“Why shouldn’t people be able to teleport wherever they want?” — Palmer Luckey, Founder Oculus VR
Well now they can!
Virtual Reality is now emerging as a powerful tool for searching properties in Real Estate market. No doubt before this technology you have to waste a lot of time and efforts in looking for your dream home. And only pictures and videos are not enough to get the full experience of a place.
Before virtual reality, internet brought great change in real estate market. With online property listings people don’t have to step out of their homes in order to get information about a place. But information without experience is not enough. In Real estate market experience is one of the crucial factor.
The only thing online property listing websites lack is the experience. With only text, pictures, videos and maps you can get great information but not experience. And this is where Virtual Reality comes to the rescue.
In this article we will see real world examples of virtual reality in real estate market and see how real estate firms using this phenomenal technology to bring change in their industry.
Real Estate firm Selling Luxury Houses in Virtual Reality
The Matthew Hood Real Estate Group at Sotheby’s Internatonal Realty started using virtual reality to sell luxury homes in New York and Los Angeles.
Mathew Hood said that particularly Los Angeles is the city built for virtual reality real estate tours. The biggest problem in a busy city like L.A is traffic. It can take two/three days to visit 10 houses only but with virtual reality you can show 50 homes to a client at your office and visit the best one.
Virtual Reality in Architecture
An architecture firm Interior Architects also using virtual reality to view clients models of buildings before construction. They started using VR by showing clients virtual tours of their new office and let clients point out things they don’t like.
By using virtual reality their clients readily order expensive finishes in their projects after viewing in virtual reality. Guy Messick, of Interior Architects said “I haven’t had that happen too many times in my career and I’ve been doing this a long time”.
Matter Port — Immersive 3D for Real World
After seeing great potential of virtual reality in real estate many companies started providing virtual reality services to real estate and architecture firms. One of them is Matterport.
Started in 2010, Matterport introduced its own 3d camera which capture 360 pictures and make them a 3d model. Matterport have successfully captured around 250,000+ places around the world. They have also introduced virtual reality feature from which users can view virtual tours in vr.
Matterport is working with many top real estate firms and emerging as one of the industry leader in virtual reality in real estate.
So these were some real world examples of companies using virtual reality to revolutionizing real estate and making buying/selling properties easy. Buying and selling homes completely in Virtual Reality can be possible but not for another 5 to 10 years. There is still more work to do. But as virtual reality is growing and coming in the hands of people we will see great things in future.
Originally published at RetinaVR.co/blog/ on December 14, 2016.