Why the best BDM’s use virtual tours for real estate property management

Let’s ask Jessica Melling – the best Business Development Manager at LJ Hooker Robina on the Gold Coast, Australia. With 11 years of experience she is an expert in this role ! Learn to why use virtual tours for real estate sales and property management directly from her. If you need some extra answers to your questions ask us in comments and we will make sure to answer them.

My name’s Jess and I am the business development manager at LJ Hooker in Robina Varsity.

The main point of us using the Virtual Tour Creator is for advertising. As a business development manager, I’m going into my meetings with my potential clients and I’m actually showing them a live tour of what we can do. So once we sign them up, we’re then going through the home and doing the tour and then using it as part of an advertising tool. We’re also making sure that we use it to prequalify tenants to the home, because it’s becoming more common for people to want to apply for the home without actually seeing it. So they’re able to see the home without having any issues. I’m thinking it’s giving us an edge with technology. I know that this is the technology for the future, so us being able to have it now, before anyone else does, sets us apart. It’s also an extra tool for us to win business. Our property managers are actually starting to use it for Entry Condition Reports. It’s also helping them if they haven’t seen the property in three months, that they can go back on and see the property, what it was like and get a refresh. We decided to use the Tour Creator in the business because LJ Hooker does like to be one step ahead with technology. We have been using this for a few months now and we have noticed that our clients are very impressed with the technology that it does provide. It’s really easy and it’s quite affordable. We can do a four bedroom house, walk through the house, take the photos, within about five, 10 minutes and then come back to the office and you can have the tour created in another 20 minutes. It is about a half an hour exercise to do a full property, but I guess the more you do, the quicker it gets. The quality of images that it does provide, it gives you that little bit extra leeway if your owners didn’t want to use professional photography. The tours do create the photos in a better quality than what your phone would. It also does show the property in it’s true condition, so it’s not, you haven’t got overexposed photos, overexposed videos, so people can actually see the home for what it is. It’s basically our landlords that probably get the most excited when we’re going through their home and taking the videos and we’re walking from each room and then running out of the room to take the photo with them. They get quite excited about it and I guess it’s technology that if you’re not in the industry, you don’t understand how normal it is. So for them it’s very exciting. They know that this is the way that technology is going to be going in the future, so we need to make sure that we’re ready now with this technology so that in six months, one year, two years down the tracks, when it becomes normal we’re already ahead. We understand how it works and our clients obviously already expect it from us. It is a great point of difference. It’s keeping us ahead of everybody else and it’s a great tool for all of the new BDMs because it is very important for us to be growing our rent rolls and to have that point of difference. Great tool for the property managers to have during Entry Condition Reports and a great way to keep a good relationship with your owner. So you might be dealing with an owner who’s just purchased a property and they may not have seen it. It’s a great way for us to go, hi Mr. Landlord, here’s a quick video that we took of your property, so you can see how it is. Another great tool for property managers to do is after renovation, to be able to go through, do the video and go, hi Mr. Landlord, thought you’d like to see a full update of how your property is looking. Tom is very easy to contact, which is great and also his website is very self-explanatory. Once you’ve done one tour, you’ll find that you’ll be able to do another 50 with your eyes closed. It is great that Tom is easily to contact, so we can text him, e-mail him and he’s always getting back to us the same day.