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360 Virtual Tours for real estate property management – 10 benefits
The new-age digital era is constantly evolving and changing the face of different industries. Considering the real estate industry, the most recent technological innovation is Virtual reality (VR). Going by the statistics, more than 77% of real estate clients aspire to have a virtual tour before making the actual visit to the site and more than 68% aspire to see the aesthetics of their furniture with the right positioning in their new home.
With acceptance and evolvement of VR, it has become an engaging, excellent, and intelligent alternative to field trips, while reducing the barriers of expenses, logistics, and time. It gives a real feel of the place where you cannot be physically present. This, in turn, has deeply influenced the real estate industry, providing abundance of benefits.
If you peek into the vastness of the sector, varied domains and verticals branch from the root of the industry. Undoubtedly, each domain is gaining tremendous benefits from modern-day technologies. Here, let us discuss Property Management that includes a vast spectrum of services including marketing, leasing, renting, applicant screening, maintenance, managing needs of the tenant, and rent collection.
Here are the key benefits of 360 virtual tours in property management according to some of the best property managers, agency owners and business development managers in Australia. You can trust them and learn why and how do they use 360 Virtual Tours in Property Management.
1. Lease faster
Virtual tours have proved to be a blessing for leasing staff and prospects. It offers an excellent and on-demand experience to clients. It also puts fewer efforts on the leasing staff with enhanced productivity. According to Rob Woolmer, the business development manager of LJ Hooker in Perth, Australia, virtual tours is probably the best thing he has adopted into his business. With virtual tours, he is able to skyrocket the leasing efficiency of his business.
2. Grow your rent roll
Offering a service like 360 virtual tours in your listing presentation makes you stand out from the crowd and allows BDM’s to win every listing they go for. Having Virtual Tours in your offer and presenting the great results they deliver to your listings, allows you to prove to landlords your worth and easily increase your rent roll without lowering your fees!
3. Get better tenants
When you are marketing a property and listing it for sale or rent, you can receive ample inquiries. However, meeting everyone personally poses a challenge while placing heavy pressure on your time and resources. With a virtual tour, you can help your potential clients see the property and have a real feel of the property. Whosoever feels like going ahead with the deal will undoubtedly get in touch with you. This way, you will be able to shortlist your enquiries and lay your focus on people who are genuinely keen to close the deal. Going by the beliefs and experiences of industry experts like Adam Freitas, a business executive with Raine and Horne in Newtown, and Daniel Brown, a licensee agent with Wal Murray & Co First National Real Estate in Ballina, New South Wales have seen tremendous business growth in property marketing with a very good point of difference in the competitive space since we started using www.virtualtourscreator.com.au
4. Cost Cutting
‘Time is Money’ is a well-known idiom. For all your marketing, leasing, management, and supervision operations, you can save your time through the use of virtual tours. When you save time, you are also saving money on fuel you’ll spend on driving to and from to meet your clients. Besides, you are also able to invest your money and time on more productive operations. All you need to do is upload the 360 tour and let your clients evaluate their needs and aspirations. According to Brandon Read from Ray White Real Estate in Australia, virtual tours have been an integral part of their property marketing packages.
5. Effective Inspection
Time has changed with a swift transformation to a digital era. Rentals are also switching over to virtual visits and digital inspections to save time and money while having a realistic experience before actually being there. Property Managers use technologies like 360 videos, live inspection through video calling applications, and 360 walkthroughs to showcase the property to potential tenants. This gives an accurate idea of property size, layout, and condition. Tara Bradbury, a licensee & leasing agent from Active Agents in Queensland, Australia, also experiences a similar kind of benefit regarding tenant inspection. She likes the setting when a tenant can put an application by seeing the virtual tour, and then the same can be used for further conversations. Even Pascal Pierre, a licensee with LJ Hooker on the Gold Coast, Australia, believes to have experienced a competitive edge in business with virtual tours.
6. Convenient Entry Condition Report
Entry condition reports are the records that cater to the property’s actual condition and its inclusion. This includes furniture, fittings, wall conditions, lights, windows, power points, security systems, and much more. So, generating such a report through virtual tours in conjunction with the written report helps the Property Managers spent at least one hour less in the property on taking photos. Joel Davis, the Managing Director of Image Property in Brisbane, Australia, also states that creating an entry condition report through virtual tours has helped to put everything in the property into perspective.
7. Improved Efficiency of Real-Estate Business
When considering the administrative tasks and functioning of real estate business, Virtual Tours have made a significant mark. According to Joel Davis, Director of Image Property and CEO of Stafflink, he has helped his property management businesses improve the service quality and process efficiency through this amazing technological innovation. VR as a game changer innovation also helps in streamlining administrative tasks and attain full transparency for your owners, tenants and staff.
Virtual property tours easily and conveniently give you an option to manage, sell, or rent a property while helping potential clients access the tour anytime from anywhere. It gives tenants, or property buyers an opportunity to assess floor plans, dimensions, positioning of furniture, choosing color combinations, changing patterns, and evaluating floor covering through an inspiring harmonization of pictures and videos. According to Nick Pellucchi, a sales consultant with LJ Hooker in Cairns, Australia, virtual tours gave him an option to bring his customers into the apartment without physically going into it.
8. Better Decision Making for Significant Renovation
At a site when a renovation is needed, virtual tours are able to give an access to each and every position of the property. The spacing, the positioning of the furniture, the structure or design of the footpath, the architecture of the backyard, or the placement of the air-conditioning unit can all be easily assessed and evaluated through virtual tours to send signals for renovations if required. This makes it so easy for builders and property management businesses to execute customized renovations based on individual needs.
9. Stronger Bonding with Landlords
When it comes to connecting with landlords, there are many issues and concerns that are faced on a day-to-day basis. However, with virtual tours it has become easy, convenient, and hassle-free to make the landlords aware of the existing condition of their respective property. Every time it is not possible for landlords to visit the property and hence real estate professionals create virtual tours. Through the tour, landlords are able to judge and analyze the actual condition so that further decisions of placing the property for sale, rent, or mortgage can be put into consideration. This, in turn, creates complete transparency and stronger bonding with landlords.
10. Better Field Service
According to Director of Image Property and CEO of Stafflink, Joel Davis, virtual tours are substantial for us when it comes to field service. With this technology, property managers are not required to visit various sites for field service. Through the 360 virtual tours they are easily able to see exactly what the property looks like and make a wise assessment. With just a physical point of difference, it makes the process of field service so convenient, time saving, and fruitful.
The Bottom Line
Going deeper and deeper, you’ll realize there are more benefits of virtual tours in property management and the overall the real-estate sector. VR experts like Virtual Tours Creator are focused and committed to creating a flawless experience as real as possible to make the virtual tours almost matching physical visits. This, further looks to bring significant transformation and organizational changes for all real estate sector.
DIY virtual tours for real estate
How to make a virtual tour?
Virtual Tours Creator is the only software in the whole wide world that will teach you ONE ON ONE how to do the 360 tours. We will hold your hand throughout the whole process. From buying the proper camera, through taking your first 360 photos, uploading them to a vr tour, teaching you how to properly position the camera around the property to publishing it. Not like all other providers who only offer to tak your money for the subscription :). KEEP THAT IN MIND.
Of course, 360 camera or the VTC 360 set is essential, so you must buy it. It is a modern device, but easy to use. All you have to do is put it on a tripod in the center of the room and set it via mobile app. After a few seconds panoramic photo is ready, so you can take the camera to the other place. Whole process should not take more than 10 to 20 minutes (depending on the size of property), so you can save a lot of time.
Virtual Tours Creator is a perfect solution for real estate sellers who want to be up to date with client’s needs. Using this platform is very cost effective and competitive but the quality of finished vr tour is excellent and is praised by clients. If you use this technology properly, especially now, you will start picking up clients in no time. You can sell with 360 virtual tours in less than two weeks and easily get new listings, significantly increasing your earnings. At this moment in time there is not that many other agencies that are offering 360 tours, so it is a competitive edge, which helps to stand out from the competition.
What are you waiting for? Buy the 360 camera and, register for free at virtualtourscreator.com.au, make photos and get new clients – as simple is that! The value you will get from new commissions, property managements, listings, and the promotion will be beyond your expectation. On top of that, you will spend a lot less on it than if you ordered a professional implementation.
Rent or sell sight unseen, win more listings, and stand out of your competition. Present your offers in most effective and easiest, affordable way. Use online software to create unique virtual tours in under 15 minutes for less than $3!
So I’ve been using the tours for both our rental properties as well as our sale properties with a lot of people finding that they can get a good feel for the property prior to coming through and having a look. So with a tenancy point of view we are getting, a lot of the time, tenants from out of state or out of town who are looking at the virtual tour and being comfortable enough to apply for the property to lease at that stage, which means the applications come in a lot quicker. And therefore we can lease the properties faster with a lower time on market. With the rental properties, we also use it for our ingoing inspection reports which gives us good functionality, but we found that the transparency that that gives us for a property is just unparalleled. We can give the tenants an absolute snapshot of the property when they’re moving in. And then at the time they’re vacating the property we can recreate that tour and give them back a virtual tour of the property as it was the day they moved in. So it has cut down a lot of that argument where tenants are saying that the property wasn’t in that condition when they moved in. It really takes that whole argument out of the, off the table and enables us to have a really transparent, both with the landlords as well as the tenants, a situation when they’re moving out and we can truly get the property back to the original condition.
I’m finding it’s extremely beneficial for the tenant inspection side within my business. So applications on properties from people that can’t physically be here but by seeing that virtual tour, they can comfortably put an application in and I can continue that conversation with them afterwards.
We use it as an entry condition report for every single property that we do. It doesn’t replace the written entry condition report, it works in conjunction. We’ve actually had to take significantly less photos because the virtual tour has actually put everything in the property into perspective. So at that point in time, we’re taking photos of damage or items that need to be taken photos of, as opposed to taking a photo of every single thing for the sake of it.
Really, really improves our leasing efficiency. And it gives us the point of difference where I can say to a prospective owner, we’re the only agent in Perth right now that can show your property 24/7, while all the other agents are asleep.
Use virtual tours in property marketing. And I believe that gives me an amazing edge and advantage over my competitors. Now, for my clients, that allows me to really truly show their property and how it presents. And more importantly, it allows tenants to prioritize my listings over the next ones.
In terms of doing our ingoing inspection or entry condition reports, we find this to be really time-saving. So we used to probably spend about four hours just at the property note-taking and things like that. Whereas now, with our virtual tour, we can sit in our office and we can create a transcript from the virtual tour and it’s quite quick. So I would say that our four hours is now halved at least to two hours. And then just a quick round of photos after that.
Our property managers aren’t necessarily the ones that go to site all the time. And we have build services that go to site for our office a lot. And so the PMs, whilst they haven’t been there, they can still see exactly what the property looks like. And they can look through the virtual tour and assess anything that they want to see themselves. So look, you know, huge range of really practical applications for the product.
If you’ve got a property, that’s got some maintenance issues, and you’re trying to explain this to your owner, perhaps the photo doesn’t really tell them the full picture. You can go through and get a walkthrough of the property. And you can point out all the areas of concern, the areas that may be holding tenants back from applying or areas that are holding them back from getting the maximum possible rent. If you can capture their property and give them that experience like they’re there, remotely, it’s a really good way. We’ve definitely used it a few times for getting owners to make some basic remedial repairs to improve rentability of the properties.
The tenants love it because they can go and look at inspections. You don’t have to go and do 50 inspections in a week, and do them all separately because tenants can pretty much look at the house and see if they like it or not. And by the time they get there, they’re qualified and they pretty much would want to rent it themselves. I know that we, everyone’s asking us, how long does it take? These, like nine people, they’ve been empty for, some of these have been empty for two months, right? And they’re like Eddy, how long does it take for you guys to rent out a house? Takes us a week to a week and a half because we take professional photos, 360 tours. These things can do videos as well if you want to do the videos. We upload them. Tenants love it. They send in online applications before even looking at the damn property and then we lease them but we do want them to look at it. But then we lease them so quickly and we gain new management.
So our leasing efficiency has improved dramatically. We don’t have to show the property as often anymore. Tenants now are really, really information hungry. So they, they want to be able to see a floor plan. They want to go through the property and they can do that from home. So we can kind of weed out people that the property is not going to be suitable for. So we know the people that are coming through, they already know everything about the property. Coming in and seeing it is a formality. So I suppose if you’re opening the door and you’re getting people in who already know everything and they’re coming in, they’re more likely to take it. So we don’t have to keep going back to the same property, time after time after time.
One of the best has been actually our BDMs. It’s a physical point of difference at a listing presentation. You know, our BDMs can say, look, one of the things we do for every single property is a virtual tour. Here it is. Here’s what it looks like. And points of difference are increasingly difficult to come by. And for me, the reason I love that point of difference is because it’s one that we’ve got proof of and that’s really substantial for us.