Working with Immersive Design Studio, a Montreal-based virtual world developer, Prudential Real Estate and Relocation Services (PRERS) has launched a new online tool, using video game technology, that is intended to take virtual home tours to a new level. The tool can be used by people who are relocating for a new
job in another part of the country, making it possible to view potential homes without traveling to distant locations. If virtual home tours become standard in residential real estate, use of the tool may spread to commercial real estate, and possibly the self-storage ind
ustry, as well. Someday, people looking for self-storage units may be able to go online and use a virtual tool such as the one Prudential is developing to "walk" through units and properties. Traveling to a self-storage facility in one's own home town is not onerous or difficult, but it does take time out of a busy day -- and if online tools such as virtual walk-throughs become standard in the industry, it may not be necessary.
Self-storage developers may also want to take a close look at the new technology with an eye to developing virtual walk-throughs of properties that have not yet been constructed. Virtual technology might make it possible to allay many of the community concerns that often are raised during the process of changing zoning laws to allow self-storage facilities to be constructed. A virtual drive-through, for example, could be added to a community presentation showing how a new facility would affect traffic patterns, which is a concern that is frequently raised when communities consider changes to their zoning regulations. If an interactive virtual walk-through is developed, a self-storage developer could go to a community meeting, make a presentation, and then show different alternatives in response to questions from members of the community.
"This is actually Avatar meets real estate," Prudential's CEO, Jim Mallozi, said in today's Inman News. "We demonstrated...how (two people) could both be in different rooms at opposite ends of the country and be holographically next to each other. Buyers can start to experience homes and what they would do with (a home) even before they actually see it," he continued. It is hoped that the home tour technology will eventually allow viewers to actually walk through a room physically, projecting a version of the room onto a wall and using technology that tracks the human body as it moves, so that home buyers do not have to click with a mouse or even wear special equipment to do the walk-through.
According to a company statement, Prudential's collaboration with Immersive with do much more than provide virtual home tours. It will be a "collaboratory," or a "lab without walls," combining state-of-the-art virtual technology with the Prudential Real Estate network. It will explore ways the real estate industry can use four areas of technology: sensory spaces and video gaming, social networking and media sharing, mobile computing, and Web search engine research semantics. The search engine research is focused on finding ways to display search results that relate to the meaning of the words in the query, rather than providing results, as Google does, based on keyword page rank.
"It's not a traditional laboratory in its own right," said Mallozzi. "It's a combination of three things: innovation, a research and development effort, and collaboration between experts in the industry and practitioners. We think it should allow us to bring new tools to the market even faster."
Other new tools announced by Prudential this week include:
- the Prudential Real Estate Media Center, an online bank of tools and resources that can be used by salespeople to put together presentations, videos, photos, and graphics
- a rent-to-own calculator, which can be used by consumers to figure out how much home their rent payments would buy if they were using the same amount of money to make mortgage payments
- interfaces with social media sites directly from Prudential's Online Seller Advantage platform
- PruRE.com, a website designed for use with smartphones
While the tools Prudential is developing are currently focused on the residential home market, it is easy to see how such tools could be applied to commercial real estate as well. Self-storage businesses already get much of their business from people who make reservations using smartphones, for example. An online resource containing presentation tools could be very valuable to businesses who are putting together online presentations of their facilities for prospective buyers, or could be used, like the virtual walk-through technology, by developers making presentations before community planning commissions. In the self-storage industry, there has also been a lot of interest, over the last few months, in using social networking tools to strengthen a business -- self-storage owners may want to keep an eye on tools such as Prudential's Online Seller Advantage platform, and think about how those tools could be used in self-storage marketing.
Prudential made the announcement of the new tools and its collaboration with Immersive at its annual convention in Austin this week. The virtual tours are not available on Prudential's website yet, but are expected to be available for use by home buyers soon.
Sources used:
Brambila, Andrea V. "Prudential plans 'immersive' virtual tours." Inman News. March 10, 2010.
"Prudential Real Estate and Relocation Services launches industry's first research and development laboratory; introduces new tools for affiliate network." Enhanced Online News, March 8, 2010.
"Prudential Real Estate and Relocation Services launches industry's first research and development laboratory; introduces new tools for affiliate network," MarketWatch, March 8, 2010.