a much richer experience with listings and allow buyers to get an accurate sense of space of the property.
For a time, I owned a Matterport camera and scanned listings myself. Then I found a more complete solution with Toursler through a local service provider, Architech 3D Imaging.
With Toursler, we found a solution that meets all of our needs for our new listings. Beautiful, professional photographs, a clean floor plan and a showing that allows buyers to walk in and around our listings digitally.
Digital showings are a great way to stand out from the competition and provide a true value to sellers. This technology contains proven marketing materials in addition to the most innovative and advanced way to experience a real estate listing.
By leading with the latest digital showing technology, we are immediately able to distance ourselves from the majority of our competition.
Unmatched engagement and results
Although the digital showings are extremely effective at winning listings, they don’t stop there. Online viewing of video content is usually measured in seconds.
Facebook counts three seconds of playing video as a view, which includes its auto-play feature.
Research tells us the shorter a video the better; video completion rates fall significantly with videos longer than 60 seconds.
Only about 50 percent of your audience is paying attention after 30 seconds.
In contrast, Toursler claims that users are actively engaged with their digital showing for an average of six minutes.
Unfortunately, Matterport has not released any analytics. However, I imagine the data would be similar. Digital showings appear to be exponentially more engaging than most videos and your basic slideshow set to music.
I can’t stress this point enough — if 1,000 buyers view your listing video, it would be a little over eight hours of passive eyeballs engaged with your video 30 seconds at a time.
With a high-quality digital showing, you are looking at about 100 hours of buyers actively exploring and interacting with your listing. The results are simply astounding.
The increased engagement results in significantly more inquiries and offers — all with fewer days on market. But benefits of the digital showing technology doesn’t stop there because they make you more efficient.
We see fewer physical showings on listings with digital technology because they weed out the tire kickers. Most showings are fruitless because they don’t result in an offer and are thus a needless disturbance to the seller. However, 3-D technology filters out those that aren’t sincerely interested in purchasing.
In several instances, this offer has been made after a single physical showing. Buyers often use the tours to review the property after that first showing and download the floor plan to explore design and furnishing options.
All of this helps get buyers to envision themselves in the home with the added benefit of fewer disturbances to the sellers.
A new generation is now entering homeownership, and their demand for richer, better and more engaging experiences in real estate is apparent.
This technology has been an enormous win for our team, and it can be so for you as well. Nothing would make me happier than to see more of the listings I show buyers have the same tools and quality content available to aid their decision-making process.
Brandon Doyle is a Realtor at Doyle Real Estate Team — Re/Max Results in Minneapolis, Minnesota. You can follow him on Twitter.
