COVID19 is an opportunity

The COVID19 pandemic has created global panic and we are definitely entering a sharp recession.

If you’re a real estate professional, you can choose to freeze in fear and take shelter. Alternatively, you can choose to seize the opportunity to innovate and create a foundation to thrive after the pandemic ends. 

Every crisis creates chaos and a change in the natural order. When this status quo is disrupted, the traditional way of doing things by the established powers crumbles. From this point, opportunities emerge to launch new initiatives, gain market share, and build products and services around new consumer behaviors.

It’s difficult to have a growth mindset when entire nations have quarantined themselves from the virus. However, some companies are experiencing unprecedented growth due to the current climate. There has been a massive shift to remote work, which has benefited companies working in that space. While traditional remote conferencing may work fine for a technology company, it’s essentially useless for real estate. 

The real estate industry is a marketplace of physical spaces in the real world. Moreover, since properties have huge selling prices, it requires people to physically inspect these spaces - both for due diligence as well as the emotional burden of making such a huge investment. Thus, the anxiety and fear gripping the real estate industry makes sense. How are we supposed to sell properties when people can’t visit the properties? 

Virtual Reality to the rescue! 

A quarantined home buyer is still capable of visiting any place on earth through VR, as long as that place has been recorded in virtual reality (VR) and then uploaded to YouTube as a 360 video. 

The Condo Weekly team has been creating “VR open houses” already. Check out the 360 video tours embedded below. 

If you have a Google Cardboard, you can view these tours in VR. You should first open the YouTube video on your smartphone’s YouTube app, then press the VR headset button at the bottom right corner on the screen, visualized below:

If you don’t have a Google Cardboard VR headset, you can still enjoy the 360 experience. If you’re using YouTube on your smartphone, you can just move your phone around to view the 360 experience. If you’re on a computer, you can use your cursor to scroll/drag and see different parts of the room. 

By recording 360 VR house tours, we’ve enabled buyers to visit our open house 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from anywhere in the world. Prior to COVID, this was already valuable for several reasons. 

First, a VR open house opens your pool of potential buyers to a global audience, instead of just the audience of people who can physically commute to the property. Second, for every open house, there is a population of people who might have been interested, but had scheduling conflicts or were just too lazy to show up. Since VR open houses enable people to attend the tour from a time and place of their choosing, you’ll capture many of those leads that you previously lost. 

Finally, once the VR open house is created and uploaded online, you’ve done the work for the open house once - but that open house exists online forever for anyone to view. In this way, it’s like you’ve created a clone of yourself and the property that can do on-demand open houses for anyone in the world, without having to waste any extra time and energy. 

Seize your opportunity while you can

All of these aspects of VR open houses were valuable BEFORE the global pandemic. However, now that we’re all being quarantined, it’s basically impossible to do real, live, traditional open houses. This means that VR open houses aren’t just valuable, but that they are literally your only option right now. This is also true for buyers, who can’t visit properties - even if they wanted to. 

Thus, if you’re a realtor, you currently have two options. On one hand, you can freeze up in fear, do nothing, and let your personal brand, hard work, and relationships slowly wither away into nothing. Alternatively, you can seize a new opportunity with an innovative new technology, and gain market share while everyone else is panicking.

COVID19 presents a unique opportunity at the intersection of real estate and VR, not just because realtors can easily create VR open houses, but because the whole world is quarantined in their homes, bored out of their minds, with lots of free time to try new things - as long as those things are done at home. 

Thus, since buyers are all quarantined at home, many of them will be open to trying VR headsets like the Google Cardboard, Oculus Go, and Oculus Quest. Of these headsets, the Google Cardboard is by far the cheapest and starts at $12. The cardboard is more than sufficient as a tool to view VR open houses, and it’s what we suggest that agencies recommend to their buyers.

In fact, given the unique situation, we recommend that agencies actually invest in buying bulk orders of Google Cardboards to distribute to their buyer lists. This way, when you create VR videos, you have a guaranteed captive audience that will be able to immediately view your open house. 

If you decide to purchase cardboards in bulk, you should disinfect them thoroughly before delivering them to your clients - and also recommend that they disinfect them again on their own. 

The future of VR and real estate

VR open houses will become a way for innovative realtor teams to break forward and grab market share from incumbents who are too slow, or scared, to adapt to the new reality. Once the pandemic has subsided, new VR behaviors will become increasingly mainstream in the real estate industry. Some of the more tech-savvy players in the industry (Side, Redfin, Zillow) will probably adapt to the new reality. Other players who claim to be high-tech, but are not, will lose their compass, become directionless, and end up sacrificing market share. 

We believe that the pandemic will permanently change behaviors across the entire real estate industry. Since the entire spectrum of work has to be done remotely, real estate teams that adopt VR now will gain market share of buyers and sellers - both in their home cities as well as nationally and globally. Real estate teams that don’t shrink in fear, but use this time to engage with their client bases in innovative ways, will stamp their mark on the industry. In contrast, teams that just take shelter from the storm will lose brand integrity with their audience. 

Ultimately, there has never been a better time to experiment with new ideas and position yourself for long term success. The world is in a chaotic place. Are you going to use this time to seize new opportunities? 

We certainly are. And we’d like you to come along for the ride. 

Creating VR open house tours

If you’re interested in creating VR open house tours, get in touch with us in the email form below. We’re experienced videographers, realtors, and VR professionals who have done open house tours for San Francisco’s most prestigious buildings, such as the Four Seasons Residences. 

We are essentially a one-stop-shop that can provide services from start to finish:

1. Storyboard the VR video tour

2. Shoot the 360 open house tour with our VR equipment

3. Professionally edit the VR video so that buyers have a great viewing experience

4. Upload the video for you and help you teach your audience how to take the VR tour

Reach out to the Condo Weekly team and we’ll help you get a competitive edge in this unique time in history. In doing so, you’ll give yourself a strong chance of not just surviving the crisis, but thriving. After all, it’s in times of crisis that winners are born. This was true of Microsoft, Airbnb, Uber, Slack, and Pinterest: which were all started during recessions. 

A storm is brewing. We’d like to extend a hand and have you climb aboard our ship, and navigate this pandemic to seize opportunities together. Let’s take bold action and come out of this crisis stronger, smarter, and more resilient than we ever thought possible.