If you are looking to close more leasing deals – and who isn’t?! – the answer may be found somewhere you aren’t currently looking — with a virtual apartment tour. The key to success? Making sure you’re creating the right kind of virtual tour – the kind that turns prospect to resident.
Let’s start with why the right virtual apartment tour is important and what the right virtual apartment tour looks like. Then, we’ll look at what makes an amazing tour and how that tour experience can help you close more deals.
Welcome to the World of Virtual Apartment Tours
If you want to succeed in today’s ultra competitive multifamily real estate business, you must cater to today’s prospective residents. And that means providing quality virtual apartment tours that they can engage with without having to physically show up to the community. Now, let’s talk about why.
First of all, you need to give prospective residents every option to tour your apartment community. In other words, that means no matter where they are, when they’re interested, or what device they’re using, they should be able to truly experience your community and see what they want to see. Many of today’s prospects don’t have the time to tour apartment after apartment in person. Or, geographically, it’s impossible. Or perhaps your community is pre-leasing and you need to show the space in lieu of a hard hat tour.
That is where the modern apartment virtual tour comes into play. This is more than a virtual reality apartment tour or 3D virtual apartment tour. Today’s prospective resident wants video. By using virtual video tours, you allow prospective residents to take a tour on their time. Whether you are hosting live tours or sending and sharing pre-recorded tours, video is your best bet. Using video for everything from apartment floor plan virtual tours to larger community overviews mean prospective residents can see the property anywhere, anytime, and on any device.
In today’s technology-driven world, virtual apartment tours are an absolute must-have. But not just any digital apartment tour will do. There are certain aspects a good virtual apartment tour should have, if you really want to see them be successful.
Start closing more deals with the best virtual apartment tour software
What Takes Virtual Tours From Standard to Amazing
The short answer is that creating the right, most effective virtual apartment tours should be personal and it should replicate an in-person tour as much as possible. Now, let’s dive into how to make those things happen.
Making them Personal
At the heart of transparency and authenticity is personalization. A personalized experience will win time and time again when compared to a stock virtual tour of a model unit.
This sort of content includes 3D virtual tours, 360 virtual tours, and the expensive, highly produced videos. A prospect could watch these and wonder “was it recorded a year ago? Have there been changes to the unit? What about the closet in that room or the view from that window?” Not a great customer experience and likely leaving more questions unanswered than answered.
The best virtual apartment tours are nuanced and should be specific to your ideal resident. These video tours should cover exactly what is of interest to each individual prospect. Are they young students? Then, proximity to campus, a quiet place to work, and access to some solid coffee shops will be a great selling point. It needs to be more than a stock virtual tour of a studio apartment. Or are they young families? That’s where the park across the street and the larger floor plans with ample storage would come into play. Plus, you can make your video content accessible across all devices. No matter if a prospect is mobile only or prefers their desktop, you can personalize the experience for them.
Make them Real
When looking for a new home, today’s prospect wants to see everything. They want to see every area that’s important to them and more. But, many times, that doesn’t mean they can come physically see the space with their own eyes. Expecting them to be able to do so is an outdated expectation. However, relying on the 3D tour of your model or the community overview video created 2 years ago, doesn’t cut it in terms of showing your prospects the real thing.
A good virtual apartment tour should literally duplicate the experience of visiting an apartment in person. That means it should use actual footage of the property, not a digital recreation. 3D luxury apartment tours and virtual reality apartment tours are very cool. They have a lot of fancy technical bells and whistles. But, ultimately, they are not what today’s prospective residents want and is not providing the conversion that leasing agents want. People want to see a real, non-photoshopped, experience when touring an apartment online.
Is the view out of the window not ideal and looking straight at a highway? Show it! Is the closet on the smaller side? Show it! A resident will eventually see all of that the second they step foot in the unit, so do yourself a favor and show all of that from the beginning. They’ll appreciate the transparency.
Authenticity Matters
Building trust with a community is the foundation for a prospective resident to sign on the dotted lease line. That’s why authenticity, realness and personalization are so important. People want to trust that the place they are seeing the real deal. They want to believe there will be no negative surprises when moving in and trust the people who maintain their home. And you need to convey that in the virtual apartment tour experience. Because, today’s residents? They want all of that without having to physically show up to the property to experience it.
Learn more about the most authentic, personalized virtual apartment tour software on the market
Have questions about how to increase your conversion rates using video for your multifamily community? Reach out — we’re here to help and are excited that you’re thinking about adding video to your leasing toolbox.
Until next time…keep it real!
