In the modern world, when a person decides they are going to start looking for a house to buy, the first place they are going to look is online. More than half of all buyers found the home they eventually purchased online. Sellers who want to reach those online-first shoppers are going to need to use what they can to make their homes stand out from the crowd.

Click here to view a live 3D Tour of one of our listings

One way to make a house stand out online is through the use of virtual tours or a 3D walkthrough. Among home buyers, 48 percent said that virtual tours were a “very useful” feature when looking at properties online. While 43 percent of buyers under the age of 37 ranked the walkthroughs as very useful, they were most popular among buyers over the age of 53. About 52 percent of buyers from the ages of 53 to 62 ranked 3D tours as very useful, while 53 percent of buyers aged 53 to 61 did.

If you want to make your home listing stand out and increase the chance of your property selling quickly, adding a 3D real estate tour to your online listing might be precisely what you want.

What Are 3D Tours?

Welcome to the next level of home viewing. Pictures are nice. A picture slide with music is nicer. However, a 3D Tour invites a buyer into your home. These tours are a type of virtual reality and immerse buyers in a property. When a person navigates through a 3D tour online, it is almost as if they are walking through your home in real life.

A buyer can do a virtual walk-through of the home, moving freely, rotating their view 360 degrees as well as up and down. The movements of the tour are very similar to the head movements a person makes as they walk through a property. During a virtual tour, people can even go up and down the steps in a house.

One thing a 3D virtual tour is not is a video walk-through of the property and house. It’s not uncommon for real estate agents and sellers to confuse the two. But while the person behind the camera is the one in charge of navigating a video walk-through, the person on the other side of the computer or laptop is the one in charge of navigating a virtual tour. A video tour or walk-through might show a person what the inside of a house looks like, but it won’t give a potential buyer the chance to experience a home on their own terms.

Sellers who are looking to use virtual tours to market their homes have a few options. A dollhouse view shrinks the entire house down into a dollhouse-sized image and lets potential buyers jump from one floor of the house to the next. Another option for sellers is to purchase a floor plan style layout for the home tour.

Although nearly 90 percent of all home buyers consider photos to be very useful when it comes to checking out properties online, a virtual tour offers some things photos can’t.

When you look at a still image of a home, often, it can be difficult to get a sense of how the image fits into the rest of the house. In some cases, the photo might not be very good — it could show a tiny corner of the bathroom or be out-of-focus.

When a potential buyer goes on a virtual tour, they get to “walk” through the house. Suddenly, that tiny corner of the bathroom makes much more sense, as the buyer can see how it connects to other areas in the room. A virtual tour can also help a buyer see themselves in the property. During the tour, a buyer can click on certain areas of the property and get a sense of what it’s like in real life to stand in that particular spot of the house.

If you are interested in including a 3D tour in your home’s listing, there are a few things to look for in a company that will create the tour. First, you want to know if the company will use actual photos of your house — which look the most realistic — or if it will create a CGI-version of your property. It’s a good idea to get a sense of the type of tours the company has made in the past. Are they inviting and enticing, or is the photo quality poor? Do the tours give you a view of the entire property? Ideally, the more realistic and accurate the company can make the 3D tour, the better.

3D tour technology is brand new. Most companies offer it only for very expensive homes. Here at CENTURY 21 Core Partners, we are making 3D Tours available to all our sellers, included in our standard listing package when you list your home for sale with us. This is what sellers hire a broker to do: to better market their property for sale with the newest technology available.

Click here to view a live 3D Tour of one of our listingsand see if a virtual walkthrough is just what you need to sell your home more quickly.

Benefits of Virtual Tours

More than half of all homebuyers end up finding their home online, and the first move people make when looking to buy a new home is to search online before contacting an agent. First impressions are everything, so you want to make a lasting imprint when prospective owners find your listing.

Virtual tours offer benefits for everyone involved in a real estate transaction. Buyers tend to love them, and real estate agents who offer 3D tours tend to be able to attract more clients. Sellers who use the tours typically sell quickly, too.

A virtual tour is one of the most innovative ways to promote your home online. Here are just a few of the benefits:

1. Increases the Views You Gain Online

Listings that have a real 3D Tour receive more views compared to those without. Feeling like you’re walking through each room is more satisfying than searching through two-dimensional pictures or viewing a slideshow of the same pictures. Think of it this way: If you were looking for a house online and you came across two options, one with a tour and one without, which would you click on? Most likely the listing that had the tour, as it would provide you with a realistic view inside the house, and it would let you quickly see whether the property is a good match for your needs or not.

From a practical standpoint, home listings that have virtual tours and other images available are more likely to make it to the top of the search results pages, which usually means more people are apt to click on them and check out the properties.

2. Increases the Time Buyers Spend Looking at Your Home

Navigating through a virtual tour is a lot of fun. It’s almost like a game, one that gives a potential buyer the chance to pretend that they live in your house. Thanks to this grown-up version of playing house, people are going to spend more time on your listing page and more time thinking about your property.

The more time buyers spend looking at your home, the more likely they are to make a showing appointment or make an offer.

3. Provides Access to a Perpetual Open House

Open houses might be fun for some people — usually your neighbors who take the opportunity to drop in and check out your house and maybe enjoy a free cookie or two. There are also people who make a hobby out of going to open houses and stop by as many as they can just for fun. For sellers and agents, open houses can be a chore. There’s no way to guarantee that serious buyers will drop by the open house or that hosting one will lead to an offer.

Creating a virtual tour of your home is one way to offer a perpetual open house without having to stock up on cookies and having your agent spend a Sunday afternoon waiting. With a 3D tour, prospective buyers have 24/7 access to your home and can dismiss the extra step of working with real estate agents. You can skip the process of showing your home, and buyers can see your home on their own time.

4. Saves Time for Everyone Involved

Photos and video posted online can only show an interested buyer so much. There have been cases when a house seemed one way on the internet only to be completely different from what was expected in real life. When a buyer and their agent schedule a showing of a house that turns out not to be a good fit, it wastes their time. It also wastes the seller’s time, as that showing could have gone to a person who is genuinely interested in the property.

Virtual 3D tours can help pre-qualify your property and allow you to increase the number of showings by buyers who are genuinely interested in your home, while at the same time helping you avoid having unnecessary showings. Everyone benefits, including buyers and their agents and you and your agent.

5. Offers Immediate Information to Curious Buyers

The human brain craves novelty and information. When a potential buyer stumbles across a house for sale online, their first thought might be “tell me more.” The same is true when a person is wandering about a neighborhood and comes upon a “for sale” sign on a property. Offering a 3D walkthrough quenches a person’s thirst for knowledge. With a few clicks, they can see if your house is something that interests them or not. Even if they’re not looking to buy a property at the moment, offering a tour can give them an idea of whether or not the property might be a good match for a friend or relative.

Along with the virtual tour,if an interested buyer finds your house online, they can see instant details about the property, such as location, schools and mortgage information. They can also find specifics about the home, such as square footage, beds and baths, yard accommodations and any other unique features that set your house apart.

6. Improves Your Social Media Reach

Using platforms like Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and others helps increase your marketing reach. Sharing a 3D Tour of your home increases the impact of those postings. It even encourages online sharing. Online “word-of-mouth” does wonders to increase the number of prospective buyers you that look at your home. Social media posts with images, video, or in the case of real estate, virtual tours, get shared more often than those without visuals. Facebook posts with images have nearly 40 percent higher engagement rates than posts without and tweets with images are 35 percent more likely to be retweeted.

We have thousands of Facebook followers who will get to see and possibly share the 3D tour of your home with their friends.

7. Boosts Your Marketing Reach by Having Tours That Are Operative on Real Estate Search Engines

Social media is only one option when it comes to promoting your property. You will want to promote your house on many different real estate sites, and virtual tours are one of the most attention-grabbing tactics you can use.

You can’t ignore the value and popularity of real estate websites. In April 2016, Zillow had 83 million users and around 65 percent of the total online real estate market. During that same period, Realtor.com had around 40 million users. People are looking at real estate websites, and more often than not, they are finding out plenty of information about homes that might be right for them. Including a virtual tour with your property’s information is one way to make sure users of those sites get all the details they want and need about your house.

CENTURY 21 Core Partners will automatically send the 3D Tour of your home to all major websites, so no matter which website buyers are looking at, your 3D Tour is available to them.

8. Re-Ignites Buyer’s Interest

Once it’s put together, a virtual tour is easy to share with the world. Even if your house has already been on the market for a while, you can still reach potential buyers with a 3D tour.

A 3D tour can be a great way to spark or re-ignite buyers’ interest in your property, too. A tour can be an extra bit of enticement or a way to encourage buyers to take a second look at a house they might have moved past.

If your agent is in contact with several interested people, sending them a 3D tour can make or break a deal. It may be what they need to take one last look of the house to know it’s their dream home. Your agent can also send it to curious buyers to grab their interest.

9. Raises Attention and Boosts Your Home’s Presence

A virtual tour gives people a more realistic idea of what your home is like. It makes people pay attention to your home and can show them aspects of it that would be missed with regular photos or even with a video tour.

People prefer virtual tours because they are more interactive as opposed to stationary photos. Buyers can zoom in, see different areas of the house and get a bird’s-eye view, as well as more up-close details. Virtual tours are a fantastic way for people to explore a property on their own.

10. Increases Customer Interaction

Including a 3D tour of your home with its description turns your property listing into a video game. Instead of just looking at or reading about the house, people get a chance to experience it. Sure, they might not get to touch the countertops or turn the sink faucets on and off, but they will get a sense of what it feels like to move through the space.

Since virtual tours offer a range of different layouts, potential buyers will not only get to “experience” your home. They’ll get to see it from a unique angle. Buyers are not just able to walk through your house using the 3D Tour, but they are also able to see a “dollhouse” view of your home, showing all floor levels (basement included) at once.

Should I Have Both an Open House and 3D Tour?

Can a 3D tour replace an open house? In many ways, all signs point to “yes.”

To get started, let’s take a minute and explore the role of an open house and what usually happens after a seller decides to host one. Often, the goal of an open house is to let as many people as possible see a property. The thinking is that the more people who view the house, the quicker it will sell and the more likely it is that there will be a bidding war over it. That’s not always the case, though. In some areas, more than a quarter of properties that skipped the traditional open house end up selling for more than asking price, compared to just 17 percent of properties that held an open house.

Often, an open house doesn’t lead to a sale or even an increase in the price of the house. In a survey that asked them to rate how effective they thought open houses were, more than half of all real estate agents ranked open houses a 5 or lower. A score of 10 is “very effective” while a score of 0 is “not very effective.” Even real estate agents, who traditionally use open houses as a chance to gather new leads, find them to be not very effective.

In fact, people are just as likely to skip going to open houses when they are on the market for real estate as they are to attend one. About 50 percent of home buyers of all ages used open houses to get information about a property. Many more — about 95 percent — get the information they need about a property from a website.

Open houses also present risks to the sellers. If you aren’t careful to lock away your valuables, there’s a chance someone might take them. There’s also the risk that a visiting party will rifle through your medicine cabinet or scroll through your computer. Usually, it’s a good idea to have a person, such as a family member or real estate agent, keeping watch on each floor of the house. But that surveillance can make potential buyers feel uncomfortable as they wander through your home.

Creating a 3D tour of your house can replace the traditional open house. It’s also a lot more convenient for everyone involved. Potential buyers don’t have to give up a precious weekend afternoon to visit your property. Your real estate agent can spend their weekend doing something else, such as promoting your house online, and you don’t have to worry about packing up all your belongings or that something will get broken or stolen.

Like a traditional open house, a 3D tour can act as a “taster” for a potential buyer. They get to view the property and walk-through it, then decide if they want to take the next step and see it in person or even put in an offer.

Working With CENTURY 21 Core Partners

Professionals at Century 21® encourage all home sellers to take advantage of our 3D Tour services. If you live in a more remote location that’s hard for people to reach, 3D tours are a great way to capture your home & let someone truly walk through it before driving to see it in person.

We understand everyone has their own preferences, so we will also take professional HD pictures with an ultra-wide architectural lens so buyers who prefer pictures, can see your home at its best in a 2-dimensional setting.

When your home is one of the thousands listed online, it can use all the help it can get when it comes to grabbing and keeping people’s attention. Adding a 3D walkthrough to your home’s listing can be just what it needs to move from “ho-hum” to “must-see.” Are you interested in adding a 3D tour to your property’s listing? Contact us for more information about virtual tours.