WorldExecutivesDigest.com | Ultimate Guide to Virtual Open Houses | Running an open house is a huge part of marketing the properties you’re currently selling, but when there’s a pandemic going on and some parts of the country have travel restrictions, customers need alternatives to driving up and parking on the road next to the HomeSmart open house signs you’ve put out. That’s okay, though, because one of the online tools that has emerged for realtors over the last decade has just the solution. It’s time to learn how to throw a virtual open house!
Step One: Find the Right Software
Virtual open houses are run via software that allows prospective clients to move through an online recreation of a property, seeing it from a camera’s-eye point of view. It’s a few steps beyond listing a comprehensive picture gallery, and it typically requires the support of software that’s designed to help you map the space and then serve it to clients. Finding the software that works for you is a big part of that, but so is making sure your customers can find it. When you’re working on finding web and social media templates for realtors, make sure you find something that makes it easy for you to put a portal to virtual open house tours front and center, where customers can find it easily.
Step Two: Update Your Marketing Offline
You’re still going to want signage at the property for the same reasons you’d use it for a regular open house. Street traffic viewing the home for sale sign with updated online open house information will bring in more prospective customers, in addition to those who find the virtual open house tour online. If you’re not used to signage that includes a referral to an online tour, update your brochures with the information people need to find the online resources and then go looking for real estate for sale signs templates that support virtual open houses, so you can optimize all your resources.
Step Three: Make and Upload Your Virtual Tour
The last step is the simplest, and that’s using your new digital tools to make the actual tour your clients can take. Depending on your app of choice, there might be a lot of options for this, so it’s hard to give specific directions. Once you have the tour created and uploaded within the app, it’s a simple matter of bringing in clients and managing communications about property features. Just like the open houses you’re already used to conducting, right? The biggest difference is that when you’re following up on a virtual open house, you’re more likely to get requests for an individual tour in-person, because people don’t have a chance to see everything for themselves online. That means you’re likely to get follow-up appointments for individual viewings that let you take the most interested buyers back through with the social distancing and other precautions that make them confident about buying properties in today’s market.
Virtual tours and open houses are providing a much-needed solution to today’s issues with conducting business, but they aren’t just for managing things when you can’t host an in-person open house. Consider adding them to all your listings and offering them alongside traditional viewings to reach the widest customer base you can.
