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Lennar partners with SkyNav in mixed-reality marketing

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Real estate agents and developers need to do all they can to make their properties and communities stand out to potential buyers, who use an ever-thickening morass of apps and websites to peruse and purchase property.

Immersive home tours, such as those provided by Matterport, Zillow’s 3D Home and Ricoh’s tour production package, have become commonplace and are often an expected marketing feature.

SkyNav is another such firm offering rich tour media to the real estate industry, but it is doing so in a more integrative way buy combining multiple forms of video and data-driven visuals, including VR-ready aerial flyovers and 3D sky-to-ground drop-ins. It calls its niche “mixed-reality marketing.”

National homebuilder Lennar announced this week in a press release that it has partnered with San Francisco-based SkyNav to showcase a Summerville, South Carolina, master-planned community called Summer’s Corner.

Agents will be able to send and show prospective buyers a comprehensive digital summary of a property that starts with spherical, 360-imagery of the location. The video identifies specific properties from the air, then “flies” into an exterior street view before teleporting into an Matterport tour of what’s inside.

Viewers can click into traditional photo galleries of a property and connected YouTube videos and view augmented reality data throughout viewing. Other features available include slide-out maps, pop-up menus and descriptions, SEO-enrichment, and social sharing.

When hovering over a community, click-ready icons float to indicate coffee shops, pending retail developments, available listings and agent-branded 3D tours. Slide out menus link to nearby schools and other community benefits.

Agents can track user actions while in a presentation, which can also blend ambient sounds according to tour feature to increase realism.

According to the release, the immersive system has resulted viewing periods ranging from 5 to 25 minutes per visitor.

SkyNav calls it its most advanced real estate solution, which also uses beacon technology and is designed to be viewed within VR environments, such as those created by headsets like the Oculus Go. An app is not required to view SkyNav property tours, which makes it accessible to those using only a desktop browser.

In the release, Lennar Marketing Manager Amy Dooley praised the software’ ability to encourage on-site visitation.

“This immersive interactive tool solving a major issue of site visitors understanding proximity to neighborhoods, amenities and nearby cities, while enticing potential homebuyers to come for a visit,” she said.

SkyNav also provides services to individual agents and their listings, commercial developments and land listings, among other large-scale property uses.

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