Leading real estate writer, commentator and coach Professor Bernice Ross reveals how the latest hi-tech tools are changing the way properties are marketed and sold, and explains why 3D will be one of the major developments of the future

‘At the moment there are 2m Realtor licensees in the US and 1.2m members of the National Association of Realtors (NAR). As an emeritus professor of psychology, one of my roles is to teach the companies that I work for how to perform better. I think that technology now plays a crucial role in that. Technology gives people a competitive edge, it allows them to simplify their business and not spend as much money on marketing. It also lets them know how best to serve their customers.

‘One of the things that those who are going to survive the recession have to understand is that the real estate market is now global. So the issue that they face is how do they reach that international buyer? It is not enough anymore to just go out and look at homes. The other challenge the real estate market faces is that, because of the buoyant market we have enjoyed for so long, there is a whole generation of people who are without negotiating skills and that we are now in a period when it is extremely difficult to get financing.’

Know your technology
‘What I am finding is that the people who are succeeding at the moment are those who have the wisdom to address those issues and they are doing that with a mix of technology and street knowledge. They are turning to technology because now 90 per cent of buyers are going online as part of their search.

‘But many of the people I talk to still do not know what is generating their online sales. Sites are getting a lot of hits, but the Realtors don’t know why. They don’t track leads and they don’t know what is governing their conversion ratios. They do not know what is generating their qualified leads: they think that technology is a substitute for connection.

‘Research recently carried out by the NAR has found out that 98-99 per cent of those people who view a property online will drive by and see it. The chief areas of technology that people should be concentrating on are Customer Relationship Management systems and a marketing set-up that allows them to carry out all of their marketing from just one place. With a one-stop marketing shop they should be able to carry out just one upload that places their listing on many sites and they should be able to do the same with their videos, etc: www.tubemogul.com is a good example of that.

‘It is something that the President of Nokia has referred to as “iPodification”. All of your services should be delivered to one point. Because of that there should be two variants of a real estate website – a full-blown version and a dot-mobi version which carries short, one-line descriptions for mobile.’

Sense of community
‘Mapping is one of those components that has been around for a long time and is now expected. One of the very interesting developments is www.rottenneighbor.com which lists bad neighbours, sex offenders and foreclosures. This is a development that I think is going to really pick up pace because at the moment anything that is pushing from the bottom up is gaining momentum.

‘So, what we are going to see is the growth of community information. That information will come from co-creation by users, word of mouth, the picnic and cocktail party circuit and from people who share common interests. Real estate agents are going to start drawing on that. The real estate companies that exploit this trend will be successful because they will become the “manager” of my zip code; they will become experts for that area and its lifestyle.

‘Two good examples of this are www.kevintomlinson.com and www.goarmyhomes.com – both are sites that are about “me and my lifestyle”. What these sites will start to do is become the basis for a search: people will be looking for people who have a similar lifestyle.

‘There are sites that are being put together now that are looking for people who are 35-50 and who either work on Wall Street or are involved in the media, film, TV and art. The idea is that they will form a community online and that they will also want to live near each other. It’s “where I’m doing business” and “what is my lifestyle”.

‘Into that you will get local information being factored in, so you will get the local restaurant owner and other people who have local businesses putting in information, and people buying a property will want to know all about that. People will be using Twitter and they will be blogging. In fact, I can see a growing market for journalists, because people will have to able to present this information in a professional way.’

3D – techno-tool of the future
‘I am making a presentation to the NAR, and one of the things that I have in it is that real estate goes 3D – I see that as a big trend. I also think that there will be an increased use of future creatures that will be able to walk around in those 3D models and give you a picture from wherever you are standing. I think 3D will expand into that community world.

‘The essential information that has to be on a website is listings, prices and community information – we are going to work towards what is being called “MLS 5.0”, which includes the traditional information, videos, interactive 3D and the community side.

‘One of the most interesting speakers at the last Inman conference was a man called Baynerchuk who was a wine merchant. He wanted to do a wine promotion over the holiday period and used radio and billboard advertising and Twitter. Both of the conventional methods generated 150 sales, while Twitter accounted for 1,700 because he made himself available as part of the local community and advised people on wine.

‘3D will have the same sort of role to play in providing local and specific information: it will also give people a competitive edge. I am involved in a real estate business in Beverly Hills, and if I were wanting to advertise a $3-5m listing, then I would do it in 3D – because that is what would give me the competitive edge.’

Blog: Mark Foreman

‘Virtual tours are great, but what if you don’t like the color of the living room?’

The constantly evolving technologies that help
us market and sell real estate all started with Gutenberg’s printing press in or around 1450. Fast forward to 2009. Fax machines, cell phones, digital cameras and the internet have created marketing tools unimagined 30 years ago – so what will the future of real estate marketing and sales look like?

No one really knows, but sci-fi author and techno-visionary William Gibson once said, ‘The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.’ Some innovative companies are already showing a glimpse of how agents will market their listings in the not-too-distant future: 3D technology is at the center of this movement.

Potential buyers already have the ability access property data, photos, flat floor plans, photo tours and virtual tours online, before they venture out to physically tour the homes. In the very near future, agents will be able to walk buyers through their listings virtually. If they don’t like the wall colors or floor style, they will change them with the click of a mouse. Want to see what the rooms look like with furniture? Simply arrange and rearrange with your index finger. Just about any item in the home will be viewable in a different style or color.

As a Realtor for over 21 years, I have worked with a lot of buyers who look at a lot of houses that they never buy. Some just like to look. And I can’t tell you how many times I have heard, ‘My furniture will never fit in this space.’ Having my buyers ‘fit’ their furniture in the rooms before they go out and look at the homes would make a tremendous time saving. They would only then look at homes about which they already have a sense of the interior size and layout. Most of my clients end up spending a lot of time envisioning how the walls will look in a certain color, or asking, ‘What if I changed the floors to hardwood from carpet?’

Many Realtors already use floor plans as part of their marketing package, which add depth to the information a potential buyer uses in making a decision whether or not to go see a home. Virtual tours are great, but what if you don’t like the color of the living room? How can you tell if a King-sized bed will fit in the master bedroom? A two-dimensional static floor plan lets you see the room layout, but it won’t allow you to place furniture in the rooms or play with different wall colors.

A new program, being developed by the Denmark-based United Lane Corporation, will soon allow home shoppers and commercial tenants to make and see these changes online. United Lane’s software takes that 2D floor plan and converts it to an interactive virtual 3D model that then becomes an open house – 24 hours per day. No more Sunday open houses; no more asking the sellers to leave for the afternoon; no more baking gingerbread cookies to make the house smell ‘homey’. Any buyer can look at and ‘walk through’ the listing anytime, from anywhere in the world. That’s powerful marketing.

It’s rare when a product/concept so unique and intuitive first comes to the market and almost everyone can immediately see how this could change the face of several industries. The early version of the program is impressive to say the least, but high-definition, video-quality 3D walkthroughs are already in the development stages. And purchasing consumer products through this venue might be as easy as clicking the Dell laptop on the desk in the den and inputting your credit card info.

It won’t be too long before every single piece of commercial and residential property in the world will have an interactive 3D rendering of the layout available to the owner, or made accessible to the public if the home is for sale. Planting a virtual ‘For Sale’ sign in front of these homes and buildings will let the world know that this property is on the market. Potential buyers will be able to ‘cyberwalk’ down United Lane, popping into the properties they are interested in seeing. Agents will benefit by taking buyers only to homes that they have a high level of interest in. The possibilities can only be imagined…

3D technology is being hailed by experts as one of the possible answers to the credit crunch, as web designers look for that extra wow factor to give their sites the edge in the economic downturn

Having already been the victim of one false dawn eight years ago, 3D technology is beginning to emerge from the shadows as one of the most exciting developments on the internet.

‘The trend is very clear,’ says Karthik Ramani, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Indiana’s Purdue University and an authority on 3D technology.

‘The real world is 3D and, as humans, we want things to behave in the way that they do in the real world, so going to 3D is very natural. It is the next evolution of the web.’

Techno race
The claims have not gone unnoticed by internet companies like Google and Microsoft, which have developed Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth in what appears to be a race to capture the world in 3D on the web. These developments are now exciting traditional industries such as property sales and furniture design, and are spawning a whole new virtual world industry, far removed from current technologies like Second Life.

‘The rate of development of these technologies is already having an impact on the US real estate market,’ says Doug Garcia, the director of research for Colliers Parrish, a large real estate group based in the San Francisco area.

‘We’ve explored using 3D modeling on the market and are working towards a future where actual 3D tours will allow you to go to different floors of a building and look around the location using Google Earth.

‘Increasingly we think that people will want to use 3D to assess the value of a property remotely, and the challenge there will be in the refresh of the 3D worlds that will evolve, though I could see that happening with social networking for an area where people will work to contribute information.’

Superior interiors
And while companies like Google focus on the outside, other companies are now working hard to create interiors that show off properties and products. Here at United Lane, we want to form a closer association between 3D virtual environments and the real world.

‘Our aim is to make 3D technology available to anyone using the web,’ says Chief Technology Officer, Kresten Thomsen. ‘So, what we do is let people upload plans of their own houses from a 2D floor plan and populate it with real furniture and objects, change floors and wall colors and then render the whole thing in a photorealistic fashion, because people find that more compelling and attractive.

‘In our visualizations, we can even add the view from a window; that is how I see the internet going – it will be a believable mirror of the real world.’

Virtual world
While United Lane can make photorealistic images of buildings that do not yet exist in a remarkably short space of time, Vzillion, wants to go further. In line with the old vision of the internet bubble at the turn of the century, when developers promised a photorealistic world inhabited by lifelike avatars of real people, Vzillion envisages 3D with everything.

‘We think in 3D and we feel things in 3D. If you look at a virtual world you see an environment you are engaged with,’ says Antonio Collier, the company’s CEO.

Its offering for the future is a 3D virtual world where you are given the keys to a virtual flat that can be populated with the objects that you use in your everyday life. Objects which, according to Collier, will work in much the same way that they would if they were in your real room.
‘You will be able to go to Amazon and point and click and play a music movie on the TV in your virtual apartment,’ he says. Potentially, it’s a move to mesh the real world with Second Life – that might have implications for both.

3D thinking
Professor Ramani, whose resume also includes work at the prestigious Stanford Research Institute in California, says that the key factor in the use of virtual environments for people is the amount of data that a 3D world can convey.

‘I have worked with cognitive psychologists and we have looked at the way that people like to navigate 3D content. We gave them the ability to take snapshots from within the visualization and found that people always choose positions that allow them to convey the maximum amount of visual content.

‘Of course, there has to be some value for the 3D visualization to be useful, and we found that people considered the 3D interface much more intuitive than a 2D one.’

Part of the reason for this, according to a recent study carried out by scientists, is because our brains find 3D environments more reassuring. Their research suggests that the part of the brain governing vision is able to map out a copy of a 3D image by projecting it onto responsive neurons that can create a 3D model of an object.

‘Human beings are keenly aware of object structure, and that may be due to this clear structural representation in the brain,’ Charles E. Connor, associate professor in the Zanvyl Krieger Mind-Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, told Science Daily in October of this year.

In the study, Connor and colleague Yukako Yamane, a postdoctoral fellow, trained two monkeys to watch a computer screen while 3D objects were played upon it, while the researchers recorded the responses of neurons in the higher-level part of the visual area.

According to Connor, the research may ultimately reveal the reasons why our brains find some objects and views visually pleasing, yet dismiss others. The suggestion is that there may be an element of ‘pleasing comfort’ created in the brain among groups of neurons when they display an object.

Blog: Kresten Thomsen

‘What you don’t see is all the 3D that looks like real photographs.’

When the word ‘3D’ appears in the headlines it is, almost    invariably, supported by crappy images that look like crappy imitations of real life. We have all seen these lame ducks, either in the news or in computer games.

But what if you could take photographic images without the use of a photographer – or even a product? What if you could use 3D technology to produce high-end pictures of homes, furniture or materials without having to produce each product or material? Imagine eliminating the use of prototypes because you can see the end product in real life as you design it (it would certainly reduce the greenhouse effect), and then use the same technology to test user-friendliness, determine inventory and stock, and minimize losses with products that your focus group doesn’t approve of anyway.

The idea of taking a proposed product, testing it against the market, redesigning according to calculated focus group demands, and producing marketing material without an actual production run makes incredible sense – not only from a green tech point of view, but also in terms of hard cash. To reduce the cost of photography by 50 per cent is, in itself, highly relevant; but also to adjust your inventory according to demand is almost invaluable for anyone in the manufacturing business.

And then when you saw the word ‘3D’ again, you would still see all those crappy images. But what you don’t see is all the 3D that looks like real photographs – because you just don’t notice them. That’s when 3D technology becomes relevant from a user’s perspective, a designer’s perspective, and from the finance director’s perspective.

3D photorealism isn’t about making things look like real life; 3D photorealism is about making 3D a part of everyday life without anyone noticing. That’s when you’re really talking photorealism – when it isn’t a ‘Second Life’, but already part of your real life…