Price/Package Changes, 3D Tours and New Interactive Floor Plan

Hello Snap2Close Clients,

I would first like to thank all of you for the trust you have placed in Snap2Close during this COVID-19 Pandemic. March, April, and May were our busiest months ever, and we are most appreciative.

Bookings for Zillow and Matterport 3D Tours, Floor Plans and Interactive Floor Plans surpassed our expectations, thus I would like to chat more about these individual services and products, as well as forthcoming enhancements to the Interactive Floor Plans that is a unique offering developed by Snap2Close.

By the way, this is a lengthy Newsletter so, if you have time, grab a coffee, or your favorite beverage. Hopefully you find the following information, explanations, and opinions useful when choosing media to market your listings.

PLATINUM PACKAGE IS CHANGING

Early on Snap2Close began offering Matterport 3D Tours to our clients. The COVID-19 Pandemic has dramatically increased the call for Matterport Technology. In fact, so many clients have been adding these Tours to our Gold Packages (HDR Photos + Zillow 360º Virtual Tours + Enhanced Video Walk-through + Interactive Floor Plans-“IFP”) that we have redefined the Platinum Package to reflect the choices that you, our clients, are specifying most frequently.

Going forward, the Platinum Package will consist of the following:

HDR Photography
Floor Plans (one with room dimensions and the other without)
Interactive Floor Plan
ZIllow 360º Virtual Tours using Ricoh Theta Z1 Camera
Enhanced Video Walk-through will replace Pro Home Tour Video, offering improved light sensitivity and a wider view
Matterport 3D Tour using the PRO2 3D 4K Camera

And, and, and! Adding better news to good news: the above combination of technology results in a 20% reduction in the price of a stand-alone Matterport 3D Tour.

ZILLOW AND MATTERPORT 3D TOURS

I would like to chat a bit and share my thoughts about 3D Tours and their benefits. When we first joined the Zillow 3D Tour bandwagon it was primarily to help your listings get higher rankings on the Zillow and Trulia search results.

However, it honestly confuses me why Zillow or any number of other companies like Ogulo, cloudPano, RicohTours, iGuide, Inside Maps, and others can call their tours 3 dimensional. They are simply a series of 360° panoramic photos linked together through navigation.

Technically, ZIllow’s 3D App works only on the Ricoh Theta V and Theta Z1 360° cameras and iPhones. The Theta Z1 is our choice for creating 360º Virtual Tours: it has two full frame sensors and much higher quality lenses resulting in greater quality 360º photo renderings than the other cameras.

Time wise, each shot takes approximately 1 second so it only takes a few minutes to shoot a home, but creating the navigation for these tours is pretty time consuming. This is true for all the services mentioned above.

By the way, I personally like cloudPano over all of the other independent 360° services, but the fees charged by these services (except Zillow) seems a bit unreasonable to me.

The real benefit of Zillow’s tour is that the company offers their service for free. Plus Zillow places the tour as the 4th image on the listing’s webpage. That is very helpful for homebuyers and gives them easy access to tours. Zillow also pushes listings with their tours to a much higher ranking on search results.

Surprisingly, Zillow allows their tours to be used on other websites via a link. We embed their tours in our branded and unbranded tour property websites along with the higher resolution photos, videos, floor plans, etc. so they can be seen on Realtor.com and other sites as a virtual tour link.

Here are a couple of direct links to Zillow 3D Tours created with the Ricoh Theta Z1 360° camera: Zillow Tour Sample 1 and Zillow Tour Sample 2.

The Matterport 3D Tour is technically in a class all by itself. It’s rather expensive PRO2 3D Camera uses three separate high quality lenses with full frame sensors, shoots multi frame brackets for HDR, and has an auto rotating motor that takes 25 seconds to rotate 360°s. That translates into 15 shots times 3 bracket HDR equals 45 captures vs a 360° camera’s 2. Plus, each shot is 134 MegaPixels vs 15 MegaPixels for a 360° camera. The resulting image quality of the Matterport 3D Tour is vastly superior to that of any of the 360° cameras used for a Zillow 3D Tour.

Additionally, it uses six infrared transmitters and receivers that literally maps the items seen and creates a three dimensional technically accurate textured mesh of the space. Then their A.I. Cortex software places ultra high quality HDR 4K images onto the mesh to provide a photographic visual quality within the 3D space. In layman’s terms, it creates a truly accurate digital twin of the homes scanned.

This allows homebuyers to literally walk through the home at 5 foot intervals. It is truly an amazing technology that homebuyers genuinely appreciate.

Statistics really back that up as (1) 95% of buyers are more likely to call about homes with a Matterport 3D Tour, (2) Listings with Matterport 3D Tours sale at a 4-9% higher sales price and at a 31% decreased time on the market.

In our opinion, any home listed for $800,000 or more should have a Matterport 3D Tour during this pandemic. Your listing clients’ will appreciate it and it will bring you much quicker sales and at a better price. Plus, it simply helps you to look more professional and upscale, as well as helping you get more listings.

Here are a couple of links to our last shot Matterport 3D Tours: Matterport 3D Tour 1 and Matterport 3D Tour 2 .

FLOOR PLANS & INTERACTIVE FLOOR PLANS

Since we started offering truly affordable floor plans they have become extremely popular. I’m guessing that nearly 80% of our newly booked photo shoots now include a floor plan. Our current plan is to innovate our offerings with several different styles of floor plans. I will keep you posted when we make the new release.

The first version of our Interactive floor plan has been wildly successful and we have received many compliments from our clients. View sample . We are now working on a newer second version that we believe you will like. Click here to view a sample . As of now, I anticipate that we will be releasing version 2 in about six to eight weeks.

WRAP UP

In closing let me again thank you for your trust during this COVID-19 pandemic. I hope this insight into 3D and 360° tours has been helpful and educational.

Stay safe everyone!!!

Charlie and the rest of the Snap2Close team.