Have suggestions for products that you’d like to see reviewed by our real estate technology expert? Email Craig Rowe.
Emerza provides immersive property rendering, virtual tours, and data visualization tools for real estate developers and professionals.
Platforms: Browser
Ideal For: Residential and commercial developers, landlords, teams and on-site sales agents
Top selling points:
- Expansive community rendering and animations
- Data-driven presentations
- Photo-realistic interior tours
- Real-time integrations with multiple public and private data resources
- Street-level exterior tours
Top concerns:
Likely, cost. However, developers and agents being challenged by public entities in development projects will have to weigh cost of delays and legal tangles against the software investment.
What you should know
I’ve been in the middle of public real estate development battles.
In the public eye, the real estate side is always the bad one. Greedy. Uncaring. They’ve heard it all.
Agents, marketing staff, and figureheads are all ripe for attack and often left for dead in smoldering heaps on Nextdoor threads when the project finally (as it almost always does) breaks ground. It’s not uncommon for jobs to be lost and people to quit after particularly intense, drawn-out debates.
Imerza is a company aiming to draw up peace accords between both parties.
Its data-enriched, real estate and community visualization platform creates living, breathing development solutions. Its realistic, immersive models reveal what life will be like when an entirely new mixed-use community is built down the street or what home models will look like in a proposed 1,000-home subdivision.
In short, if you need to know what a single-family home or a 50,000-acre commercial industrial center will look and act like, Imerza can do it.
This is an incredibly powerful software offering with outstanding long-term potential to the industry.
With graphics and modeling on par with the highest end video game console, the company can help developers, lenders, and neighbors fully understand everything from pedestrian traffic in front of a shop window to hours of sunlight on the new community pool.
IMERZA INMAN LOOP FINAL from IMERZA on Vimeo.
Using architectural drawings, initial sketches, approved plans, zoning data, and multiple sources of public and private data, the company creates exceptionally detailed renderings that can be layered and enhanced with an array of decision-critical information. Traffic counts are only the beginning.
Imerza representatives took me on a tour of a prospective Atlanta development. Starting from the street (moving cars stopped for us as we “walked” across the street), we entered a building lobby, followed by an elevator, chose a floor from a pop-up number panel, exited into an office common area, and proceeded to a conference room window to confirm that the building next-door wouldn’t block the view or the natural light.
From wide exterior angles, occupancy stacking plans can be turned on to view total building vacancies and individual unit specifications.
Agents can let an aspiring buyer view the building from all angles, see what unit most interests them and then enter it for a tour.
Imerza Demo from CHIL & CO. on Vimeo.
They also demonstrated a basic residential subdivision fly-over, complete with adjacent retail centers, parks and clubhouses.
The animation led to an empty lot where a potential buyer can choose a floor plan, elevation, and exterior colors, and then enter their possible new home for a tour or stand on the porch for a look around. It’s all there: cul-de-sacs, landscaping options, front door variations, perspectives from night and day.
On-site sales agents and developers can work with Imerza to create scenarios where buyers can run through all the options from a web browser on their home, make choices and fill out interest forms. Talk about warm leads.
In essence, think about taking a Matterport tour of an entire neighborhood that isn’t yet built, browsing multiple homes, and then being able to see what kind of equipment the community fitness center will offer and where you want your locker to be located.
Development teams often struggle with being able to communicate the benefits and physical impact of a project on surrounding neighborhoods. And for that, they should experience some push back. After all, you need to make your arguments extremely clear when changing an entire community’s sense of space.
This is the first and most important problem Imerza solves, whether you’re building an airport or a townhouse.
And of course, it packs all the marketing power of 360 tours and virtual staging.
I’m a big fan of a product called TopHap. Minus the photo-realistic property tours and visualizations, TopHap and Imerza have a lot in common: the ability to leverage volumes of data and computer processing power to find simple solutions to complex real estate problems, many of which often have untold millions of dollars on the line.
In a particularly impressive display of its capability, Imerza had a hand in crafting a dynamic, 3D-printed scale model of Tampa, Florida, as part of the city’s billion-dollar Water Street redevelopment project. It is located in the project’s marketing center.
Above the model hung a series of laser projectors, each able to beam on the model specific real-time data sets about the intended building project and the streets, buildings and places around it. On the walls surrounding it, LCD screens show corresponding immersive views of any area being highlighted by the above-projected data. This is next-level real estate sales. Video below:
Water Street Tampa – Case Study Film from Votary Films on Vimeo.
Imerza is heavily service-based, meaning most notable projects involve more than a few uploaded photos and emails.
But, when an entire development’s future hangs in the balance, not to mention the reputation of the people behind it, should you cut corners on your public relations efforts?
Despite this company’s capabilities, the people there only want it to be known as “enterprise technology for real estate development.” Technically, that’s true but only in the same way that Airbnb is technology for room sharing.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
