In the one-two punch of distribution, Jutvision Corporation has secured strategic partnerships with three of
the largest listings sites on the Internet - Realtor.com, HomeSeekers, and,
just announced, Microsoft's HomeAdvisor. What does that mean to you, the agent? With the addition of HomeAdvisor, Jutvision can increase your choice of portals to reach the millions of Internet home buyers who come to the Internet to view listings.
Agents who have home pages on Realtor.com and HomeSeekers have already
bought "thousands" of the $99 virtual tours. These agents feel that virtual
tours make them more competitive in the Internet environment.
Debbie Burton, with Fred Sands
Platinum Realtors, believes that her listing at 48 Gauguin Aliso Viejo, opened
escrow because of the virtual tour.
"If it (the listing) had only had a still photo or no photo at all, the buyer
might have not seen the home," says Burton.
Typically, an agent will purchase a virtual tour for his/her home page, and
then pay an additional $20 to have the home marketed to each of the listing
portals of their choice. The virtual tour will appear alongside the listing on
each portal, and the consumer can click on a button and tour the home free of
charge.
With on-line customers in the millions per month for the listings portals,
agents are looking for ways to redirect attention from listings back onto the
services they can provide. One way to do that is an attention-getting virtual
home tour on their home page. The question after that is how to get
traffic to the home page. The listing portals solve that problem
handily.
Consumers view each home presented on Realtor.com as many as 130 times. Although the number of home views weren't available from HomeSeekers and
HomeAdvisor, the MSN portal stands to generate huge traffic numbers.
The advantage for agents is that they don't even have to own a computer to
have virtual tours attached to their listings. All they need to do is call the
toll-free number and give Jutvision the listing address. They dispatch a
videographer to film the house, usually in about 30 minutes. The video is
shipped back to a processing facililty where the film and data are processed to
create a virtual 360 degree tour. The final step is posting the tour on the
Internet at the agent's direction.
For those agents interested, Jutvision provides a turn-key service across the U.S. that includes image capturing, processing and posting on the site(s)
of the agent's choice. Call 1-877-JUT-TOUR for more information.
Published: March 31, 1999
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