What Is Real Estate Virtual Tour Software in Multifamily?
Real estate virtual tour software makes it easy for leasing teams to facilitate more qualified leads, reduce in-person tours, blend in-person tours with virtual tours, and save leasing teams time.
Continue reading below to learn more about virtual tour software. If you found this information helpful, subscribe to the Realync newsletter to learn more!
Accelerate Leasing
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Speed Up Lease Up
by providing construction updates and showcase your space without having to do hard hat tours.
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PRE-LEASE OCCUPIED UNITS
by ‘showing’ them without having to physically tour the space by sending pre-recorded videos.
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CONVERT A HIGHER PERCENTAGE OF YOUR LEADS INTO LEASES
when you receive notifications when prospects are viewing videos to cater your follow up.
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SPEND LESS TIME TO CLOSE EACH LEASE
by removing roadblocks and barriers in the leasing process.
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INCREASE SIGHT-UNSEEN LEASING
by making it a breeze for out-of-market leads to choose your community.
Improve Community Engagement
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PROMOTE YOUR PROGRAMS BETTER
via pre-recorded videos by linking via social media or internal apps.
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DECREASE MAINTENANCE REQUESTS
by creating maintenance videos.
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REINFORCE COMMUNITY RULES
by receiving notifications when residents are viewing videos to know who has seen a message and who hasn’t.
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REDUCE REPETITIVE QUESTIONS
because consumers retain 10% of a message when reading it via text, but 90% of a message when viewed in a video.
More Than Software
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Virtual Training
is available for every property utilizing Realync.
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Make your video efforts consistent
with one set, standardized process and platform.
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TRACK ENGAGEMENT And Usage
across your entire portfolio.
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Partner with the Realync Team
to create a personalized training program to be rolled out across all properties.
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Are you Ready to Get Real?
Talk with us today to see how Realync’s platform can 2X your lead-to-lease conversion rate!
Request a Demo
Real Estate Virtual Tour Software
In the multifamily real estate and property management industry, an empty unit is lost money. Shuffling through leads and applications, contacting prospective residents, and coordinating tour schedules takes time and are likely the sources of countless headaches for any onsite team. But what if you could fill your apartment units while barely lifting a finger? Today’s advanced technology is shifting the way that leasing agents are able to connect with prospects and lease their communities—for the better.
With real estate virtual tour software, it’s now possible to show your space to anyone at anytime, and from anywhere. Your prospective residents will love this flexibility and the benefits that follow. Among the best virtual tour software 2019 companies is Realync. Unlike other virtual tour software available, Realync enables leasing agents and property managers to host live video of their properties, giving prospective residents a crystal clear, authentic virtual apartment showing.
The benefit of doing a live video tour? The 2019 Kingsley Report found that 16% of prospective renters no longer want to visit the property before moving in. Period. That being said, they still want to see and experience their exact unit, the amenities they care about and more. And nothing can showcase those things with more transparency and realness than a live virtual apartment tour. The live aspect also allows for leasing agents to still be a part of the equation in order to build relationships with prospects, answer questions, and more. Plus, Realync’s virtual tour software is super easy to use and requires nothing more than an iPhone or iPad.
Intrigued? Read on to learn the basics of how to create a virtual tour and a live tour for an apartment showing, and, importantly, why these options are better than the alternatives available. Be that property your prospective residents are looking for by providing a fantastic and authentic real estate virtual tour and no longer mandating onsite visits as the only option for truly experiencing the property!
How to Create a Virtual Tour
When creating a multifamily virtual tour, you want to draw in and keep the attention of your prospective resident. Make sure the unit and area that you’ll be showing is clean and organized before recording or hosting the tour, that lights are on, toilets are closed, and the space will allow you to easily walk through it for your tour. Choose a time of day that provides the best lighting through the living space as well.
The flow for your video tour and apartment filming, should follow desired flow of your viewers. What would catch their eye in a room first? Where might they want a close up? A full view? Don’t forget to show shots out the windows and on balconies when available! When recording, be sure to create a smooth viewing experience as well. Avoid swinging the camera too quickly or walk with an unsteady gait. It’s okay and actually a best practice to do your recording in multiple sections, or room to room. If creating a pre-recorded apartment video, break your recording into multiple individual clips of video versus just one long recording. Record the entry way, then stop. Record the living room, then stop. And so forth throughout the space. With Realync, you can instantly stitch all of those individual video clips into a polished, full-length apartment unit tour with just the click of a button. The point is to convey a fluid, authentic picture of the unit and property. If your community includes common area amenities like a gym, pool, or playground, take shots of those areas as well and either include them in your unit tour video or create a separate video showcasing those amenities that you can send along with the recorded unit tour.
If capturing someone’s attention is the goal, don’t forget to capture or add-in sound with your videos. When leaning on virtual tour real estate, especially if you’re in an urban area, sound can give apartment seekers knowledge of the noise — or lack of it — in the apartment and can go a long way towards signing sight-unseen. A quality narration or voiceover can also go a very long way in pointing out things throughout the tour that may not have been picked up on otherwise by the viewer. Many real estate virtual tour services will provide expensive products like 360 virtual tours, but the real estate virtual tour pricing for these options is steep. With Realync, the only hardware you need to shoot your virtual tour is your smartphone or tablet. And adding in quality virtual tour music or a slick voiceover is simple within Realync’s video leasing application.
Live Tour
Many will agree that the best level of service is one where there is a human going the extra mile for you. That’s no different with apartment touring. Taking your virtual showing experience one step higher by hosting a live virtual tour for a prospective resident is a service that will always stand out among the crowd. Not only is connecting live with a prospective resident a way to stand out, it’s also the single most authentic way to convey the feeling of living in the apartment to a prospective resident outside of them showing up in person.
Many of the most popular virtual tour options today, including 3D tours and 360 tours, are still relying on stagnant, staged, and pieced-together images that don’t always reflect the real apartment. While potentially valuable for generating initial interest, it is leaving apartment shoppers wary of virtual tours, and still wanting to see the apartment with their own eyes before signing a contract. The one big factor with a 3D apartment tour is that it likely is not of the exact unit a resident would be leasing. And that’s likely all that prospect needs to see in order to be comfortable leasing – their exact unit.
So pursue the platform that allows your onsite teams to do just that – show the prospective resident exactly what they want to see. A live video tour through the apartment gives the viewer a genuine, authentic understanding of the community and unit in real-time. The reason live video tours are so beneficial at instilling trust into the leasing process from afar? You can’t photoshop live tours! It’s showing the space as it truly stands at that point in time. And with a real human hosting the tour, it allows the prospects on that tour to ask questions and even call out the host if they feel they’re skipping over something or not telling/showing the full story.
In the world of multifamily real state, the truth of the matter is that the days for needing fancy equipment and a state-of-the-art production company have passed. So have the days of requiring or expecting that every single prospect will want or be able to physically visit the property before moving in. In reality, the future of real estate is in live and low-fidelity video.
Let’s finish by looking at some virtual tour alternatives or standards that don’t match up to the Realync live tour experience and explain why the live video tour is superior in each case.
360 Virtual Tours Are Unnecessary
360 property tours have slowly become the norm in virtual tours that sit on a community website over the last decade. While an artistic and innovative approach for its time, 360 property tours require extra equipment, time, software, and money that ultimately isn’t required. The 360 tour creator starts with a pristine apartment, amply staged, and pictures are taken throughout every room from different angles or with a 360 camera or lens, allowing a full room to be captured in one image. Special 3D walkthrough software can let you add arrows to move around a room virtually through stitched images and indicate on a floor plan the picture’s location and direction.
With the use of a 360 virtual tour, multifamily professional can attract prospective residents with fancy technology and a glitzy experience, but it is not the tool or media that will get that prospect to actually convert into a resident. Why? People understand that the ‘tour’ they’re experiencing online was created/shot at some other point in time and may not be an accurate depiction of the space as it stands today. Not only that, but it is likely not the exact unit they would be living in. And they still want to see that.
While 3D or 360 virtual tours can be a decent lead generation tool, they are not a lead conversion tool and the inauthentic experience of 3D virtual tours, will likely always lead to additional work for the onsite team to convert that lead to a lease.
Why not just take out that unnecessary experience and stick with the simpler, cheaper live virtual tour that’s more likely to land a contract sight-unseen?
Virtual Tour Cameras Are Expensive
The 360 virtual tour was at one time the industry standard for real estate virtual tours. With changing technologies and consumer demands though, that is no longer the case. So why spend money on expensive, highly specialized equipment and 360 virtual tour software to create tours that aren’t even being demanded anymore? The purchase of the best 360 camera for real estate virtual tours can range up to several hundred dollars, if not a couple thousand when 3D is involved. Even with the use of the best 360 camera for real estate (2019 especially because of the rise of tripod stabilized cameras over handheld cameras), the process of staging each picture from different angles in each room takes up your precious time.
As the leasing agent or property manager, you’d either need to purchase this equipment and software yourself and learn how to use it, or contract a company that specializes in the 3D tour. This time and money is much better spent elsewhere. Our recommendation? You guessed it—Realync video leasing. We believe the cost of expensive virtual tour cameras and equipment are unnecessary expenses when all you really need is what’s always in your purse or pocket—your smartphone. The quality of smartphone cameras today, with the help of a virtual tour camera app like Realync, eliminates the cost and reduces the time before your apartment tour is live.
Virtual Tour Software, Free is Not Better
So if you’re just using your smartphone, why not just use a free virtual tour software as well? That’s a great question, especially since we just went over why expensive equipment and software for 360 virtual tours is unnecessary. Sadly, the answer is that the free train kind of ends when it comes to just using your own smartphone or tablet for recording or hosting real estate virtual tours. There is no free virtual tour app and free virtual tour hosting options do not exist either.
The thing about free virtual tour software is that it wouldn’t be able to provide all of the tools that you need to truly showcase your property in its best light, including real estate virtual tour hosting. Your virtual tour software should not only have great, simple video recording and editing functionality, but should also make all of your multifamily video tours available on the cloud for instant sharing. And the most important aspect? Fair Housing compliance! If your free virtual tour creator doesn’t provide those key elements, keep on looking.
While Realync is not a free virtual tour software, it is an affordable one built by a venture-backed B2B SaaS company. And it’s a proven success having shown an ROI for multifamily clients across the United State ranging from the most luxury Class A multifamily development to affordable C properties, student properties, senior properties, military installations, and everything in between.
Maximize your time on Realync by creating polished virtual tours on your iPhone or iPad in just minutes. Within the Realync app, easily edit video clips with captions and voice-overs to create a custom experience for your prospective residents. Publish your video tours to the cloud with the touch of a button for sharing online, through text message, or on your favorite platform of choice. Importantly, you can host a live video tour for prospective residents right in the app, to provide that authentic experience for them.
At the end of the day, what matters most when it comes to finding the right virtual tour software for you and your team is what your prospective residents desire and would connect with. There’s rarely just a one source answer either. Sometimes it takes a mix of 3D virtual tours and live video tours to attract and convert leads. In the end, Realync wants to same thing that you want, which is the same thing your prospective residents want: speed up the leasing process by keepin’ it real. Realync wishes you all the best in your virtual tour creation and remember — minimize the production and maximize the authenticity!
