Virtual reality the real thing for tech-savvy property sellers

Technology could boost immersion, independence for buyers

If technophile and real estate marketer Hari Minhas’ vision for the future of commercial property hunting is realized, then it will be only a matter of months until prospective buyers and tenants will be touring buildings and properties not in tow of a realtor, but solo, and in full-immersion virtual reality.

Minhas, the director of marketing and market intelligence for Colliers International in Vancouver, has been working for about a year with Vancouver digital effects company Vividus on technologies that he thinks will tear down space and time barriers, making property hunting more interactive and far more efficient for both sides of a property deal.

Together they have been using small drones to record aerial video tours, while also developing choose-your-own-path interactive video tours of buildings and property interiors. And Minhas and Vividus are well on the way to converting those tours into fully immersive virtual reality by pairing them with the Oculus Rift DK2 headset.

“Over the last six months we’ve been testing these out, and seeing what is actually practical and what’s still sort of a novelty,” Minhas said in an interview, stressing that realtors and tech start-ups in Canada have been relatively slow to capitalize on the benefits of teaming up.

Real estate offers a “huge opportunity for tech companies, but they haven’t paid as much attention as I think we would like to see in our field,” he said.

“The amount of money that venture capitalists have sunk into real estate tech start-ups in the U.S. has been huge,” Minhas said. “I think in this year alone it’s been over a billion dollars.”

Within the next few weeks, Colliers in Vancouver plans to unveil two aerial video tours for listings compiled by small sixor eight-blade drones equipped with high-definition cameras. One is for an industrial site in Delta, and the other for a former school property on Dollarton Highway.

Industrial sites and drone videos are a good match, he said. The sites are large and buyers are interested in aspects such as turning radius, access to highways and other transportation routes.

“We’re actually taking those drones inside the building and shooting inside as well,” he said. “Typically, 30 feet or higher clearance, and we get some interesting angles on what the space looks like inside.”

The drone videos provide footage that can be paired with computer-generated images to create virtual developments or ideas for finishing, he said. “With development sites, we want to showcase what is possible.”

For other asset classes, like office spaces, Minhas and the team at Vividus have been polishing interactive online video tours that can be controlled by the viewer. They’re expecting to have certain tours online by the end of the month.

Short video clips or slide shows of a space just don’t cut it anymore, he said. “Now you can control it yourself, and it’s not us trying to force you down a certain path.”

The next step is virtual reality. The Oculus Rift provides realistic 360-degree head tracking, allowing wearers to look around a lifelike virtual reality space. Minhas and Vividus have combined the Rift with their interactive tours to take clients inside a property.

“Here’s the actual space, take your time and you can walk through the entire layout yourself, and you can see how big the boardroom is, you can go around the corner to the left that you weren’t able to see before,” he said. “You can walk down the hallway, you can walk into the bathrooms, you can do all this stuff and really get a better understanding of the space.”

Minhas said the virtual reality tours are expected to be available to clients before the midpoint of this year after some bugs are worked out.

He added that there’s a perception that many realtors are “old school” when it comes to new technology, especially on the commercial side. “On the surface level, some people just think it’s demographics, some people think it’s comfort, or sort of the ‘if it ain’t broke, why fix it’ mentality.”

But Minhas said a lack of general buy-in probably has more to do with technology overload. “I think a lot of the lag in adoption is just noise. There’s a lot of technology that’s available right now, and our agents and our sales professionals are trying to figure out what’s relevant … because we don’t have time to learn it.”

Realtors who do take advantage of new interactive technologies will likely be spending less time arranging and hosting tours, Minhas adds.

“A lot of the work that our sales associates are doing is understanding the business challenges of our clients and then pairing them to the right real estate opportunity. I think technology will only allow us to focus on that a lot more, versus going out and doing 10 tours and not realizing that four of them didn’t make a difference, but we had to go show them because there was no other way to see it.”