Starting this month we will be offering Zillow 3D Home Tours in addition to our regular real estate marketing services such as still photography and Matterport 3D photography. First, let's get things straight, although they are called "3D", the Zillow 3D Home Tours are not really 3D. They are created with 360° panoramas, and are sequenced together into a 360° player without any photogrammetry or depth that would allow for their tours to be "true 3D". While this difference may not matter to some property marketers, it's a notable difference when comparing this service to a 3D photography offering. And, the creation of the tours is not entirely automatic. Although there is a bit of assistance from artificial intelligence (AI) to help place the panos in the right spots, this process is still largely manual and requires human intervention to make sure that the tours are indeed showing the correct relationships between images. Will there be 3D in the future? It's quite likely, so we are getting a head-start on working with their tech, and are looking forward to seeing this service evolve in the coming months

What the Zillow 3D Home Tours really have going for them is that although they aren't the highest image quality yet, they are incredibly efficient at reaching a ton of eyeballs via the Zillow platform. There are 40+ million unique users searching on Zillow every month, and early tests of the platform showed us that properties were getting hundreds of views on their tours. One of the reasons for this is that the Zillow app is wildly popular with home seekers. The other reason has to do with the way that Zillow promotes content. If you have a home with a Zillow 3D home tour, it will get bumped up in their search for an entire week as soon as it is published. Those seven days of premium placement on Zillow can be a huge game-changer for properties, and the thing that the 360° tours accomplish, which most photos cannot, is that they are still able to show the relationship between rooms. 

There's also a surprisingly helpful boost in understanding the property through the tours in spite of their modest visual quality. When using the app, we can tell that the beautiful photographs we have taken of properties are suddenly even that much more helpful when paired with a Zillow 3D tour; they help viewers understand the context of the rooms and layout a lot better. And, these links can be repurposed on any other site that has a field for a link (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). With the tours starting at $75 for a simple tour with 5-10 panos, this is an additional marketing boost at an awesome price and efficiency for a broker on a budget. We will continue to sell our clients on premium tours, but there is no reason that any property marketer would not list their home on Zillow and include a 3D tour now that the platform has integrated it so well. 

Please contact us today to learn more or to add the new Zillow 3D Home Tour service to your booking! 

Earlier this year I started a facebook group called "Real Estate VR/AR News". We now have 70 members, and I am always looking for great content to post there and to share what I find with others. Everyone is welcome and invited to join the group - realtors, content creators, real estate marketers. You can definitely learn something from each of the posts and I'm happy to share all sorts of fun experiments such as this one from a recent listing in Berkeley, CA for which I created an XR virtual tour on Facebook! 

It was without a doubt a huge highlight of the month of January to fly out to D.C. and to spend the day with so many other professionals who are vested in real estate and architectural visualization using VR and AR. I’m super-grateful for the work of Bob Fine, who put together an incredible event. Wonderful people, lovely venue, and lots of very stimulating proposals for how to work with VR from a previsualization standpoint, as well as new ways to approach reality capture. Thanks also to Chris Petracco from TrustedPhotoDC for joining for the day. I’m so glad to have had the opportunity to meet with everyone in person. I have to put a shout out to Samantha Wolfe who was also there, author of Marketing New Realities, and I hope we stay in touch! I’m also very happy that the Spatial Utility: Lessons from 3D/VR/AR for Real Estate presentation went well, and I am pleased to announce I’ll be heading to Vancouver, B.C. to present that at the end of the month. Exciting times!