3D Videos in Real Estate: Just Around The Corner

So, I was sitting in Staples Barber Shop last week, waiting to get a trim and a photo of Obi-Wan Kenobi on the front of USA Today caught my eye. (Disclaimer: I’m a bit of a Star Wars fan, but that’s besides the point).

Turns out the photo was a lead-in to an article on 3D video and how researchers at the University of Arizona have made a breakthrough with holographic technology.

Remember this classic scene from Star Wars?  Well, this may be reality sooner than you think.

Pretty cool, right?  You’ll be able to take a video and show it in 3D…like something out of Star Wars.  (And what’s best of all?  You won’t need to wear those corny 3D glasses to see it)

But this got us thinking: how cool will this be for real estate?  Answer: it could, once again, transform how buyers search for homes.

Here’s how we see it: You stroll into your local Nest Realty office in the morning with your cup of Starbucks to prepare for a few hours of house hunting.  But you’re not going to hop in the car and drive from house-to-house for the next 3 hours.  Instead, you go back into one of our three Search Rooms.  Each Search Room is dark – black walls, dimmed lights – and has 6 comfy chairs located around a Microsoft Surface-type touch screen table.

Your area tour begins.

Your Nest agent takes you on a quick tour of Charlottesville, Ivy, and Crozet…you watch a few quick neighborhood videos to get the feel of the area and overlay all of the coffee shops to make sure you are within a mile of one.  (Or we could even take you on a tour of Virginia Beach, but that’s a story for another day…)

Then you ‘arrive’ at your first house.  You tap the house twice and a holographic image of the listing agent pops up on the table, welcomes you to the house, and begins to tell you about the house and neighborhood: ‘Welcome to 123 Rugby Road.  This is a great house – built in 2007, this 4 bedroom home is just a 5 minute walk to UVa…’

After the intro, you are literally taken on a tour of the house – through the front door, into the kitchen and family room, upstairs through the master suite, into the garage, and through the back yard.

During your three hours of searching, you toured 20 homes and made follow up appointments to see 3 ‘in person’ the next day.  All in all, it was an efficient morning – you got to preview 20 homes (probably about 12 more than you would have if you had to actually drive to each house) and the sellers didn’t have to leave the house for you to see it.

The utilization of these 3D videos are pretty amazing and far-reaching.  According to the article, this could happen in 10 years…maybe sooner.  Until then, we’ll have to keep marketing and showing houses with the technology and resources at hand.  But you can bet that we’ll be tracking this technology over the coming years…

Want to learn a little more about technology in real estate?  Check out Jim Duncan’s RealCentralVA for his post and series on real estate technology.