For men, it’s a navy blazer. For women, the black dress.
The Virtual Tour world has undergone head-spinning changes within the last year. Not too long ago Matterport Inc. owned the world market. Their product was so far ahead of everyone else they easily established themselves as the gold standard. Matterport owned both sides of the consumer channel; the 3D camera and the 3D tour publishing. Did we mention the camera costs over $4K?
Suddenly a cottage industry arose with entrepreneurials buying Matterport 3D cameras and providing tours for others. YouTube was filled with get-rich-quick virtual tour schemers. Eventually, by user demand, Matterport opened their presentation software to accept other branded 3D cameras. The consumer camera costs went from $4K to $450 dollars. Big jump.
But, enter another seismic shift. Turn everyone’s phone into a 3D camera and bundle it with tour software for a VT experience that costs agents virtually nothing to produce. With introduction of Asteroom’s Pano-kit, virtual tours have crossed the chasm. No longer expensive and reserved for the few, virtual tours are now for everyone at a consumer-friendly price. ($89 on Amazon)
Asteroom promotes users creating VT’s within 20 minutes after opening its box. Another BS marketing claim? We put it to a test. What could we really create in 20 minutes? The intention of the “test tour” was not to dazzle anyone with capabilities, but rather set a realistic bar for what a first-time, non-technical user, could expect.
Take the test tour https://www.asteroommls.com/pv…
Like all users, we did not read the documentation. Asteroom’s set up is intuitive; simply look at a picture of the product. After downloading the phone app, which automatically pairs with the Rotator, there really wasn’t anything else to do but press scan. The Rotator took over.
We established a bare minimum requirement for a “tour” being multiple scans tied together by Hotspots and filled with information tags. For this test we did 4 scans, 5 tags and 4 hotspots. The scans themselves took less than 5 minutes.
Adding Hotspots and tags took every bit of our remaining 15 minutes of the test. The presentation software does have a learning curve, mostly relating to the software’s naming conventions. In regards to Asteroom’s claim of creating a virtual tour within 20 minutes of opening its box: we rate their claim as: TRUE!
Wynd Realty has announced we now offer Asteroom 3D presentation software FREE to all of our agents. This makes the cost of an Asteroom Pano-kit as the only expense an agent incurs when creating virtual tours. That is a significant change from only months ago.
3D virtual tours will soon be the norm. Agents won’t be able to complete in the market with still shots in a picture carousel for much longer. As a result, today’s Brokerages are providing agents with state-of-the-art virtual tour capability. Our local MLS, any MLS, is not, nor will they ever be, set up for the huge bandwidth requirements it takes to run a tour farm. Brokers need to do their homework and offer their agents the best vendors possible for their VT environments.
Agents needing to compete will require an ongoing commitment to technology. Over the next 18 months the real estate market will see the introduction of dozens applications and products aimed to enhance an agent’s Listing presentation. So why stop at virtual tours?
Turn every listing into a dramatic event. Applications like Studeo, https://studeohq.com/, give agents an interactive “storyboarding” platform which helps position and brand their listing in unique ways. Studeo easily incorporates any virtual tour, while extending user-friendly professional design templates that make any agent look their best.
Presentation tools are a moving target. What is new today could be ancient in months. Look for vendors with long term vision and cooperative compatibility.
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