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Creating Your First Virtual Tour
To produce your first virtual tour, there are many choices you will have to make about equipment, time, and investment amounts. At Halo Virtual Tours, we recommend you use the most widely accepted industry standard technology & equipment, Matterport. However, this comes with some drawbacks, most notably the cost. A professional quality virtual tour platform, subscription, & equipment purchase can quickly run over $5,000 within your first year & continue up over $19,000 if specialty Leica laser cameras are needed.
This estimate does not include any time cost for learning how to use the equipment and produce a tour. If you are looking to create virtual tours full time, it is well worth the investment. If you are a real estate professional looking to save money, it doesn’t make financial sense to make your own virtual tours in house. Most look to virtual tour providers to fulfill their needs.
But how do you select a provider that will give you the results you are looking for?
There are some questions you need to ask of any potential provider you are interviewing to create virtual tours on your behalf. Ultimately you will want to ensure that your provider is using professional level camera equipment, on widely accepted industry standard platform.
The easiest way to determine this is by looking for a professional who uses a Matterport Pro camera system. This is the ideal virtual tour creation tool for both photographers & clients. With it you can easily share your virtual tours on websites & many popular listing services.
The biggest benefits to using a Matterport Pro system include super high quality 134-Megapixel image quality (in comparison, your iPhone 12 only has a 12-megapixel camera). As a bonus, anything you see inside of your virtual tour can be turned into a 4k quality photograph.
Beyond the superior image quality, most real estate virtual tours will benefit from the ability to take extremely accurate measurements within the virtual tour environment. Using Matterport, any surface can be used to take 3D measurements accurate to within 1%. How much time & money would simple accurate measurements save your business? Does this feature alone offer you the ability to reduce your build out time?
I still want to produce my own virtual tours in house. How do I get started?
First you will need to sign up for a Matterport account & choose a camera & service plan. There are some budget camera options, but with these options you will no longer have bright clear image quality. You will also lose the ability to confidently measure within your virtual tour like you would with a Matterport Pro 2 camera. Lastly, you can’t create site plans with the budget cameras. At the time of this writing, your best overall camera option is the Matterport Pro 2. Unlike budget cameras, it offers access to all of the features and benefits that come with a subscription to the service.
Our final thoughts are simple. If you aren’t looking to produce virtual tours for your full time job, there is rarely a circumstance that it makes financial sense to purchase the camera and do it yourself. We at Halo Virtual Tours are available in almost every market or you can easily find pros in your area, and the costs can be more affordable than you thought. In most cases, the time saved from having a professional tour created will help pay for itself.
With most midsize property scans priced under $400, the time is now to consider adding a virtual tour to your real estate tool box.
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