My gut tells me they don’t, but no one seems to agree.
With most agents offering new ways of getting to know a home with 3D tours, floor plans and videos, I think I could argue that photos are an after thought from the “olden days” that don’t serve much purpose in today’s high-tech market place.
What’s the point of having photos if you can walk through every inch of a listing using your phone, browser or even a virtual realty headset? That’s what our 3D tours allow you to do and the cost is really low. Bindu Patel, a downtown real-estat after having tried one of tours to sell a million dollar listing in West-mount was shocked. Without asking for feedback and with absolute certainty she told me she’d recently sold a house she’d been having problems with and she was 100% sure the 3D tour had something to do with it.
Makes sense. It’s a lot easier to have buyers fall in love with a house they can visit over and over. I took a glace at our statistics from the last 3 years and our 3D models have had almost a quarter million views, 15,000 of those coming in the last 30 days alone. Not bad.
More and more agents are also ordering floor plans as buyers find it really useful to have a traditional, visual perspective that makes it easy to see measurements to plan on where to put furniture. Agents love it too because our floor plans are accurate to the millimetre freeing up their time and eliminating tape measure battles (the tape measure often wins.)
And videos are having a Renascence too. Agents like Joseph Montanaro, whom I did Cline Dions’ home in Florida have been using videos for over a decade, but these days we’re getting more and more calls again as agents look for ways to impress vendors and stand out from a crowed field of real-estate agents.
So what about photos? I’ve asked all my clients and everyone of them said they’re more important that ever! And, I admit– photos are still king of the real-estate marketing material. Why? Here’s my guess: there’s something special about a nice photo. Unlike new technologies that are no doubt useful and cool, photos evoke something in the soul. They make it more likely for a buyer to fall in love, to feel something and want it.
