Hot New Technologies to Help You Buy, Sell, or Decorate Your Home

franckreporter/iStock

Have you ever had an inexplicable hankering to operate your sous vide water oven from 3,000 miles away? Felt compelled to give your housebound Tibetan terrier Tomas a treat while you’re toiling at your desk at work? Are you jonesing to visit the top of Everest without having to leave your warm, comfortable bed? Well, there are technologies and apps to help you do all of that. In fact, it seems like high-tech advances are transforming just about everything—even how you buy, sell, and decorate your home.

Technology “is hugely important to the future of real estate” says Annette Anthony, vice president of technology engagement at EXIT Realty Corp. International. “Through augmented reality, through virtual reality, through video, consumers [can] feel what it’s like to be in the home before they actually go visit it.”

Indeed, burgeoning 3-D and virtual reality home tours, created with technology from imaging firms like Matterport, are already beginning to catch on with buyers, sellers, and their real estate agents.

“We’ve had a few buyers make an offer before they’ve physically walked through” the home, says real estate broker Robert Brown. Brown, of Cornerstone Real Estate Professionals, in Logan, UT, frequently uses 3-D technology. He even keeps a VR headset in his office for would-be buyers to use.

“It’s a huge plus, having out-of-state buyers being so familiar with the property before they even get here,” he says.

In fact, our own company, realtor.com®, is beginning to use the technology for virtual home tours on our mobile apps.

And that’s just the beginning. There are other real estate–friendly technologies that you may not even be aware of yet.

Interested? All you need is Wi-Fi and a finger or two to type—or swipe—with.

Augmented reality to make home buying a ‘snap’

Self-promotion alert! Realtor.com® has a bunch of other cool new tools to help buyers who are out and about get more information about homes on the spot. See a “For Sale” or “For Rent” sign? Take a photo with your Android phone and use the new Sign Snap feature to instantly get information on the property and view photos. You can even learn when the next open house is to be held.

Another tool set to launch in spring, Street Peek will let prospective buyers pan a street with their Android phone and receive information on the homes on that block—including key information such as the price of the home and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Even if a home isn’t on the market, you can see how much it most recently sold for.

Show off your home with a magazine-quality digital flipbook

Today’s buyers want to be wowed visually, and you can give your home the glamour treatment with an interactive storytelling app like Studeo that enables sellers or their agents to create a high-end digital brochure for the real estate listing.

The virtual flipbooks give extra oomph to the most coveted features of a home: the sweeping views, the chef’s kitchen, the one-of-a-kind backsplash. Sellers and agents provide the professional photos and descriptive text and drop them into a template created by Studeo, a Toronto-based company founded in 2014. The result: a striking, interactive digital booklet that can be displayed on real estate websites, sent out in a link, or printed as a flier and (snail) mailed to prospective buyers.

“More than ever, people are just enamored with photos and videos,” EXIT’s Anthony says. “It delivers that ‘wow’ factor.”

Arrange your furniture—by clicking a button

Experts agree that staging a home will help it sell faster. But it is yet another fee to pay upfront before you’ve got cash in hand from a home sale.

Yet doing it right is neither easy nor cheap.

A budget-friendly alternative is virtual staging. (It’s also useful if you want to do a remodel.) If you’re tech-savvy enough to play Candy Crush, you can stage a home using tools from VisualStager, a Bay Area–company founded in 2013. Just fire up your browser and upload your photographs of the rooms you’d like to redecorate.

“You can then select from our library of over 2,000 sofas, beds, accessories, plants, and wall decor,” says VisualStager CEO Parag Tope. “Simply place, drag, and rotate the items in place.” Voilà. Your rooms are staged.

RoOomy, a Silicon Valley company started in 2015, offers a similar program that lets you generate a 3-D model of your home using regular old photographs and a few room measurements. Once your rooms are virtually built, buyers—or even homeowners—can add furniture and decorations or change floor coverings to see how they would look.

This helps buyers “easily visualize how a room might look if it was decorated to their specific taste,” says RoOomy CEO Pieter Aarts.

The post Hot New Technologies to Help You Buy, Sell, or Decorate Your Home appeared first on Real Estate News & Advice | realtor.com®.