A new organization hopes to make it easier for small to mid-size virtual tour photographers to make a profit while serving the real estate industry with virtual tours.

The VR Guild, organized by David Allison of Dallas-based Matrix Tours, hopes to attract struggling virtual tour providers and help them to create packages of tours that can be easily posted to a variety of online sites including real estate agents' personal sites and portals such as Homestore and HomeAdvisor.

VR stands for virtual reality, which includes virtual tour photography of homes.

"The VR photographer takes virtual reality images and the ones that create packages to sell to agents are creating virtual tours," explains Allison.

The guild is designed to create the package for the guild member and save time and effort in getting the tours delivered.

"It completes the step of creating a packaged tour," explains Allison. "If you have got a camera and the equipment, you still have to package the photographs in a form that is valuable to the agent. The VR Guild system takes those images and creates the tour package that is branded to the agent and delivers it to the agent and the various agencies that the agent wants, for $10 a tour. That includes hosting and delivery."

The exceptions to the pricing policy are tours that are posted to Realtor.com.

Homestore, operator of Realtor.com, currently charges a $19.95 fee to virtual tour providers to post their tours to the site. Tour providers must also pay a $5,000 fee to Homestore to become a "PicturePath" partner to be allowed to contribute virtual tours to the site. Homestore has told Realty Times in the past that this is a quality-control issue.

But Homestore's fees are a barrier to many photographers, maintains Allison.

"Virtual tours are done on a local market," says Allison, "and a price-conscious one. The biggest barrier to compete has been to compete with national companies. The advantage we offer is to give these individuals equal footing to compete."

As a member of the VR Guild, a virtual tour provider can bypass Homestore's $5,000 fee by allowing the guild to do the posting of the tour for them. While tour providers pay $10 a tour for processing, they pay an extra $21.95 fee to the guild so that the guild can use their computers to post the tours to Homestore in their behalf.

"The idea is that if you are a PicturePath provider and your agent clients want their tours on Realtor.com," says Allison, "they can do so."

Allison believes that the guild will benefit real estate agents and improve virtual tour service delivery to Realtor.com.

Homestore will also benefit, says Allison.

"They have gone through a big consolidation, and they don't want to make the investment in customer service to deal with the virtual reality business," says Allison. "They want to deal with professionals, so allowing us to do this is a way to get small to medium producers able to participate, and it gives Homestore a steady revenue stream and more virtual tours to put on the site which will make the listings more attractive to their visitors."

Editor's note: Members of the guild also pay a $250 membership fee and a $250 training fee.

Published: August 2, 2002

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