Pivot in Practice | no.4
This is the fourth edition of Pivot in Practice, Nimble.’s recurring series aimed to address some of the most frequently asked questions we’re hearing from trusted clients and teams during this unpredictable time.
With the aim of delivering relevant strategies and marketing solutions to help our teams get through this together, we hope you will follow along and contribute to the conversation.
Have a question? We’d love to connect.
Q: How do we deliver an impactful virtual tour experience?
This #PivotInPractice post is dedicated to the question we’ve received most frequently since WFH became the new norm — how do we deliver an equally engaging, well produced and digital alternative to the physical tour experience, while remaining hyper conscious of audience attention spans and changing priorities?
Beyond targeted email marketing campaigns and fly-through videos, commercial real estate marketers understand the power of an impactful in-person tour experience. While compelling marketing campaigns can help to peak interest during this unpredictable time, it can be difficult to replicate in-person asset previews in the digital space. In-person tours allow for mutual discussion, a sense-driven experience and a guided, realistic look at potential workplace. However, experience doesn’t begin and end on this tour.
As marketers, it is our responsibility to innovate with a changing [economical, social, worldly] landscape. With so much riding on this communication vehicle to leasing success, we’re excited to breakdown a range of solutions to support your interim remote tour needs with or without property access.
If your property is allowing select on-site access at this time—
Invest in Matterport or a Matterport Partner.
If your property is allowing select on-site access, utilizing a 3D capture tool like Matterport can support an exceptionally impactful virtual tour experience. While this type of technology does come at a higher price point than some of the alternatives listed below, this is the easiest way to mimic a virtual IRL tour equivalent.
From the ability to map exact tour paths and pause points, to tools that enable you to measure distances, generate floor plans and list space dimensions — this is a versatile camera solution that will heighten remote user engagement and enable impressive presentations.
PRO TIP: Brokers can plan to narrate (or engage a freelance VO artist) the tour for a personalize, guided remote viewing experience, ensuring script points are presented and received by the prospective viewer.
→ Take a virtual Matterport tour of The World Trade Center Lyon’s 27th floor to get a feel for what’s possible.
There are two ways that you can build a Matterport model:
1. Invest in the equipment and do it yourself (great for teams interested in making this a standard across property listings).
→ If you’re interested in investing in the equipment, learn more here.2. Or hire a local Matterport Service Partner to scan your asset(s) for you.
→ If you’re interested in hiring a local partner, contact Matterport here.
Specific pricing information varies and is typically based on square footage and local market rates. You should plan on an investment of $1,500 - $3,000 depending on project scale and market/location.
Or, consider these DIY alternatives.
If Matterport doesn’t suit your needs or available marketing budget, there are numerous alternative providers that offer similar technology and a DIY approach.
Depending on property size, your audience, and your standard approach to tours, it’s important to do your research to understand which platform will best serve your needs.
Here are a few platforms that offer free trials and real-life examples, to try before you invest:
Concept 3D — Well suited for a multi-building campus with outdoor amenities to highlight, Concept 3D enables you to make digital, interactive maps for immersive campus tour experiences — a nice alternative to isolated space previews.
Tour Creator — Well suited for achieving a marketing center tour experience, Tour Creator enables you to generate 360° photos, points of interest and image overlays for an easy to tailor and share tour experience.
Roundme — Well suited for hosting multiple tours, Roundme allows you to display created virtual tours in a modern, clean and central online portfolio location.
If your property is not allowing on-site access at this time—
If you are not currently able to obtain property access, photographing and/or filming your project will not be a feasible solution. When it comes to working with creative assets on-hand, reach for your high-resolution property photos and consider transforming them into a flexible form of digital storytelling that provides the ability to track engagement through analytics.
A few ways you might creatively approach a solution:
Consider a video content series, hosted on an easily segmented platform like Vimeo.
Distilling a multi-faceted tour experience down into bite-sized moments can be a great short-term solution to delivering virtual tours, with attention spans in mind.
At Nimble., we’ve started prototyping short animated video compilations using high-resolution project photography to help showcase crucial tour moments (i.e., one video showcasing arrival to a renovated lobby, another showcasing the tenant lounge, a third highlighting views in a full floor availability, etc.).
Through this approach, we are able to arm CRE marketing teams with short video snippets and the ability to customize the tour, tailoring it to suit diverse audience types. A video series is an engaging medium to share, track [flexing your analytics] and tweak [agility is key right now] based on user response. Not to mention a great opportunity to distill clips into social posts for added promotion and engagement.
Depending on the desired level of quality, special effects and quantity, video development prices and process range. However, in the interest of creating something meaningful, authentic and the opposite of long-winded and pitch-y, this solution could range from $5,000 - $15,000, highly dependent on vision, production needs and market/location.
→ Contact us to chat through property specifics and we can drive a solution for you.
Consider utilizing your property website as the tour guide platform.
We can all learn a thing or two about the potential for great virtual tours by taking some inspiration from the way select mixed-use developments and museums are responding to this global pandemic.
Just recently, Google Arts & Culture partnered up with more than 2,500 museums and galleries across the globe to make narrated virtual tour experiences and storied online exhibits available to audiences practicing social distancing.
Consider the possibilities for how this could translate for the CRE industry.
There are a few of ways this can translate for office:
The Smithsonian National Museum digitized their Understanding the Natural World and our Place in It exhibit through a user-friendly solution that combines story, photography and a simple micro site solution with long-form vertical scroll.
→ Take the tourAmsterdam’s Canals website offers a four part visual glimpse into the creation and history of the iconic 17th-century canals, flexing a custom website development solution to enable users to take a step back (and forward) in time, on their own.
→ Take the tourBrooklyn NY’s Domino Park (historic site of the Domino Sugar Factory) completely digitized their “Park Features” tour path through a custom, user-friendly solution that combines storytelling through copy, photography and a simple website carousel.
→ Explore here
Ask your architectural team for VR support.
Enscape is just one example of what might be possible for your project, every firm has varying in-house or outsourced capabilities; the main takeaway is to seek experience-rich fly-through or 360º content (beyond static renders).
Have pending spec suites, lobby renos, or amenity spaces actively in design planning?
For in-progress capital projects, connect with your architect regarding avenues for translating design progress to immersive digital experiences.
In recap, effective virtual tours can be composed in a number of different ways, depending on access to the property (at this time) and allocated marketing dollars available.
By strategically honing the tour script, planning the [digital] tour sequence and defining UX for self-navigation, you can continue to promote your properties in their best light.
→ Connect with us to discuss your property specific challenges so we can best direct a solution.
Contribute to our growing conversation on Pivot in Practice.
We’d love the chance to answer your questions in an upcoming post. We’re grateful for the opportunity to support an industry that has raised us up for over a decade and counting.
Please — share your concerns, challenges, and pivots with us so we can work and solve for current times together, #bethegood, #pivotinpractice.