Five COVID-Friendly Strategies To Offer Tours For Your Luxury Home

While we're still reeling from the pandemic, some people are venturing out and trying to re-establish their lives. Many more are still staying home, tucked away and keeping safe. That makes it rather difficult to sell a home, especially if you want to offer tours for your luxury home.

We may be living in a new normal right now, but precautions are still necessary, because we've seen that spikes can still happen. That means people are wearing masks, practicing social distancing, and regularly washing their hands.

So how can luxury home buyers and luxury home sellers find a safe and common ground? How do we let buyers safely see inside homes and how can sellers protect themselves and their families?

It's important that buyers and sellers are as safe as possible, and that we take proper precautions to do so, which means limiting (but not eliminating) tours of luxury homes.

We have five strategies that both buyers and sellers can take advantage of while still providing a robust experience that gives home buyers a sense of the homes they're considering, before they finally make an in-person visit.

1. Take Professional Photos First and Foremost and Always

Every luxury home needs high-quality, professional-level photography. That's a given. Realtors have found over the years that taking professional photos of homes not only sells them for more money, they sell a lot faster too, as much as 32% faster.

But you can't just snap a few photos on your phone and call it a day. Selling a luxury home means having photos that show your home in the best possible way, with proper lighting, framing, composition, and so on. And unless your realtor is a professional iPhone photographer, you're just not going to get that without a professional photographer.

Good real estate photographers know several techniques for making your home look as gorgeous as it is in real life. They take twilight shots of the exterior just as the sky is changing color at sunset; create vignettes of each room to help buyers see how it could be used; they'll shoot with a wide angle lens to let buyers see more of a room; and, they'll compose the photos so the lines direct our eye to a focal point in the room.

2. Offer a Pre-recorded Professional Video Tour with Voiceover

People are watching more and more videos these days, and not just young people. It's so easy to create short videos and to watch them right from a web page or social media account on your phone. In fact, 85% of all Americans watch some sort of video online on any kind of device.

If that's the case, doesn't it make sense to offer pre-recorded professional video tours of your luxury home?

While it's possible to create videos with the professional photos you just had taken, it's also very easy to shoot original videos of a home, especially if your professional photographer is also a videographer. If not, you can easily hire a professional videographer and/or drone pilot to shoot footage of your home.

The Abode team has been shooting video on every luxury home for six years, because we know how important it is that each home is shown in its best light.

Video tours are also helpful if your buyers live out of town. You might be able to see what a house looks like with a photo, but you can get a sense of the flow of the house with a video tour. You can also add a voiceover to point out some of the different architectural features or hidden details that you don't see from the photos — dovetail drawers on the cabinets, the side shower heads in the walk-in shower, and so on.

3. Take Advantage of 3D Videos: The New Tool in the Luxury Home Toolbox

3D video tours are a new tool in the luxury home toolbox, as created by Matterport. A 3D tour lets you virtually walk around a luxury home, giving you a sense of all the features as well as the floor plan so you can see how a home is laid out. Plus you can stop in each room and look around to get a perspective on where everything is. You can't do that with a regular video.

While people may have been hesitant on 3D tours before the pandemic, now they're almost vital for every luxury listing now. It's as close to an in-person visit as you can get without actually being there. That means it's a great boon to out-of-town buyers who want to get a better sense of a home before they consider it. (We once sold a home to a buyer based only on a 3D tour and photos.)

There's even a measurement tool that lets a buyer know how long or how big a room is. Someone might have an art piece or a piece of furniture and they want to know if it will fit. That's an advantage over an in-person showing. It also lets buyers with designers review the property without making repeated in-person visits.

3D videos let people see everything before they walk into a home, and it makes all the difference. For one thing, it lets the buyer see if they like a layout of a home or not. This helps the seller immensely, because they're not spending hours and hours to get their homes ready for "looky-loos" and people who aren't that interested. You aren't wasting time on people who aren't the right buyers; you can focus on the serious buyers who might turn into the right one.

4. Offer Live Agent Walkthroughs To Answer Questions

Of course, buyers will have plenty of questions that can't be answered just by looking at photos and videos. This is where a live video tour with an agent can help.

If a buyer can't go into a house on their own (out of an abundance of caution or because they live out of town) the agent can conduct a live tour through FaceTime or Zoom. If you've seen the photos and watched the videos, now is the time to get your questions answered.

This is also the time to get the lowdown on certain details. For example, on some of our video walkthroughs, we can point out things like the sounds of a nearby road or planes overhead.

All of these strategies are also helpful because we've moved away from using paper brochures and handouts. People don't want to pick things up nowadays, but we can use photos, videos, and walkthroughs to replace them. Plus, we can also make digital brochures that people can read on their devices.

All of this leads up to the final, very careful in-person walkthrough before the sale.

5. Make Your In-Person Strategy As Safe As Possible

The first way we protect everyone is to ask the buyers and the buyers' agents if they've tested positive for COVID in the past, if they have been in any hotspots recently, and so on. We want to make the seller feel better about letting people into their homes.

We're also seeing more buyers across all price points getting pre-qualified before they begin the final stage of their buying journey. Both buyers and sellers are more comfortable getting that pre-qualification because it cuts down on people coming through the house who aren't interested or able to buy the house. In the past, many sellers were more comfortable with letting anyone tour their property, but pre-qualification has become more accepted and expected.

If everything is good, we then require masks of everyone who enters the house. We provide masks, sanitizers, and booties if the seller wants that. We also have a form that we ask any visitors to sign. It's as much for the comfort level of the homeowner as it is a contact tracing measure. It's a PDF and people are able to sign it digitally without ever handling the paper.

And if the seller wants to be very cautious, they can ask that only one person opens and closes all doors and drawers, and that they wipe everything down with a disinfectant wipe afterward. (If necessary, sellers can have a professional service come in and do a thorough cleaning after a visit.)

Finally, as open houses are making a comeback we have shifted our practices to keep everyone as safe as possible. We held our first open house since COVID in the middle of September, and we required everyone to wear a mask and use hand sanitizer that we provided. 

In "Closing"

Sometimes it takes a crisis to lead to major innovations in an industry and the real estate industry is no different. We've seen a sharp increase in the number of people who look at photos, watch videos, and take virtual home tours as part of their buying process.

Sellers love the new innovations because they've never had a 3D home tour done before, and buyers love them because they get a lot more information to make a better buying decision before they even decide to visit a home. It also makes the buying process a lot easier because most of the legwork is done on the front end before the buyer ever visits the home they're interested in.

These advances make the buying process much safer and ensure that buyers are only seeing properties that are a true fit for them, saving the seller and buyer both time and energy.

Enjoyed these insights and looking forward to more?  

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Steven Ritz, Buyer Specialist - Call 321-277-8271 or email here

Linda Sitek, Listing Specialist - Call 407-963-6544 or email here