Real Estate Tour

[jmcilvaine]

I have been playing around with trying to build a Real Estate tour using Pano2VR for some time now. With a bit of inspiration from Stu at 360imagery and of course all of Hopki's informative posts I finally think I am on the right track. It took me a while to grasp the Skin Editor (like 2 years....lol) but I am finally starting to understand how this all works. I still have a way to go but this is what I came up with (It's a work in progress):

http://www.inmotionrems.com/tour_demos/output/

I still have a few things I want to do, like have a larger thumbnail appear when I hover over the smaller ones and add some pop-out or slide out (a la Stu's tours) navigation for the panoramas. I also like Stu's "hovering" arrows for navigation. Anyway, now that I kind of know what I am doing I should have the "desktop" version of the skin done soon, then I can work on a "mobile" version.

FYI...I managed to even throw in a pinned video in the Family Room pano...

Joe

[Hopki]

Hi Joe,
This is very good work, it brings in lots of different features of the skin editor in one presentation.
There were one or two things that could do with tiding up, for example it would be nice to see a custom hotspot graphic rather then the red dot. Also I noticed that when you scrolled the thumbnails the last two did not have the larger popup image.

Also see if you can find a way that when you click between say the video and map that the map button would close the video.
This is being real picky but I think for such a project it is well worth the extra effort.
Regards,
Hopki

[jmcilvaine]

Thanks Hopki, if it was not for all your contributions I would not have even known where to start...

This is a demo I am working on so there are some things that still need to be completed. I agree about the hot spots. My idea is to use "camera" or "movie camera" icons for the hotspots on the floorpan and "hovering arrows" similar to what Stu uses with his tours on the panoramas.

Over the weekend I finally learned (for the most part) how to use the place holders and hotspot proxies. I'm also going to use the "previous/next" trick I came across reading the forums. I'm going to tinker with this for a couple weeks and get it nice and polished before I use it live. Here it is on a website:

http://idxsandbox.inmotionrems.com/vt.php

Then I have to work out the workflow. I'll need a couple droplets to create the different panos and thumbnails but I think once I have this down I should be able to build a tour fairly quickly (I will be upgrading to Pro soon as well which will speed up creating the navigation quite a bit). Speed really is key for me to be competitive price wise with other tour providers here in South Florida.

Also still kicking around the best way to handle still images. I like the flat panorama method since it works nice when using Full Screen (the photos scale with the screen). But I am not too keen on the way they load and if I set the tour to dip to black between nodes (which I want to use) the transitions look horrible on the flat panoramas. I have an idea I am going to try out using regular jpgs.

I really appreciate your input. Having you tell me this is very good work is like Eddie Van Halen telling me he liked my guitar solo... Thanks!

Joe

[Hopki]

Hi Joe,
For the Flash output here's a nice little trick when using arrow hotspots.
See attached project, sadly does not work in HTML5 as yet.
Regards,
Hopki

[jmcilvaine]

That is cool! The lack of HTML 5 support is not a big issue for me right now. I'll be handling HTML5 a bit differently than the Flash version.

[Rajah]

Very, very nice!

When it is finished, is it for sale? I am really interested!

Frans

[Rajah]

Try it once again!

Frans

[jmcilvaine]

Frans,

I kind of gave up on the project. The skin is very inefficient as far as building a tour. I can build a tour using the cloud based service 10X faster and it handles stills and video much better than P2VR. For me, time is the most important factor. In my location (South Florida, USA), real estate tours is a very competitive market and I cant afford to spend much time putting a tour together. For example, I built this tour last week. It has 11 panos, about 30 stills and 2 floor plans. It took me 25 minutes (not including stitching the panos and retouching the photos)

http://www.tourbuzz.net/public/vtour/display/146037?a=1

All I basically have to do is upload the photos and panos, name them and arrange them in the order I want them, it's all "drag and drop", the system does the rest. It generates a branded and unbranded version (to be MLS compliant) and even sends out weekly traffic stats to my clients. My client can also log in to order and pay for the tours, download MLS and print quality images and even re-arrage the images and panos if they want. All for $12.00 per tour. For an extra $3.00 it will even convert the tour into a youtube video and post it to my clients youtube account automatically. I don't have to do a thing. It even serves a "mobile" version using device detection.

Realtors only care about 2 things, cost and time. They want their tours for $100-$150 and they want them online the next day. I've seen $10,000,000 homes using photos taken with an iPhone. Maybe in Europe tours can command a higher price tag, but here in South Florida, tour companies offer 50 stills and up to 10 panoramas for $150.00 and that's what I have to compete with.

Here is what my competition offers for under $130.00:

http://homesite.obeo.com/Viewer/Default ... l=obeo.com

As much as I would like to offer something unique, it just seems like its not worth the effort.

Joe

[Rajah]

Joe,

Thank you very much for your time and this amazing "cloud development"
You could imagine that I am very happy with this information, as I look for new outstanding products for my real estate customer.

Wish you a lot of succes!

Frans

[jmcilvaine]

Your welcome Frans,

I still would like to come up with something using P2VR for clients that want something thats unique and will set them apart from other agents. What I offer now is OK, but it's basically what everyone else offers. I'm one of the few down here that does video/panos/tours/stills, plus I do custom IDX websites, postcards, brochures, and search engine marketing. My plan when I began this was to be a "one stop shop" for real estate marketing. If you want to get some ideas for yourself, heres is a link to some of my tours. Some combine stills, panos, video, and floor plans:

http://vtours.inmotionrems.com/public/tour/search

I think P2VR blows away the cloud based service as for as panoramic tours and what can be done, but for "cookie cutter" real estate tours, which is 90% of the business here, the cloud based service is better suited for that.

I've been working on an idea of what I want to do with P2VR to create a really unique tour. Then it will just be a matter of salesmanship on my end to convince agents to pay more and get less "bells and whistles" but they will get a higher quality tour.

I'd rather do 10 tours for $300 than 30 tours for $100. It's just finding those agents willing to pay a premium for something unique that will be the challenge.

Good luck!

Joe

[Rajah]

Thanks Joe for all that information. I appriciate that. Keep me informed, if you wish and if you have time.
One question about the vtours.inmtionrems.com , the pano's are under a header "Schools". I understand the word "school" as in a building where you learning something.Does that have a meaning too in relation with panorama's?

Only some pano's work (because of the U.S. 'shutdown') and I don't see zenith's and nadirs.
A spherical pano is not possible?

Frans

[jmcilvaine]

Hi Frans,

Yes tourbuzz supports full spherical panos. As far as the Schools links, when the US is not in turmoil that links to a gov't website that lists all schools in the area, from there the user can learn more about local schools (for some homebuyers that is important info), it has nothing to do with the tour itself.

I don't do full sphere panos. (I'd like to eventually) I use a 10-22 lens (at 10mm) and I take 12 shots with the camera level or pointed slightly down, this usually gets enough ceiling and floor detail. I'll be the first to admit I have a lot to learn as far as shooting panos goes. It's difficult for me to get good interior and window exposure. It's easy with still but a challenge with panos. I've tried many combinations and cant seem to be able to get as good results as I'd like. I'm sure it can be done, I've seen amazing photography work here, I just have not figured it out myself yet.