One of the major problems that Homestore management has faced recently was how to restore its once promising virtual tour business and make it more attractive to Realtor customers. Withering under complaints that the virtual tours as provided through Homestore's iPIX real estate subsidiary (now known as HomeTour360) were too expensive and poorly serviced in many areas, current management has worked to come up with a plan it hopes will please customers and encourage new virtual tour sales.

The two-pronged plan includes making full-service tours easier to get serviced and posted to the Internet by setting up local photographers as resellers of HomeTour360, and by lowering linking costs to outside virtual tour vendors from $40 to $19.95.

Homestore is also sweetening the sale of virtual tour services by presenting them under its REALTOR.com® brand.

Using momentum from the National Association of Realtors mid-year conference, Realtor.com announced the launch of an enhanced version of HomeTour 360, which features "greater ease-of-use, new lead generation capabilities and wider, more efficient distribution through a nationwide network of local service providers."

“Not only have we added several features to HomeTour 360° designed to increase leads, but we are also delivering a service proposition that our customers told us they wanted: local relationships and less red tape,” said Steve Ozonian, REALTOR.com’s president.

To facilitate sales, Homestore has established a network of "authorized service providers," photographers who can deliver the full-service HomeTour 360° solution to agents and brokers in local markets, including Virtual Imaging Corporation (VIC), the established photographer network portion of iPIX when Homestore was licensing the technology from iPIX. Homestore will sell packages of tours to the resellers at a discount, and the reseller will resell them to local Realtors. Prices for the tours will be established locally.

Enhancements to HomeTour 360 include:

• Desktop Tour™ - Formerly offered as an upgrade, it is now included in all HomeTour 360º virtual tours and allows virtual tours to be saved to hard drives or floppy disks for offline purposes such as listing presentations.

• Find Out More™ - This lead generation and tracking feature when clicked by consumers launches an e-mail form directly to the listing agent.

• Send-to-a-Friend™ - This button enables potential homebuyers to e-mail the virtual tour to share with friends and family, increasing the property’s exposure and reach. Real estate professionals can use the feature to share tours with clients as well as other professionals.

• Homestore™ Distribution Network (HDN) - In addition to REALTOR.com agents will now be able to select where their tours are displayed within the HDN including other national real estate sites, MLS sites, national broker sites, franchise sites and local sites.

For agents who want to choose their own virtual tour provider, REALTOR.com® also announced changes to its PicturePath™ virtual tour program - pricing. PicturePath is a hosting and distribution solution for outside virtual tour service providers. The idea is to provide these tour providers with the same consumer-friendly features as HomeTour 360 on Realtor.com listings, regardless of the origin of the virtual tour. Realtor.com says it has numerous photographer networks that will also provide virtual tours apart from iPIX technologies including VIC, 360House.com, VR Guild, CirclePix.com, ImageMaker360 and VideoHomeTours.com, among others.

Outside vendors who were charged $40 per tour to link to Realtor.com listings will be charged $19.95 as of June 1, 2002. Tour providers will also be allowed to privately brand their tours on REALTOR.com with their own logo. The $5,000 one-time implementation fee still applies for new partners.

“We have talked with local providers and real estate professionals all over the country and responded to the needs of the industry. We now are pleased to offer our customers with greater choice, enhanced features and a much lower price for PicturePath,” said Ozonian. “This benefits Realtors and consumers alike by improving the user experience on REALTOR.com.”

Published: May 17, 2002

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