Virtual property inspections are becoming a popular real estate tool to help sell property. With virtual real-time inspections, video walkthroughs and even 3D virtual tours as options, you can tap into a new market of remote buyers, as well as show off your property effectively to entice prospective buyers to open homes, and potentially sell your home more quickly.
Virtual tours and online real estate tools are becoming increasingly popular in the real estate industry to help market and sell property. They can help prospective buyers engage with a property in ways traditional text and images can't.
Virtual real-time inspections, video walkthroughs and 3D tours can give potential buyers a better user experience. They can imagine their furniture and belongings and get a great sense of what the property is actually like, without having to work around open home times, or travel any distance for a viewing. It could even mean that your home gets purchased without the buyer even setting foot on the property.
While it’s always worth weighing up the cost versus benefit, some of these tools – such as remote real-time inspections via Zoom, Facetime, Skype or a video call – are a relatively low-cost way to reach a broader market, including people living further afield in Australia, or even overseas.
A virtual inspection is the closest thing to an open home you can get online. Interested buyers make appointment times with the real estate agent and receive a live virtual tour of your property. This allows them to ask the real estate agent questions in real-time, as well as being a way for potential buyers to view your property even if they don’t live in your suburb, city or even country – or if in-person inspection isn’t an option.
A well-produced video walkthrough has several benefits; primarily it’s available for potential buyers to view online at any time. It also means you get to craft the story you want to use to sell your home, while avoiding on-the-spot questions. However, a video can also work hand-in-hand with a livestream virtual inspection, with the video attracting people, and the agent hosting a walkthrough. Buyers can experience this on their desktop computer or mobile device.
This is one for the professionals, where 3D cameras are used to video or take images of the property and all the rooms in the house, which are then rendered in three dimensions creating a virtual reality walkthrough. Viewers can then move through the 3D space themselves, clicking to get 360-degree views of rooms, zooming in on points of interest and examining floor plans or even measurements. This makes 3D tours a relatively effective way of generating more views and getting more potential leads.
A live, real-time walkthrough is the simplest of the virtual tools, and may not add extra cost to your real estate agent’s fee. Likewise, filming a virtual inspection video can be done on a smartphone, but it will usually need editing. Professional editing can add cost, whether you’re using an external company or a service offered by your real estate agent.
If you have a luxury property targeted at a higher price range or think a listing needs an extra ‘edge’ to reach a wider buyer pool, then the cost of a professionally produced video, or 3D virtual tour, may be worth it – particularly if you can recover that cost through a higher sale price for the property.
This is very dependent on your home, the property market and other factors, so it’s best to ask your real estate agent which of the virtual tools would be a worthwhile marketing tool for you.
Many real estate agents are set up to create virtual walkthroughs or even 3D virtual tours – it’s the ‘new normal’. Unless you have a particular competence in that area, it’s often best to leave things to the professionals. There are also companies who create virtual inspection videos or 3D walkthroughs if you’d like to organise it yourself.
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Here are some of the common things that potential buyers may ask, so make sure that whoever is taking people on a live virtual inspection is prepped with the answers to questions such as:
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