The perpetual open house

Reap real rewards from your Web site by adding virtual tours.

by Ward Lowe   No one has free time. Consumers don’t want to waste hours visiting houses that aren’t right for them, and you don’t want to waste your day showing listings that won’t lead to a sale. Virtual tours offer a way to eliminate some of that wasted time for both parties and, hopefully, make your time with potential clients more productive.

One size does not fit all

Virtual tours come in different flavors, depending on what you want. There are simple tours that offer little more than a slide show of static images, panoramic tours that enable users to sweep through 180 degrees of viewing for each picture, tours that provide 360 degrees of seamless viewing freedom for each image–up, down, and all around–and walk-through video tours.

The process of creating a tour can involve as much or as little effort as you want. Some companies provide comprehensive packages that include everything from photographers to Web links; others give you little more than software and a pep talk.

Choose your weapon

Purchasing an all-inclusive tour package, or service-provider tour, makes sense for some people. You make a phone call and meet a photographer at the listing. Done. It’s easy, but if you intend to post many virtual tours, the costs can add up. And you relinquish control–control of when your tour is posted on the Web and control of which images are used.

Another option is to create your own tour–an agent-controlled tour. This method provides advantages for many real estate professionals:

• Take your own photographs and use as many as you like.
• Ensure that tour viewers see only favorable images.
• Include unlimited text and audio narratives.
• Control how soon your tour is posted on the Web.
• The more do-it-yourself tours you create, the more money you save.

But agent-controlled tours require an initial investment of time and money. You need a digital camera, computer, and some facility with both, as well as the time necessary to learn the process.

Service-provider tours

If you’re not interested in the do-it-yourself choices, fret not. The Web is brimming with tour operators who sell everything from comprehensive (but basic) virtual tours for less than $100 to professionally edited, Oscar-caliber productions for significantly more.

Before selecting a company or tour package, review your listing and decide what you need from a virtual tour. Don’t spring for the super-deluxe package if your experience tells you that the listing won’t last two weeks. USA Virtual Tours (www.usavirtualtours.com), iPIX (www.ipix.com), and VideoHomeTours (www.videohometours.com) provide good examples of what to expect with service-provider tours.

USA Virtual Tours sends a photographer to the listing, processes five 360-degree images for the Web, and provides instructions to link the tour to as many Web sites as you want. Their package costs $12.50 per month per listing with an eight-month cap, meaning you won’t pay more than $100 regardless of how long the listing stays on their site.

Homestore, which operates Realtor.com, owns iPIX. For $99.95, iPIX sends a photographer to your listing, processes four 360-degree images for the Web, and for the duration of the listing automatically links the tour to Realtor.com, HomeAdvisor, Homes.com, or HomeSeekers.com.

Homestore recently decided to allow tour providers other than iPIX to automatically link to Realtor.com. As a preliminary step in this process, Homestore has linked with ImageMaker360 (www.imagemaker360.com) and VideoHomeTours. Other virtual tour providers can supply instructions to manually link tours to most Web sites.

In addition to its new linking agreement with Realtor.com and its 360-degree tour packages, VirtualHomeTours also provides some exciting walk-through options. Rather than a separate, rotating picture for each room, video tours offer a continuous feed that escorts viewers from room to room.

The basic video package starts at $185, which includes a walk-through of the listing, background music, an exterior pan, unlimited Web links, and three months of tour hosting. Other VirtualHomeTours options include voice-overs and, starting at $999, even community and development virtual tours.

Do it yourself

The cost of creating your own virtual tour varies greatly according to what path you take and what equipment you need to purchase (i.e., software, digital camera, etc.).

You can create an automated slide show by using inexpensive software (or a good programmer) to turn several pictures into an animated GIF. Or you can use "stitching" software to merge several photos from one location into a single panoramic image. Either way, plan to spend a day or two learning your way around the software.

IPIX offers several tour solutions to real estate professionals. If you have your own iPIX-compatible digital camera and personal computer with Internet access, you can create one iPIX 360-degree tour with Real Estate Wizard software for $59.95.

IPIX also offers various combinations of do-it-yourself virtual-tour packages complete with digital cameras and wide-angle lenses. These more expensive options start at more than $1,000 and go up.

VisualTour (www.visualtour.com) markets a virtual-tour package that enables you to create 10 360-degree virtual tours with your own equipment for $499, with each additional tour costing $25. Each tour can include up to 50 images with unlimited text descriptions, a one-minute voice narrative, unlimited Web-site linking, and will remain active for six months.

Coming attractions

While adding video tours and voice-overs may sound fairly advanced, URreal Inc. (www.livetour.ws) of Seattle is pushing the virtual envelope further with its LiveTour product. LiveTour enables you to host real-time virtual tours and communicate with up to five participants at once via either instant messaging or voice transmissions. You can schedule an online open house that you control and show prospective buyers a listing. LiveTour provides the necessary software and the Web site access, and you supply the digital images to create the virtual tour. Currently, LiveTour is available only on the West Coast.

You may think that agent-client interactive tours are a novelty now, but that’s what many people said–and some are still saying–about virtual tours. Many agents now use virtual tours to stand out in the crowded real estate industry, but virtual tours are fast becoming standard on realty Web sites.

An NAR survey revealed that more than half of homebuyers who used the Internet as an information source rated virtual tours as a "very valuable" online feature. So virtual tours can save you time, and you can help buyers by providing a tool that they want. Virtually everyone wins.

Photo illustration: Joel Mathews; photos © Comstock Images and Corbis Images.

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