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Ontario-based iGuide has long provided the real estate industry with its immersive digital twins, often paired with the company’s dynamic, navigable floor plans. It offers its own capture hardware, too, the multi-purpose Planix camera.
Attendees at the 2022 NAR NXT event in Orlando may have been surprised to see the 3D tour creator joined in its booth by another popular vendor in the listing marketing milieu, HouseLens, the result of a partnership between the two technology companies, announced on Nov. 11.
“We’ve been excited to announce this partnership,” said Michael Vervena, vice president of sales and marketing at iGuide, in the statement. “We’re looking forward to collaborating with HouseLens and bringing iGuide to more real estate agents across all major regions in the United States.”
HouseLens, headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, offers residential real estate customers a wide range of visual marketing and information solutions, ranging from a marketplace of real estate photographers to meta-tagging listing videos.
Its parent company, Seek Now, is heavily active in less consumer-facing but critical uses of real estate information processing, such as ground-truth insurance inspections, underwriting, damage assessments and post-construction quality inspections, among others.
IGuide’s interior capture software integrates a range of options for users to create compelling listing tours including image tags, live tour sharing, room measurements, virtual staging and Google Street View integrations.
The collaboration will provide customers more ways to reach buyers, David Pedersen, executive vice president of enterprise growth and strategy at Seek Now, said in the statement.
“[It also] provides them the tools and technologies to be more successful, which is using iGuide’s 3D virtual tours and floor plans,” Pedersen said.
Virtual marketing assets, such as 3D tours, floor plans and recorded walk-through tours rose to ubiquity during the Covid-19 real estate market, because in-person showings were so rare. Today’s market is demanding them for opposite reasons. Listing agents need to do all they can to move properties in a high-interest rate environment.
The National Association of Realtors 2022 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers found that digital marketing and a compelling online presence will be more important than ever, especially on mobile devices. The report found that 60 percent of all buyers search properties on their mobile device versus 34 percent that use a laptop, meaning listing content should be highly visual and optimized.
In response to the NAR survey, Bernice Ross, president and CEO of BrokerageUP and RealEstateCoach.com, wrote that digital marketing assets need to shine.
“In addition, visuals are more important than ever, [such as] professional photos, floor plans, and virtual tours,” Ross said. “Make sure that every listing you take in 2023 takes markets using these tools sellers and buyers want and expect.”
