Digitization of Real Estate
Digitization of Real Estate
What is the digitization of real estate?
Whether you're buying or selling, you've probably seen that the real estate industry did not escape the digital transformation but it goes beyond putting a listing online or making it significantly easier to search for specific properties.
Here are three recent trends that you need to keep a lookout for; you can ask for these services from real estate agents, ask how they help attract buyers, or whether they're giving an accurate impression of the lot size.
Virtual staging
Photos are one of the most important things to potential buyers when they're looking at a property. They need to see themselves in the space, and it's easier for a person to see themselves in a room if there's some furniture and decorations.
Still, the rule of thumb from real estate professionals is to remove personal items and show off how much space is available. The difference between a virtually staged house and one that is traditionally staged is that the sellers can still feel like they are living in their own homes.
The process involves removing the items from the rooms (furniture and decorations), taking high-quality photos, and letting the professionals virtually stage the rooms. The good thing is that once the photos are taken, the furniture and decorations can be moved back into place. As a seller, being able to still live in your home the way you like to while on the path to sell is something many underestimate but it helps greatly. On the other hand, if you're already packed up or are about to be, then virtual staging can help you get things into moving trucks faster.
When using that service, it may feel like you're creating an illusion but real estate professionals have more to lose than anyone else if they misrepresent a property. Virtual staging can transform the look of a house to sell it more easily but before making any investment most people will want to access the real-life location. Virtual staging is a technology many will use more and more in the future and it will apply to more locations.
Drone videos
Drones in real estate are becoming an increasingly important tool to use, especially if you are looking for large properties. The quality of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) drone videos is extraordinary now, the vast majority of which are now 4K quality.
Drone video footage is not something you will see all across the market. Given the resources it takes in terms of money, drone video is not essential for most realtors and the properties they represent. Smaller properties or apartments make it hard to justify the cost needed to create a video.
If you're interested but unsure about whether or not you would gain from using drone footage in listing your home, it's best to discuss it with your real estate professional. Just because something is a trend doesn't mean that it's guaranteed to deliver results for your house.
3D tours
While this has been used more for commercial real estate in the past, 3D tours for properties have started to become more and more common for residential real estate. While 3D tours are not like a real-time physical walkthrough of a house, they are the next best thing. It's a lot easier for clients to make their minds up about a house without a visit if they can almost walk through it from the comfort of their own home by just using a website.
In a market where there is a lot of competition, a realtor can suggest the use of 3D yours if the cost is worth it. The upsides of a 3D tour are massive but unless it's done for a whole building where units are similar enough, the time and money needed might be prohibitive for a listing.
Possibilities and pitfalls
Technology for real estate has long since moved away from a website, Facebook account, and the occasional YouTube video. The future of the industry sees the average realtor with these tools as common selling tools in their portfolio.
Technologies like that can help both buyers and sellers equally and are legal as long as there's no misrepresentation. Virtual staging, drone footage, and 3D tours can help you get a better idea of a property and they make a property stand out in a market. Any element, when used properly, generates more leads and these can help the process of finding the right house exponentially faster.
It's easy for people to find a video to watch for a property, but novelty is something that stimulates the human brain more than anything. We have moved from having a "for sale" sign on front yards to putting a house on an online listing service, to short videos, and now we are entering the age of almost walking into a house without having to change out of your pyjamas.
This amount of digitization also has some drawbacks.
Virtual staging is something that needs to be done by a professional for a few reasons. If done improperly, it can create false expectations of what a property can become. Examples of that include extending virtual furniture in ways that are not possible in real life, manipulating how light will actually spread throughout a room, or changing how the exterior of the property looks. Still, these are not things that cannot be done already with tools available for decades like Photoshop.
Drones offer an amazing new perspective but unless a buyer plans on flying one around their property it can give a false sense of scale. The drone's field of view and other optical settings can make places seem bigger than they are. For a large house with a yard then an overview of the site from a mechanical bird's eye view could be extremely useful but it can also make a smaller property feel smaller than it is on the ground.
3D tours require a property to be mostly free of furniture so that the capture device can freely move around the space to give buyers a better experience. This means that unless the seller has moved out already or the property is a new build then a 3D tour might be too much of a headache.
The bottom line
If you're a buyer then all those tools are useful. They can help you fill in the gaps that photos leave which means that you're saving yourself some time during your search. Virtual staging, when the website allows you to flip between the empty room and the virtually staged version, is a boon that allows you to picture yourself more easily in your potential dream home.
If your goal is to sell, then the temporary inconvenience of having to empty rooms for a picture could be worth it if it attracts higher bids down the line. Though a serious buyer will want to look through the property in person, they will also be able to look at the space with the comparison that the virtual staging offers in their minds. Not all realtors offer services like that but asking doesn't hurt.
It's essential to keep in mind that no matter how well used these techniques are, a home inspection done by a professional is still a must. Falling in love with a house is normal but as with everything that involves love and the internet, try not to get catfished. Not to mention that things like a neighbourhood, the level of noise around the home, and more cannot be properly seen through links on a web page.
The process of buying or selling a home is stressful and complex, these services won't replace walking through a property but this technology is the next best thing.
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