How to organize a virtual open house
It's been an eventful couple of weeks and now many of us are facing a new reality, where we need to limit the person to person interactions and cancel larger gatherings. Suddenly, an open house, which is a cornerstone of real-estate business, can be much harder to organize. Thankfully, there are online tools available that can help you show the property without requiring your prospective clients to leave their houses.
In the coming weeks, amid worries about coronavirus outbreak and all the security measures put in place, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that attendance at open houses to drop significantly.
In the long term as well, a lot of potential customers might prefer to see a property first online, before deciding to show up for a visit in person. The technology to effectively present real estate properties on the web already exists and this just might be a great time to explore it and make it part of your sales process.
Video tours are uniquely suited to showcase a piece or commercial or residential real estate. They allow the viewer to get a great sense of the space and layout of the property while virtually walking around it.
The Virtual Open House experience
The idea of a Virtual Open House experience is to combine an interactive tour like the one above with video conferencing and screen sharing software. This way you offer your clients a live, guided tour of the property. It's all virtual and online, but with your personal touch!
It all starts with a virtual tour - you'll need to shoot a walkthrough video of the property or hire someone to do it for you. Once you have a video walkthrough tour of your property ready, what you need to do is organize a video conference, open the video walkthrough tour and share your screen with the audience. Fortunately, there is a lot of free and paid software out there that will make this easy! We recommend Zoom which is Free, got to love free.
Zoom is our recommended solution. It's a popular video conferencing platform that allows to easily schedule meetings and share a meeting link with all your clients either via email or text message.
Once you start a meeting, it is also very easy to choose which window on your computer to share with all the participants. Just click on the green button in the middle of the toolbar:
Although Zoom has both free and paid options, the free one will be good enough for most cases. The free version is limited to 100 attendants and 40 minutes. As the host of the meeting, we recommend you to use a PC/MAC or laptop with a big screen. However, your prospective clients can use the Zoom mobile app to dial-in.
Bonus pro tip
Regardless of which one you choose, always make sure to thoroughly test your webcam, loudspeakers, and microphone before organizing an online meeting!
Failure to hear what others say or be heard during those meetings in not unusual and can add unnecessary stress to the whole process.
Conclusion
Showing a video guided tour of the property to your audience during an online conference call, not only gives them a great feel of what the property looks like but also allows for realtime interactions. You can guide them around the place, showcasing its best aspects, while the public can ask questions.