BUILD CONNECTIONS WITH BUYERS BEFORE BUILDING EVEN STARTS
You’ll have noticed it already. The way people are buying property is changing. Virtual tours for property developments let you show off how your properties will look and feel. Even before the first brick has been laid. CGI virtual tours for my property development.
These aren’t the photography matterports that estate agents sometimes call a “virtual tour”. These are CGI-driven virtualisations of property developments that don’t – as yet – exist. A decade or so ago, the idea of being able to walk through a property before construction had even started would have seemed completely mad.
Today, for a whole demographic you could be marketing your development to, it seems totally natural. And that’s not the only reason virtual tours are a great addition to your marketing suite.
A COST-EFFECTIVE WAY TO BUILD CONNECTION
True virtual tours let buyers build a much more emotional connection with a property that’s still on the drawing board than they can from a photo or still CGI.
They also give people who are looking to relocate an easy way to view without travelling across the country.
What’s more, they’re brilliantly cost-effective to create. Even more so when you consider just how much you’re broadening your potential buyer base with this one addition to your marketing suite.
WHAT IS A VIRTUAL TOUR?
If you’ve used Google Maps, the way that a virtual tour works is going to be very familiar to you. In fact, that’s part of the reason they work so well for certain buyer personas. Picture clicking on a spot on Google Maps. Only now, instead of being on a street you’ve never seen before, you’re outside the front door of a property on your development. That hotspot – as they’re called – is fully 360 degrees. You can turn, pan, and click to move into the next room or hallway.
You’re giving your buyer a fully panoramic view of the property and letting them move around it as if they were inside. Even if the property itself suffers from the slight handicap of not existing yet.
It sounds like it might be pretty complex. But it’s actually a highly cost-effective process. Because once a space has been modelled, the output can be a still CGI, an animation, or a virtual tour with relative ease.
ROUND OUT YOUR MARKETING SUITE
Virtual tours are designed to be used alongside a brochure and animation. Not instead of them.
Because for some people, buying a property is still a case of thumbing through a classic brochure and visiting a completed development in person.
But for many other buyer personas, tools like virtual tours are a highly appealing – and, above all, completely natural – way to explore a potential purchase. That’s why you’re in a better position to sell when you’ve got a fully rounded marketing suite that covers all your bases.
Smart, branded brochure? Check. Website and other online materials? Check. Virtual tour and animations? Double check.
HOW DO WE CREATE A VIRTUAL TOUR?
We build virtual tours from the CGIs our artists create. These CGIs are pieced together using special software that lets us model the entire space in three dimensions.
The 3D models that all the CGIs, animations, and tours we create are built from your architect or interior designer’s drawings. So they’re accurate. Very accurate. The process goes through stages of:
Original 3D massed model
Model is textured, lit and/ or furnished
Final rendering
The realism and cost of the virtual tour of your property we create will be linked to the number of hotspots that are included. The more hotspots you have, the more granularity you give your potential buyer and the easier it is for them to imagine they’re inside your property for real.
JUST HOW “REAL” CAN A VIRTUAL TOUR BE?
The rendering software we use lets us build a huge array of photorealistic surface materials, props, and more from texture photographs called maps. The lighting inside the property will be correct.
Those views you see from the windows on the virtual tour? Those are the actual views your buyer will see when they’re really in the room. We capture them onsite using drones so they’re about as real as you can get.
A virtual tour is the ultimate showcase for a property that doesn’t quite exist in reality yet. It gives a prospective buyer something to explore in their own time. They can interact with the space. See how rooms link together. And really imagine themselves being there. If you want to round out your marketing materials so that you’re appealing to the largest possible range of buyers, a showcase like this is exactly what you need.