Agents Online Real Estate Forums, Discussion, Realtors Marketing Tips

Follow AgentsOnline on Twitter

Click Here to display our logo on your site and link to us!
AgentsOnline Real Estate Discussion Forums Logo

Good Ideas
Nusetlock.com




REO Prep Foreclosure Listings




How To Advertise Here

More Good Ideas!
Real Estate Websites for Realtors




Build your brand on a Real Estate Site





Facebook
Topic Options
Rate This Topic
#62389 - 07/19/04 03:17 PM Virtual Tour Questions
Anonymous
Unregistered


Hello,

I work as what began as a part-time assistant in uploading the photo's for a local office branch of Century 21 Real Estate, and eventually worked into being the semi-office computer savy guy. I'm not best by any means at what I do, but with the people here, it gets the job done. The question I have stems from our virtual tour provider. We are hooked with a company called Justsnooping.com and they host all our virtual tours for something in the hundreds a year. The service isn't really a problem but it's not great either. The entire process works like this. 1)listing is generated 2)agent or myself take a virtual tour photo shoot of the listing 3) I stitch the photo's together using Ulead cool 360 4) upload the created photo's to justsnooping.com 5) link the listing from justsnooping.com to our MLS providers and other site. All in all, it's a lot of run around. Here the question is, I have dabbled my foot into amateur photoshop and dreamweaver applications and have produced this Virtual Tour ---> http://ctrlsstudios.com/cowan/cowan_v-tour.html

It's actually for a different real estate office as I try to make some money here and there as a freelancer, and it's not finished but I showed this to my boss and wanted to know if other real estate agents might prefer one or the other. The one I created is completly my own, minus a freeware java applet I found after long hours of searching. Pending approval or a deal from the creator of that applet, we could in theory eliminate justsnooping.com from the picture and the new one would look like: 1)listing 2)take photos 3)stitch photo's 4)update v-tour template with personalised settings 5)host on our servers for free.

I think it would work nicely and if and when I leave I could just show someone how to manipulate the code a litte more and it would work long after I'm gone.

For comparison, here is a typical Virtual Tour from justsnooping.com from our office. ---> http://jsvt.justsnooping.com/opentour.jsp?TourID=1031149 <---

Any feedback on the quality of either the justsnooping.com or my homemade v-tour would be greatly appreciated. All suggestions concerning this are also welcome.

And one last note, I'm not sure how many people out there do their own tours or hire out, but what do you normally pay/charge for one? I'm curious because it's not hard work for me to do one when I just upload to justsnooping.com and so I would charge say $20 for one and I took care of everything from the appointment with the seller to the final linking. For the tours that I created I haven't really come up with a price yet, what do you think is fair? $50-60 (which includes everything once again, and the hosting since it's on my personal web server right now)

Thanks a bunch.

Matt Brandt

Top
#62390 - 07/30/04 04:07 AM Re: Virtual Tour Questions
Anonymous
Unregistered


Hi Matt,

I stumbled across your question in my morning rambling, and thought I'd add in my thoughts. Here goes:

I can understand your concern about the hassle with 3rd party providers when you are already shooting your own tours. Generally, they work great if you sub the tour production out, since it is a seamless transaction (agent orders, 3rd party shoots, stitches, uploads). However, when you run your own show, it can be easier to manage your own tours internally. Often times, I see Century 21 just use Realtor.com for most of their listings and just link the mls to those.

I found both of the tours to be of very similar quality, photo-wise at least. A lot of the images looked a bit washed out to me, almost like they were lightened a bit in a graphics program. Your tour template takes quite a while to download being all images (and we have fast cable here), I would remove all the images and just make it nice simple text based links and background. The justsnooping template works fine for its purpose.

I haven't seen many tours of this flavor, more used to the complete "immersive" 360 degree tours. You can see a demo of how we shoot 'em here: http://connectedtech.net/solutions/tours/demo Zoom around it a little bit to get the feel of the viewer, shooting them this way may provide more appeal to your (existing/future) clients. You can check out our pricing page for an idea of our rates; we sometimes run promotions that affect these to an extent. It also can change by location.

Hope that helps some, best of luck.

Top
#62391 - 07/30/04 06:36 AM Re: Virtual Tour Questions
Anonymous
Unregistered


look at the competiton to figure out your pricing
http://www.realestateoffice.com

Top
#62392 - 07/30/04 08:08 AM Re: Virtual Tour Questions
Jim Erickson Offline
Veteran Member

Registered: 03/31/04
Posts: 508
Loc: Twin Cities, MN
I did some research about a year ago so please keep this in mind when I am throwing up numbers. Things can change quickly in a year. (I ended up doing my own VT's)

Some charge an annual fee plus a fee per tour (Tour Factory was $600/yr + $40/tour)
Some charge per package (Visual Tour $500/10 tours and $25 for additional tour)

Again, these numbers probably changed and who knows, the companies may not even exist any more. This is just to give you an idea of the different pricing structures I found a year ago.
_________________________
Twin Cities Real Estate Services

Top
#62393 - 07/30/04 03:52 PM Re: Virtual Tour Questions
Anonymous
Unregistered


Thank you for those that responded. I will admit that I haven't used the 360 tours as much, without a wide angle lens, it's much harder to pull off with my camera with the current software program, because unless I pull it off flawlessly, the picture will get chewed up. I did recognize the picture background causing a long delay for the page load time, I thought that it helped distinguish my v-tours from all other though. I'm going to rework the page this weekend as I am scheduled to reshoot most of the photo's. The chosen day was overcast which is why the pictures ended up washed out, it was hard to get the right brightness setting on the exterior shots. I think I am going to try a better method, remove the graphic buttons and insert html buttons instead.

Do you think that would work better? I think it's a fair compromise, it'll reduce the sheer amount of seperate pictures that need to load as it could be cut into say 6-8 large pictures instead of the 45 or so miniture ones that fit together. I still think that in this market, (IMHO) that using this method it looks cleaner, and more oriented to showing off the property.

From checking out the market pricing for virtual tours, it seems that I am way underpricing myself for what I've been doing, though I'll admit the majority of the other systems have much more professional 360 tours. I'll post again when I've reworked the site to make it more user friendly.

Thanks again,
~Matt Brandt

------------------
Use your talents, it's what they are intended for.

Top






Moderator:  Maui 
Google Custom Forum Search

This Google Custom search may do a better job of searching the forums for some keywords than the old forum search does. The results do not include threads from the Asset Managers Forum however. To search that forum you will need to be actually in the Asset Managers Forum and you will need to use the old forum search below.
Search

Good Idea!
REO and Short Sale Listings
Sponsors

Newest Members
Jazzman, Home Moaner, Harrisk, Stckrap, Torrey
20756 Registered Users
Who's Online
16 registered (ColoREO, c302, ditty, CandyMan, Chris39, 2 invisible), 169 Guests and 2 Spiders online.
Key: Admin, Global Mod, Mod
Shout Box

Top Posters (30 Days)
DueDiligence 90
Vermont 88
HomeTeamGA 51
smg 40
pro 40
shana 40
pikes peak 39
75Corvette 37
Kjmendy 36
Brad - W4BJM 35
Artiste 34
Doin' bpose 34
realyte 31
VABroker 30
Rezo 29
(Views)Popular Topics
No new orders today 3949798
I MAKE 100 COLD CALLS EVERY DAY & LOVE IT! 2023969
Stupid MLS comments. 840760
EML 457988
Evalonline 299343
Land America 284999
Mainstreet 261426
What do you know about Froy Candelario, top agent in USA 248484
Pay it Forward - BPO/REO Tips & Tricks I & II 223423
New HUD Listing Brokers---Any Update? 222821
Is there religious content in Buffini class? 197287
Stupid QC comments and BPO requirements. 187221
FARVV 177240
REOTRANS 151286
USRES / RES.NET 147574
AVM Bpos 139412
asset val seminar in colorado 134399
FARVV 126751
Let's talk about our cars 120312
PAS 118318
Featured Member
Registered: 01/14/09
Posts: 185

How To Advertise Here


This site presented by RNC Internet Services