Selling your house can be a big undertaking. You have to market the house, move out, go through stacks of paperwork, and more.
But with the help of virtual home tours, you can speed up the process. Virtual home tours allow you to show your house online in amazing visual detail so you can host fewer physical showings.
In this article, we’ll go over exactly what a virtual home tour is and then give you five reasons to use them when you sell your next house.
Here we go!
What is a virtual home tour?
A virtual home tour is a 3D walkthrough of a house that’s all digital. It uses 3D-rendered images of different rooms in the house so that you can “walk” through them and rotate around 360° to see every angle.
Think of it like on Google Maps but instead of showing only the outside of the house, you get to go inside as well!
Some virtual home tours even use virtual reality (VR) technology to make it a truly immersive experience. Interested buyers can put on a set of VR goggles to feel like they are literally walking around the house.
By leveraging virtual home tours like this along with of your home, you can dramatically increase your buyer prospects.
Here’s how:
1. Makes home shopping convenient
You can do a virtual home tour from anywhere. This makes them incredibly convenient for buyers and you as well. You don’t have to stage your house and set aside time for viewings, and shoppers can look at the house on their device whenever and wherever they want.
Plus, virtual home tours are more easily customized. For example, you can digitally swap out the furniture and decorations to give the house its best look. This way, you can make the house look as attractive as possible. After all, the furniture won’t come with the house in the end anyway, so you might as well make the house look as attractive as possible.
2. Sells your house faster
Virtual home tours streamline the entire home selling process. As the seller, you can stage fewer showings and deal with fewer phone calls because the virtual home tour will weed out non-serious leads who decide they’re not interested.
Buyers also save time because they can view a lot more houses faster with virtual home tours. Instead of driving to different locations, they can view multiple houses virtually in a relatively small amount of time.
3. Cuts marketing costs
Because you can stage fewer showings and answer fewer phone calls, you also end up saving a lot on marketing costs. You can afford to run fewer ads and be less swamped by unqualified leads.
4. Increases web traffic
Real estate listings with virtual tours are more attractive online. In fact, Zillow says that their listings with virtual tours get .
This means your house will get more online exposure to the market and rank higher in search results. Plus, your listing will probably get shared more across social media since it is more click-worthy.
5. Stands out from the competition
According to one study from 2016, only 19% of home listings included a virtual tour. Though the percentage is probably higher today, having a virtual home tour will still set you apart from most listings. This can give you a leg up and help you sell your house faster.
Final Takeaways
It’s clear that virtual home tours are here to stay. The COVID-19 pandemic taught us many things, but one was that people can shop for nearly anything online nowadays. And that’s becoming increasingly true for real estate as well.
Though you usually still need to see the house at some point before buying, gone are the days when you had to be onsite to get a feel for the layout and dimensions of the house.
As a seller, you can use this new development to your advantage. Invest in a virtual home tour to get your house sold faster. And who knows, maybe you’ll end up selling it for more too!