What does virtual tour mean to real-estate? 

Being able to list as many as properties in a day and sell it the next day is the best situation for a listing agent or broker.

Being able to see as many as listing in a day and have the confidence to make a decision is the most desirable case for a prospect.

What's the tiring kicker in between?

For listing agent's, it is filtering out serious prospects with least amount time wasted on the road, getting key, and repeating the go to information like "availability, utility, rent," and other miscellaneous questions.

For a prospect, it is being able to see as many different floor plans and have all the confidence to know and choose the best ones available.

You see, there is a gap, so there is a better approach.

Real-estate agents today heavily rely on 2d pictures and basic "virtual tours", which is actually just a bunch of panorama pictures. It means in order to create a close to reality tour, the photography needs to take a lot of pictures, the bigger the space is, more pictures need to taken with an expensive camera - actually they call it scan a room. I think most of us know the time difference between taking a photo and scanning a photo. For a Matterport tour, a room that is 10 feet by 10 feet will require approximately four 360 photos to scan, which means either 24 photos (Simple Scan) or 72 photos (Complete Scan).

We only need to take one picture per enclosure, aka. per room.

So how do we able to make one photo to be a whole room? 

We use a different approach. We take one photo per room and turn that photo into an actual 3D model of the space. That 3D model is a high resolution, true-to-scale, model of the room. You can move anywhere inside the room to get a different perspective of the space (much like walking in real-life).

Because our model is actually 3D, we can take advantage of that space by allowing for drag-and-drop furniture, pre-measured rooms, and much more. After all these pros listed here, I have to point out, there are some cons of our way of approach (I will write about it some day), just like all things on this planet.

I'd like to say we want to make our user being able to visualize the floor plan closer to being there, without actually being there, in terms of a sense of spacial, offering tools that make it easier to plan, measure, and design. Which ultimately will consolidate the confidence choosing a home in a short amount of time and effort, for both agents and prospects. Well, we have to exclude the sense of the smell, at least for the perceivable century.

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