Right now, the whole world is looking at Australia, we are a safe place to live. People from London, Beijing, Los Angeles are all looking to buy real estate here digitally. They can’t travel here in person, but they want in.
These buyers, and really all buyers today, expect to be able to inspect digitally, transact digitally and buy a house digitally. They don’t want to waste time going round to a bunch of viewings on the weekend, they want to walk into a property and confirm it is everything they saw online. To be in the game and to win business, therefore, you have to be on top of the digital sale by providing an enhanced and engaging digital experience.
When you pitch for business, you have to go beyond offering the standard photos and floor plans (that said, some don’t even have floor plans!). You have to provide interactive, immediate digital inspection tools to allow the consumer to have a full inspection experience. The more you digitally showcase the features of a home, with high-end content, and engage a buyer online, the more qualified the buyer becomes. They stick and your property becomes top of mind, with really engaged buyers spending an average of 8 minutes on listings featuring all of these digital tools.
With a fully interactive digital inspection, buyers can walk around, imagine potential renovations and even start to mentally move into the home before stepping through the door. These tools allow buyers to furnish the home, add or remove walls, paint the kitchen benchtop, walk from room to room and really plan the layout of how it would fit their lifestyle. Buyers think I can go for a bigger property now that I’m working from home. I can build my meeting room if I add a wall there. If I paint the walls this colour the kitchen will look much brighter. I should share this virtual tour with my mum interstate who is helping with the house deposit.
The tools create well-informed buyers and well-informed buyers are easy to negotiate with. A well-informed buyer leads to an offer. Thus, these marketing tools work together to navigate the buyer journey further down the path to purchase and influence buyer behaviour.
Diakrit creates these marketing tools to provide highly emotionally engaging and effective customer experiences. You can use a portal such as realestate.com.au to access their brilliant digital tools or even have them embedded on your own website. “Once a buyer goes into the listing page on realestate.com.au, and views the photos and the 2D and 3D floor, they then walk around the home in the virtual tour to get an immersive experience moving between the rooms. Then they move onto the Photo Styling tool. Here they can customise different colours and textures of the kitchen, facade, living room and bathroom. We are seeing buyers spend on average over two minutes on the Photo Styling tool. Once they've seen the potential in the listing, the more qualified buyers then move on to the Furnish tool. Here, we've seen buyers spend over three minutes mentally moving into the property. The final confirmation is jumping back into that virtual tour, having that walk through the property and also sharing that tour with family and friends.” says Nicole Johnson, Diakrit Marketing Specialist – ANZ.
Buyers, therefore, become emotionally engaged in a property. This, in turn, decreases the days a property is on the market and increases the end selling price because emotionally committed buyers create stronger competition. For the owner, there is a greater return on their investment because they are not competing against standard listings with only photos and floor plans, their marketing is working for them. It is an engagement strategy to attract the best buyer and achieve the best price. For the agent, this is your silent partner that talks to the buyers 24/7.
Outstanding digital tools include:
1. Magazine quality photos
Brilliant photos are needed to capture the attention of buyers scrolling through. Nicole explains, “We take three different exposure shots of the room. Then through the editing phase, we combine the best elements of each exposure to create these clean, crisp, high definition, magazine quality photos. Then we have the Panorama virtual tour which sits at the end of the photo carousel before you jump into the floor plans. It is a completely immersive 360-degree experience for the buyer where they can look up and down, left and right, and use the hotspots to move through the different rooms of the house.”
2. The Explore More button
Inside the Panorama 3D virtual tour link, there is an Explore More button where buyers can move between the different tools in the one experience. “This button brings up the Photo styling and the Furnish tools. With Photo styling, we can use a photo of the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom, or the facade, and buyers can change the colours and textures of different elements in the room. For example, if I wasn't a big fan of the wooden cupboards, I could change them to black, and then see what that would look like in an actual listing. Buyers can visualise what the kitchen could be like with say a lick of paint over the cupboards or a different benchtop, or maybe a different paint on the wall around the kitchen.” Nicole says. This is a way of helping buyers see the potential in any listing and not be put off by small details that are easy to change.
3. The Furnish tool
This is another popular and engaging tool where buyers can plan their perfect living space before physically stepping through the door. Nicole goes on to say “Furnish is an interactive version of the 2D floor plan of the property. And similar to Sims, you can add furniture into the property and you can also add and remove walls. Say if it was a three-bedroom house and you wanted to add an extra bedroom, you could add an extra wall to see where that would fit in the property. It helps buyers to visualise the different spaces in the house.”
Digital inspections facilitate more time and more interaction - get to it. In the listing conversation, you must convey one powerful message: I am a standout agent. I can execute and produce a digital sale to make your home stand out from the crowd. I understand the worth of digital engagement and I am a professional using professional marketing tools. I am a digital agent in the digital time.
For more information on these tools visit www.Diakrit.com