New Virtual Tours on Homes.com

Real estate has always been a very face-to-face industry. However, right now the necessity of physical distancing makes taking a "business as usual" approach with your clients impractical and perhaps even unsafe. That's not to say you should let months or years of hard work building business momentum go to waste. Now is the time to shift and find new ways to move your business forward and connect with clients from afar. To help make this shift easier, Homes.com has added more "virtual" options and opportunities for buyers and sellers to connect with local real estate agents.

Homes.com currently hosts over 600,000 listings with virtual tours, and now we've made finding these homes even easier by adding a toggle that allows home searchers to sort listings that have virtual tours first. Virtual tours are also more visible in their new location as the first image on each listing.

Adding Virtual Tours

If one of our 600+ MLS partners, national franchise networks, or top virtual tour providers is not sending your virtual tours to Homes.com, you can now add a virtual tour through your Homes.com Connect dashboard. To learn more about adding virtual tours, click here.

Adding a virtual tour can be as easy as selecting a video hosted on YouTube, Google Drive, or a link from a virtual tour company.

Request a Video Tour

We've also added a new "Request a Video Tour" button to all listings to help consumers connect with agents to safely view homes they're interested in. Buyers are loving this new call-to-action option, which has resulted in a 500% increase in engagement.

Video tours don't have to be complicated. It can be as simple as a one-on-one Facetime video (iOS) where you walk a buyer through a property and pause to answer questions, or even a pre-recorded video tour that walks viewers through your listing. Other one-to-one video apps you could use are Skype, Google Duo, or WhatsApp.

Virtual Open Houses

Supplement your open house strategy safely with virtual open houses. In partnership with over 100 MLSs, "Virtual Open Houses" now auto feed directly to Homes.com or you can manually add them to your listings via the Homes.com dashboard. To learn more about adding virtual open houses, click here.

When creating a virtual open house, keep in mind that they must have a scheduled start and end time. Make sure to open at least 1 minute before the posted time and start outside of the house with the door open. Include your phone number to make it easy for interested buyers to reach you before the open house. Some programs you can use to host a virtual open house include Zoom and Google Meet.

To learn how to get the most out of all the new virtual features and how you can leverage your Homes.com profile, sign up for the next educational webinar here.

To view the original post, visit the Homes.com blog.