Michael Feltoe has been involved in the retail commercial property market for over 10 years, specialising in selling healthcare centers, shopping centers, and large format retail. He is committed to, and has an established track record in achieving new benchmark yields and resetting the expectations for the quality agents can deliver for their clients. Michael has personally been involved in over $165 million in recently completed transactions and has become a virtual tour convert.
We sat down with Michael and his team to find out more about why he’s convinced digital inspections are the way forward for commercial real estate agents.
LH: Why did you decide to add virtual tours to your marketing activity?
MF: We sell a lot of multi-tenanted assets, making inspections somewhat difficult to manage! We also deal with a lot of interstate parties who can’t always inspect firsthand or who need to showcase a potential inspection to multiple stakeholders within a business. Adding a virtual tour to our marketing stack allows us to showcase the asset to its full potential, as well as allow stakeholders to fully understand the potential of the asset.
LH: How has your marketing changed since adding virtual tours?
MF: By distributing a virtual tour to interested parties, we’ve been able to avoid having surface-level discussions about what the asset is, and instead go straight into the detail of the benefits of a property. We’re able to move faster to get deals closed quickly because we can spend time with parties who are interested and ready to sign on the dotted line.
LH: How are you using virtual tours to showcase your properties to interstate and international buyers?
MF: We’ve had quite a few examples of buyers purchasing assets sight-unseen since using virtual tours, especially in North QLD. This is not something we were experiencing before adding virtual tours to our marketing mix. We’re definitely more able to open up our properties to a wider range of potential buyers.
LH: What do you say to vendors to get them excited about adding virtual tours to their marketing mix?
MF: We’ll show sellers examples of what the virtual tour looks like, and we’ll also share how many more interstate buyers we can open up the property to. We explain to sellers that more buyers means more competition, which ultimately means a higher sales price. Virtual tours sell themselves from there!
LH: What does the market say about your choice to add VTs to your marketing mix?
MF: Virtual tours are now a necessity. Right now, they are a real point of difference for us because not many agents have caught on. I think virtual tours will now become so commonplace, the agents that don’t use them will stand out.
LH: What made you choose Little Hinges?
MF: Little Hinges provides the best quality virtual tours, hands down. We also have a great relationship with the Little Hinges team. They go above and beyond to deliver on our projects. Some of the properties we’ve had scanned are extremely complex and multi-faceted, and we’ve been able to work with the Little Hinges team to deliver a great result.
