Imagine buying a house, you want to find the perfect place as you will probably live there for a long time. To find this perfect place you want to see multiple houses before making your decision. In the past, you had to travel to all the houses you wanted to see. As you can imagine, this took a lot of time. Nowadays, more and more real estate agencies use virtual reality to make this process more attractive.
The usage of virtual reality in the real estate business is revolutionizing the way real estate transactions are made, and raising expectations from both the buyer and seller perspective. 3d tours allow buyers to easily ‘walk’ through their potential new homes and the best thing is that they can do it whenever and wherever they want. The only thing they need is a laptop or computer and a virtual reality headset (this will be provided by your real estate agency). Real estate agencies profit in 2 main ways. Firstly, by making the whole proces more attractive for their customers, customer satisfaction will increase. This has a lot of positive consequences. Secondly, real estate developers design new builds using computer software and show this to their customers via virtual reality headsets. This makes them able to show their customers a peek into the future, giving them the benefit of knowing that what they see is what they will get.
There are a number of reasons that support the game changing capability of using virtual reality in the real estate industry:
- Availability of the technology: Virtual Reality is becoming more populair and accessible.
- Ease of creation: Interactive 3d images can be easily created by real estate developers.
- Showcasing the future: The ability to show what a new build would look like.
As the virtual reality industry is still a new thing and will definitely grow and improve drastically, there are huge chances for virtual reality in the real estate industry. Do you agree?
Sources:
- http://www.augment.com/blog/future-real-estate-vr-ar/
- https://appreal-vr.com/blog/how-virtual-reality-is-transforming-real-estate-in-2016/?gclid=CMbRxpDgvs8CFe8V0wodYFIJmQ
- https://about.archilogic.com/blog/virtual-reality-real-estate-fad-future/
Dear Thijs, thank you for your blog! While I agree that virtual reality could potentially have a big impact on the real estate industry, I also believe that a house is such a big purchase that the process of visiting it will never really leave. However, virtual reality would allow potential home owners to see more houses, and choose which ones are worth a visit, making it easier for them to find the perfect house. I think that virtual reality can definitely show a lot of the house, but that small things still need to be checked in real life, such as the water pressure, the temperature of the house, the neighboorhood and the ‘feeling’ the house gives you. These things cannot be replaced by virtual reality. Thus, while I believe virtual reality can help in the process of looking for a house, to actually buy a house I believe you need to visit it.
Hello Thijs,
Thank you for the interesting post. I totally agree with you on using virtual reality devices to see what houses look like. Compared with the traditional way for house viewing, the VR device allows the customer not only to view their potential houses anytime and anywhere but also to efficiently decide which houses they want to see in reality, making them save more time and money. This also benefits the real estate agencies because their customer satisfaction would increase. Additionally, the VR devices are able present 3D image that is more vivid than the simple picture. However, since the real estate agencies need to provide the customer a virtual reality headset, this would be a significant amount of investment for the real estate agencies. But I believe the VR is the current trend and brings so many advantages so the real estate agencies are recommended to invest in this service.