Augmented Reality Real Estate

Visualization

Customer experience

There are quite a couple of use-cases for AR in real estate. House and property tours could be enhanced with virtual 3D assets, you could provide the potential buyer with a digital AR catalog, or give the client fully virtual tours in your office.

Benefits

Both sides can benefit from this in multiple ways. The customer gets a good, intuitive, and interactive visualization of the property. That gives the agent the opportunity to impress without even being on-site.

That said, it could save expensive trips to places the customer doesn’t end up buying. The agent could show the customer a few properties in his office, already ruling some out, making it far more likely for an actual visit to lead to a purchase.

Augmented reality could also be used to add more information for the buyer. For example what kind of heating is installed, how old the kitchen appliances are or how far schools are from the property. This could be especially valuable for open houses when the agent can’t show each and every person around.

Challenges

Though, this approach may not be so suited to smaller real estate companies yet. In order to be able to visualize a house or property, a 3D scan or model needs to be made first. That requires either hiring a third party or training someone to do it. Both is costly and time-consuming.

What’s also obviously challenging is the fact that an otherwise huge plot of land may seem tiny when projected onto an office desk. So there is a risk of conveying a wrong impression of the property.

Take Away

Bigger real estate companies could probably implement such a system relatively easily and fast. It does require time and effort but if it’s done right, it can be a really valuable tool.