With the rise of tools like virtual and augmented reality, technology is changing real estate in several ways, and it’s just getting started.
While the construction industry continues to grow and evolve all the time, for the most part, real estate sales have remained mostly static. There have been a few advancements in how houses are sold, but for the most part, it’s a relatively straightforward job – not easy by any stretch, but straightforward. Agents show the house to prospective buyers, answer questions, then the rest is up to the potential homeowners.
Again, not an easy job, but one that has remained mostly the same for the last few decades at least. Technology is beginning to upend that.
While the personal touch is still important and having an agent to handling things like closing the deal is vital, several real estate agencies are turning to virtual reality to help them sell houses. Users can log onto the real estate company’s website and take a virtual tour of a house that’s for sale. Most potential buyers will likely still want to view the house in person before shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it’s potentially a huge advantage for buyers to be able to simply sit on their couch, throw on a VR headset, and get a sense of the layout and look of several houses at once. Given that it’s just a VR video it doesn’t even require much computing power. You can typically load a real estate VR gallery on your phone and tour a house using VR gear like Samsung’s Gear VR, or even Google Cardboard, which means you won’t have to shell out hundreds for a high-tech VR headset – in theory, almost anyone can make use of this tech right now.
It’s a far better experience than simply looking at pictures or watching a video online. Some apartments already offer this to prospective tenants as well.
At the moment this use of VR is mostly limited to the more expensive houses and rental properties, partly because the cameras needed to capture the 360 VR video are themselves expensive, so a real estate agency probably won’t buy one or more on a whim. In the future, however, as the technology becomes more cost effective, this type of VR experience might become more common.
The real estate industry may not change fundamentally, but it does have a few new tools at its disposal.
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