About 81% of marketers agree that interactive content is better at grabbing an audience’s attention. Instead of focusing on a hard sell, interactive content combines authenticity and quality content to help you stand out from other homeowners trying to sell.
In fact, offering virtual home tours is one of the best forms of interactive content you can utilize when selling your property.
With COVID-19 quarantines still underway, virtual tours can help you to reach buyers while they remain safe inside.
Meanwhile, virtual house tours can attract more potential buyers and give you an advantage in the marketplace. Still on the fence? Here are 10 benefits you can experience by offering house tours online.
Keep reading to learn more about how offering virtual home tours can get you ahead of the curve.
1. Generate More Interest
Over 50% of home buyers find their new homes through the internet. Many of these online homebuyers look for virtual house tours before voicing their interest. Virtual tours are most important to buyers who fall within the 52 to 71 age range.
By creating virtual home tours, you can reach more potential buyers.
With people staying at home in response to COVID-19, you can’t wait for people to schedule an in-person tour. Instead, you need to attract more people to your property. Adding virtual real estate tours to your listing can help you expand your reach.
As more people stay home, buyers are relying on the internet to research real estate properties. Using virtual tours will help you market your property even while buyers stay at home.
Appeal to Your Target Audience
In fact, providing visuals of the property is a better way to appeal to buyers. Virtual tours offer more details than simple sketches. By providing buyers with online home tours, you can add details that are bound to make an impact.
At the same time, you’re providing home buyers with helpful information that will help them make an informed decision.
Virtual house tours can help you reach your target audience, too. You can integrate customized features based on your audience’s expectations. Using a customized approach will increase your chance of closing a sale.
At the same time, you’re making customers feel special and valued. As a result, they’ll turn toward your property instead of another.
As you attract more visitors to your listing, you’re also increasing your property’s search engine ranking. Once you reach the top of a search page, you can earn more visitors than competing sellers. A higher ranking will also build brand trust, your credibility, and boost awareness!
2. Save Valuable Time
Listing a new property for sale by conventional means can result in hundreds of phone calls from potential buyers. You’ll need to complete in-person tours that may or may not result in a sale. Meeting each of these potential buyers in person can waste your valuable time and energy.
In many cases, some of these buyers are simply curious.
Often enough, curious buyers are only touring different homes. They don’t have the intention of making a reach purchase.
Virtual home tours allow buyers to determine their interest. They can explore a property straight from their phones or laptops. If they’re genuinely interested in the property, they can contact you for more information.
Encouraging prospective buyers to explore your online house tours first will help you determine the true buyers. Then, you can focus your time and attention on closing those sales.
3. Encourage Interactions
In addition to helping you attract more site visitors, virtual home tours can also increase your clickthrough rate. A higher clickthrough rate will increase your listing’s ranking on search engines like Google.
Virtual house tours encourage people to click around and interact with your content.
Visitors will click around to navigate their way through your virtual real estate tours. Meanwhile, they can also leave comments on your posts and ask questions about aspects of each property. For example, a prospective buyer can ask about the flooring and countertop materials.
Then, you or your real estate agent can easily respond in real-time.
These instantaneous interactions will help you discover prospective buyers. At the same time, you’re increasing the listing’s search engine ranking, allowing you to reach even more buyers.
4. Reduce Bounces
A high bounce rate can have a negative impact on your listing’s search engine ranking. The bounce rate indicates how many people leave the listing and how quickly.
Adding virtual tours to your listing can boost engagement and the clickthrough rate, which will decrease the bounce rate.
Search engines like Google will recognize that the listing is keeping visitors engaged and on the page. Google will prioritize your listing over ones with a low clickthrough rate and a high bounce rate.
Most virtual home tours take about a minute. That’s an additional minute you can keep people occupied on your listing. As each visitor’s dwell time increases, your bounce rate will drop.
Remember, the higher you rank on search engines, the more people will visit your listing.
5. Stand Out From Competitors
Many real estate agents aren’t aware of the benefits of virtual tours. Offering these tours before other sellers do will give you an advantage in the marketplace.
As one of the few people offering virtual tours in your target area, you can stand out from the crowd. You’ll attract the attention of prospective buyers before others can.
Your target audience will recognize the convenience you’re offering them. They’ll choose to explore your online home tours instead of touring another property in person. Then, you can get ahead of other sellers in your area by maintaining that advantage.
Failing to offer remote tours, on the other hand, can cause you to fall behind the curve. As your competitors recognize these benefits, they’ll start offering online tours themselves.
Get ahead of the curve and start attracting buyers to your property listing before your competitors can.
6. Increase Shares
Once your real estate agent posts your home online, you’ll want to generate as much traffic to your listing as possible.
Virtual house tours are eye-catching, engaging, and worth sharing. As more people share your online home tours, you’ll receive a backlink to your listing.
At the same time, you’ll improve your listing’s authority, which can further improve your search engine ranking.
The more backlinks you generate, the better for your ranking. Then, you can attract more visitors to your listing and generate more interest!
7. Get Social
You can also generate more interest by sharing your virtual tours on social media. A high-quality virtual tour can even go viral. The more people you impress with your house tour, the more likely they’ll share the tours with their friends.
Search engines like Google also use social media signals when determining search rankings. You can ensure your listing goes viral by creating unique, quality content.
You can also encourage social sharing by using emails. As you share your virtual home tours over email, people will send the email to others. As a result, you’re also extending your reach and marketing your property to other buyers!
8. Offer Ease
Cleaning and staging virtual house tours can take time and energy. You’ll want to make sure the entire house is in pristine condition before scheduling an in-person tour. With virtual home tours, however, you won’t have to waste valuable time.
Instead, you’ll have the convenience of providing buyers with a tour regardless of the property’s actual state.
In fact, virtual tours are one of the best ways to present any property. The listing will look attractive and explorable, even online. You can highlight different spaces, allowing buyers to navigate between one room and the next on their own.
At the same time, you’re creating a permanent open house by providing potential buyers with 24/7 hour access to the property. As a result, people will also see you’re reliable and ready to offer the information they need.
9. Highlight Key Features
The time homebuyers spend looking for the perfect home has decreased by three days year-over-year. That means you have a short window to make a strong first impression.
Decades ago, static newspaper and magazine listings were enough to grab a homebuyer’s attention. Now, agencies need to use photography, videos, and walk-throughs to attract buyers.
Today, you can use virtual real estate tours to provide buyers with all the visual information they could possibly need.
You can also customize these tours to highlight specific features for each listing. For example, if you can show off the latest home improvements you’ve made. Buyers can zoom in, examine details, and explore your properties day or night!
10. Improve Your ROI
Virtual house tours can increase your sales and boost your return on investment (ROI). Instead of wasting time and money with in-person tours, you can use virtual tours to pinpoint prospective buyers. You can focus on increasing the value of your home, too!
These tours can help you reveal key selling points for each property, increasing your chance of a sale!
Take a Tour: 10 Major Benefits of Virtual Home Tours
Want to sell your home as soon as possible? Experience these benefits of virtual home tours for yourself! By creating a virtual tour, you can attract buyers and sell your property in no time.
We’re here to help. Connect with our team today to sell your property using virtual tours!
