Proud to be at the Forefront of Virtual Tours for Estate Agents
Through the Lens have created over seventy Virtual Tours post Covid lockdown for various clients and have assisted many more to create their own. Our Virtual Tours have been viewed thousands of times and have been liked, shared and commented upon countless times on social media.
We hear stories everyday from Clients telling us the Tours we’ve produced or helped produce were major contributing factors in securing millions of pounds of sales.
check out this fabulous home with interactive floor plan
So why are our Virtual Tours the best and how can estate agents use them to secure more sales and higher offers?
Virtual Tours are now a vital element of an estate agent’s marketing strategy, we rank them alongside floor plans in importance and before videos and text descriptions. We’re even seeing their importance rated highly for the smallest of properties.
What makes our Virtual Tours Different?
Our unique approach
We approach every single property we’re involved with in the same way as all our visual Marketing, by asking ourselves how we can produce the very best, value adding visual marketing content. We begin the production of every Virtual Tour with the end in mind and alongside producing the very best still images, aerial photography and floor plan as appropriate.
Design
in the example above we’ve incorporated aerial 360° images, individual property tours & high quality still images. as the development progresses we’ll add to the features
We design every tour individually to look it’s best, to operate best and to present the best view to potential purchasers, not necessarily the seller.
This influences the technology we use, the cameras we shoot with, the process we follow in creating the tour and the hosting platform we use.
Professional equipment
We shoot tours on professional quality digital SLR cameras with high quality lenses. Unlike cheaper 360° cameras we can ensure better optical quality, higher definition images and more control over the final visuals, ensuring viewers receive a better, more natural experience, as close to actually walking through the property as possible.
We process each 360° image individually to enhance the lighting, details and perspective and correct the colours, crucially again to ensure it ‘looks right’ for the viewer.
We build each tour view-by-view
Some technology relies upon the entire property being captured to make a tour operate effectively, building a virtual ‘dolls house’ which looks very impressive but produces a less than ideal marketing tool.
All estate agents (and property photographers) know there are storage rooms, garages, spare bedrooms and under utilised spaces that are better left off the marketing!
We build our tours to operate naturally but showcase a property at it’s best, working with agents and vendors, producing tours which sit perfectly alongside (and often incorporate) the other vital marketing material, high quality photos, floor plans, descriptions and videos.
We go outside!
Outdoor space, gardens, garages and ‘kerb appeal’ are vital to marketing any property but some of the highest profile ‘virtual tour systems’ don’t include any outside detail at all!
We treat gardens and outdoor space the same as any room in the home, we include it so all viewers can appreciate it’s value.
Augmented tours
With our partner agents we’re constantly developing our Virtual tours by testing the value and functionality of adding links, floor plans, photographs, text and even drone footage and aerial 360°s. We can customise tours to suit individual clients and are happy to discuss how we can make your tours look unique.
Value for money
Our virtual tours are great value for money, making them a ‘must have’ for any listing. We can provide a stand-alone virtual tour service but by combining the production of a tour with our core services of photography and floor plans they are even more cost effective and once published we don’t charge anymore for hosting your tours, for as long as you need.
Hosting your tours
Unlike some virtual tour providers, we host your virtual tours for free. There are no additional costs once your tour has been captured and created and the hosting platform we use provides a high quality viewing experience, a flexible service which is easy to maintain, update and augment with new content, easy to share and reliable. Minor amendments can be made throughout the life of the tour, usually at no additional cost (additions, major changes etc may be charged for).
this example uses a single aerial 360° image captured via a drone,
linked to high resolution still images
Sell More Homes Faster and For Higher Fees With Professional Photographs and Virtual Tours.
Agents are not just advertising homes but their whole business by driving engagement and visibility across their on-line presence by sharing Virtual Tours widely on social media and their websites. Here’s our list of tips for getting greater value from them:
1. Market the additional service. A Virtual Tour is a fantastic, value adding additional service you can offer your customers, setting you apart from your competitors. They are uniquely engaging to viewers who can’t resist clicking around and exploring listings on their own terms.
2. Create your own look & feel for your tours by deciding upon the branding, link styles and augmentation you’ll use and keep that consistent. We can work with you to design your own individual style and we’ll create all your tours in that way. We can incorporate your logo, social media & website links and even your company details & description.
virtual tours aren’t just for large properties. this charming cottage has quirky features that look great, with interactive floor plan
3. Include a floor plan. The addition of a floor plan into your virtual tours further assists viewers in understanding the layout of a property, the relative sizes of the rooms and whether it might be their future home. It puts all the most valuable marketing in one place at the viewers finger tips and adds to the immersive effect of the whole experience.
4. Demonstrate a Virtual Tour at every every sales/valuation appointment by having one loaded and ready on your phone or tablet. They’re a fantastic differentiator, talking point and sales hook and will set you apart from your competitors. We can even set you up with a very cost effective virtual reality solution which will really engage your prospective customers.
5. Share Virtual Tours widely and make them part of your marketing strategy. Virtual Tours work great on Facebook & Twitter, being visually attractive they tempt customers in and then engage them to click and explore, they soon get hooked!
6. Link to the best features. The link we supply you with will be to the natural starting point of the tour, usually the entrance, but did you know you can produce a link to any point on the tour? Just navigate to the feature and copy the URL from the browser’s address bar, paste this link in your social media and the tour will start there. A great kitchen, a fabulous view, stunning lounge? Showcase a home’s best features by sharing individual updates and links for them.
7. Embed Virtual Tours within your website to maximise your own SEO. It’s common now to see links to Virtual Tours on property portals but for ultimate value of engagement embed tours into your own website to maximise time on site and boost your SEO. If you need specific HTML code for embedding into your site just ask, wee can provide that.
8. Create short video walk throughs from your Virtual Tours. With even the most basic screen recording app you can produce fantastic short videos to take viewers around specific rooms or features. Pre-plan your ‘journey’ then simply record as you travel around, pausing to showcase the best features. This is really easy on an iPad, just enable screen recording in your settings > control centre > customise controls and the function will always be available to you on your control panel (swipe down/left from top right of the screen). We usually drop the recording into iMovie to speed it up and trim any swiping errors!
our virtual tours work great with VR headsets,
we can show you
9. Take an alternative approach for gaining maximum value from your Virtual Tours and use them as a strategic engagement tool for you agency. Rather than sharing the Virtual Tours widely we’re seeing some Clients advertise the availability of them without sharing the actual links, holding them back to share with prospective customers who express a wish to view a property. Not only is this approach leading to more efficient physical viewings by ‘pre-qualifying’ interested parties but it’s also a very valuable approach to engaging with customers, creating a dialogue in which to discuss and discover their requirements and propose other listed properties.
10. Make Virtual Tours part of your everyday marketing and be the estate agent that provides virtual tours alongside photos and floor plans. Be very clear that you provide virtual tours and demonstrate them on your own website.