Josh Callaghan, CEO Little Hinges
Virtual tours are the most important tool in your marketing suite, and right now, you’re using them wrong.
At Little Hinges, it’s our mission to be bold. So, we’re shouting it from the rooftops – everything you think you know about virtual tours is wrong. They aren’t an alternative to photography, they aren’t just another promotional tool, and they are non-negotiable when it comes to selling or renting a property.
A virtual tour will:
- Showcase your property to the widest audience, including cashed up interstate and international buyers who are swarming into Queensland from the southern states at unprecedented rates. Not only can they walk through the property as if they were there, they can feel confident enough to place an offer, sight-unseen.
- Qualify your audience by allowing those who know the property isn’t right for them to self-select out of the inspection process, meaning you’re only spending time with buyers who are ready to sign on the dotted line.
- Position you as being a forward-thinking, digital-first agent who is ready to deliver the best results for your vendor – a higher sale price and faster time to sale.
When’s the last time photography did all that?
Photography and videography focus on what the creator thinks is important – not on what the buyer actually wants to see. How many times has a buyer rocked up to an open home (after rearranging their entire Saturday morning, and sourcing an impossible to find RAT) only to find that the imagery shared online looks nothing like the actual property they’re viewing? I’ve said it before, glossy photos get eyeballs and attract buyers, virtual tours qualify and convert those buyers while eliminating effort on time-wasters.
Which brings me to another reason why virtual tours should be non-negotiable. Little Hinges have developed a world-first, real-time analytics dashboard, providing you with all of the insights you need to make strategic decisions when marketing a property. We wanted to be able to provide our agent partners with an understanding of how long potential buyers are spending inside your tour, what they are clicking on, where they’re viewing from and more – because we believe that agents of the future won’t just view this information as nice to have, but essential to their marketing intelligence.
Not only are virtual tours revolutionising the way that real estate agents manage their sales process, virtual tours are in-demand. With 57% of Australian buyers saying they would prefer to undertake real estate transactions using a hybrid model* of virtual and in-person, agents can no longer afford to ignore the shouts from buyers and sellers to adapt to this new normal.
Pair these sentiment statistics with the fact that nationally, almost 15% of digital inspections are not from the state the property was located in**, and it becomes difficult to see why virtual tours aren’t the first point of call for every real estate agent when planning their marketing strategy.
Little Hinges is Australia’s largest, fastest growing, and best virtual tours provider. We’re used by more agents in Australia than any other company, and if you’re a real estate agent in Australia, it won’t be long until your vendors, landlords, buyers and principals are asking why you’re not using us.
*Source: 2021 Zoom Qualtrics Research
** Little Hinges traffic data, Aug – Nov, 2021
