At the turn of the decade, with everyone restricted to their own homes, virtual viewings proved a revolutionary step in the real estate business. For many, having to stick within the walls of their own property only made them yearn for a new place to live. This led to a surge in the housing market and a huge competitive edge for real estate agents who’d started to deploy 3D virtual house viewings.
Limited in count in 2020, the concept of the virtual tour was able to catch on and become more prevalent on popular online platforms. Still, there remain several obvious obstacles to virtual tours becoming commonplace – especially now that people can freely go and view any house they want. This raises the question: should real estate agents still make use of virtual viewings?
Prevalence of virtual experiences
Virtual experiences were popular both before and since the pandemic, but the mainstream adoption of these tech-infused options has certainly seen a surge in the early 2020s. Now, people are far more accustomed to getting luxury interactive experiences in the virtual space. From playing classic games to exploring some of the great wonders of the world, live streaming and virtual reality 3D landscapes have enabled grand experiences from home.
It’s this mainstream adoption that continues to prop the door open to virtual viewings. With people more accustomed to these realistic and interactive options being the go-to, virtual viewings come across as a more natural step. Livestream viewings are the more accessible option for virtual viewings and offer benefits like convenience for prospective buyers, efficiency by removing travel, and only one recording needs to be taken.
With a video recorded on the best day for the current residents, a real estate agent can then offer live-streamed viewings to buyers and talk them through as the video plays. It keeps it personable, allows for questions, and saves everyone time in the early stages of the viewing process. More extensive virtual tours like ones mapped in 3D that can be clicked through or full virtual reality tours, naturally, offer a more immersive and interactive experience.
For real estate agents, the benefits here are that the quality and accuracy of listings get heightened, the deployment of such technologically advanced options enhances the perception of the brand, and customer satisfaction increases by giving them a better initial look at listings. Again, for customers, they help speed up the initial filtering process while also offering a far more in-depth assessment than just high-quality photos.
Costs and barriers for entry
The disadvantages of setting up virtual tours – predominantly the likes of 3D and VR tours – are the costs to the real estate agent and the requirements of the viewers. Making a virtual reality tour certainly offers the pinnacle of virtual house viewings right now, but VR hardware isn’t exactly commonplace in the UK. The barrier for entry is lowering and adoption is rising slowly, but for the most part, VR headsets are seen more as gaming devices than useful tools to have in the home.
Apple’s mixed reality Vision Pro might change this eventually. For now, it costs over £2,500, while even the much more accessible Meta Quest 2 still costs at least £200. Meta Quest 3 will set you back £460. As you can see, there are inherent barriers for customers to overcome just to experience a fully-fledged VR tour. There are some ways around it, such as with smartphone cases that can flip into VR headsets, but they still present a barrier.
Filming and creating a 3D or VR tour isn’t exactly cheap for the real estate agent in terms of time or real money expense, either. At the end of it, if the purchaser goes ahead after just the virtual viewing – as 55 per cent of respondents did in a 2021 survey – the estate agent could be susceptible to complaints if the virtual viewing didn’t detail all of its issues. Pile in potential technical issues and the limited perspective, and it’s clear that virtual viewings really should only be reliably used to help prospective buyers hasten the filtering process.
Virtual viewings are niche and can certainly help far-flung buyers get a fairly good idea of properties while saving time and money, but the more extensive virtual viewings, as it stands, should be considered more as unique selling points and deployed perhaps more for high-end properties than each one put on the market.