Searching for a new home has always been a time-consuming experience. That’s doubly true in large metropolitan areas with challenging distances between places, traffic jams, locked lobby doors, etc. It’s even worse for those looking to relocate long distance.
While real estate agencies increasingly solve some of these problems by offering buyers 3D property tours created from Matterport, Inc. digital twins, a new platform available in New York City offered by Prevue Immersive Tours is taking remote visits to the next level. It combines Matterport digital twins with video conferencing inside the tours so that buyers can remotely visit properties with their agents, in addition to customer relationship management (CRM) tools for brokers.
Buyers can schedule tours of properties they’re interested in with the click of a button. Agents can enter their working hours, days off, and lunch breaks so they don’t get booked when they aren’t available and the platform will sync with the agent’s calendar. The agent dashboard includes a calendar with the ability to search for tours by broker, client, upcoming tours, and previous tours. Agents can add important property details and amenities such as the number of bedrooms, parking, elevators, storage, and so on, which will help clients select the features they are most interested in. A note-taking tool is automatically activated during each tour.
The goal is to make it as easy and efficient as possible for buyers to tour multiple properties with their agents during a single appointment, to provide agents with insights about what their clients are looking for, and to help agents manage clients, properties, and tours.
“We chose Matterport because it's the undisputed industry leader,” says Joshua Maidan, Founder, Prevue Immersive Tours. “No one else can match the rich, 4k resolution or the ease of navigation. And by partnering with Matterport, we can capture as much of the virtual real estate tour market as possible.”
Reducing a two-week process to an hour
While COVID-19 accelerated the adoption of virtual tours, Prevue insists that it’s not a pandemic solution.
Virtual tours existed before the pandemic, and for good reason,” Maidan says. “Visiting twenty properties in person in a city like New York can easily take two weeks or longer. But with Prevue, buyers can look at multiple properties with their real estate agents alongside them in just an hour or so.”
For buyers, virtually touring a property without an agent is much better than relying only on photographs that don’t capture the look, feel, and flow of a space, but virtually touring a property along with an agent is a game-changer. “Clients inevitably have lots of questions, and it’s almost impossible to remember all of them for a follow-up email or phone call,” Maidan says. “The experience is much more enjoyable, efficient, and productive if they can ask questions while they’re looking at a property online, just as they would during an in-person visit.”
Customer relationship management without the learning curve
While some real estate agencies use CRM tools, many do not. Most agents don’t use anything more high-tech than a smartphone and an email account, with many saying they spend much of each day on the phone.
Prevue includes light CRM functions, such as the ability to track leads and manage teams, so that brokers can understand and manage their sales processes from lead generation to closing.
“Our goal is not to disrupt the way agents do business,” says Maidan. “There’s no need to learn a whole new platform. Prevue is click-and-drop software that requires less than five minutes to schedule a virtual tour and add guests.”
Matterport is only the starting point
Prevue uses the Matterport SDK so that brokers and clients can tour the same property at the same time and talk to each other, even if they’re on opposite sides of the world. Together they can navigate from one room to the next, zoom in on whatever interests them, change the perspective to dollhouse mode, switch from one property to another, and more. They can also download marketing material and property specs with a mouse click and invite additional guests to join a tour that’s already in progress.
Because agents can schedule tours for multiple properties in a single online appointment, they can capture more business. And it couldn’t be easier. All an agent has to do is copy and paste a link into the system, and the property is automatically added. It doesn’t even matter if the listing is theirs or somebody else’s.
Maidan points out that home-seekers increasingly don’t feel like they must visit a property in person to make an offer. “More and more people are feeling comfortable buying or renting a property without seeing it in person, as long as they’ve seen it with Matterport,” he says. “It really is the next best thing to being there.”
What’s next for Prevue
Now that the initial version of Prevue is available, next up is adding analytics capabilities, such as a heat map, so that agents can understand which areas of a property visitors spend the most time viewing. Prevue will also be adding predictive analyses that will help identify more properties that a client is likely to be interested in.
Not only will a buyer be able to revisit a property, a recording of the visit with the agent will soon be available so that clients can replay exactly what they already saw and experienced. Agents know that clients who look at a property a second or third time are more likely to be ready to make an offer, and they’ll be able to follow up accordingly.
Prevue believes that Matterport is crucial to the evolution of the metaverse. “It’s one of the portals that takes us into a digital world,” says Maidan. “That’s another reason we feel so strongly about partnering with Matterport.”
In the meantime, Prevue expects that buyers who are relocating should keep business humming along. “Everyone who wants to move from across the country or from abroad is particularly interested in the ability to look at properties from a distance,” Maidan says. “Right now, roughly 30 percent of properties are toured virtually, and since society’s acceptance of online shopping-related technologies continues to expand, that number is only going to rise.”
Prevue is a Matterport Platform Partner that leverages Matterport APIs and SDKs to build and commercialize their apps and integrations with Matterport’s market-leading spatial data platform. As a Platform Partner, they gain access to a range of commercial benefits, such as Matterport’s distribution network and enhanced support as well as co-marketing and co-selling programs to help them successfully monetize their applications. To learn more about the Platform Partner Program and apply to join, visit https://matterport.com/platform-partner-program
ABOUT Prevue
Prevue Immersive Tours offers a software platform for the real estate industry that adds video conferencing and CRM tools to Matterport 3D virtual tours, reducing property search times and enabling agents to efficiently manage clients from lead generation to closing.
HEADQUARTERS
New York City, New York
PRODUCTS
Matterport SDK
Results
- Shortens property search time from weeks to hours
- Enables agents to glean more insights about buyers’ wants and needs
- Offers easy client management from lead generation to closing
- Helps real estate agents capture more business
©2022 Matterport, Inc. All rights reserved. Matterport is a registered trademark and the Matterport logo is a trademark of Matterport, Inc. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.
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