3 Ways VR Changes Real Estate

VR is seeing rising adoption in various industries including real estate. In this article, we gathered three recent cases where implementing VR helped raise sales in companies working with the real estate sector. Each case will highlight a different way of implementing VR.

Case 1. Zillow - Buying a House Made Easier

House hunting is a time-consuming process which involves meeting up with a real estate agent, visiting multiple locations, etc. Everyone has to go through this process at least once in their lifetime, but not everyone can carve out the time for it. Fortunately, some companies came up with a solution for those in need of a house, but limited in time: online real estate platforms.

Zillow is one of the leaders in the online real estate business. They offer a website where a client can choose a house they like without leaving their home. However, the problem is that photos cannot reveal all the details about the house. And when making such a large purchase, clients want to be sure it will live up to their expectations.

That is why Zillow has recently adopted the 3D Home tool which allows
potential clients to walk around the house using VR technology. Now clients can get a much more realistic feel of the place they consider to make their home and see it as if they were physically there.

Case 2. iVariant – Renovating a House Made Easier

Everyone who has been through the process of home renovation knows that choosing the color of wall paint or wallpaper can be a real challenge. It often happens that the color looks great at the store but does not fit the interior or looks different at home because of lighting.

Victoria Stenova is a design studio that offers a wide range of unique design solutions for apartments. They acknowledge the need to show
their clients not just a sample of the wallpaper they offer, but what the
apartment fully decorated with it would look like. However, demonstrating
virtual designs in a real interior draws extra costs on rent and renovation.
That was the problem iVariant had to solve for their client, and create a
project that would allow to apply different wallpapers to virtual apartment
walls.

Using a VR headset the clients could walk around the apartment already decorated with the wallpaper they had chosen. The customers were provided with multiple locations to try their wallpaper on: a living room,
bedroom, children's room, etc. Cutting-edge technology allowed to reproduce the wallpaper textures and interior details with superior accuracy. As a result, there has been a 30% rise in sales.

Case 3. RoOomy - Furnishing a House Made Easier

New houses and apartments in the real estate sector are often sold without furniture. However, studies show that people get more attached to a place that is already furnished, as opposed to unfurnished houses. Furniture makes a house look and feel more cosy, and it is easier for clients to get emotionally attached to a place and visualize their future there.

Here comes the problem: how to sell empty houses so that people get as attached to them as to furnished ones? Obviously, adding furniture would be a costly solution. That is again the problem that virtual reality comes to solve. VR staging is a process of filling an empty house with furniture using VR technology. It allows using the exact area of the apartment/house on sale, but fill it with furniture, so that the client sees the finished version of it.

RoOomy is an example of a VR company that offers VR staging. Such service can be useful not only to real estate professionals, but also to furnishing retailers, as VR staging allows clients to visualise how the furniture they intend to buy would look in their house.

Overall, VR has revolutionized the real estate sector by offering innovative solutions for house hunting, furnishing and renovation processes. Using VR allows companies to increase sales as well as protects clients from mistakes when making an important purchase. There is little doubt that VR technologies have a great potential for further adoption in the real estate sector. Let’s see what the future brings.