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

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.

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

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.

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

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