Virtual Properties

Main Street supports Virtual Properties professional photography and vr (virtual tour scenes). Here are some examples:

• Madison Home
  
  
• Silicon Valley, CA
  
  
• New York
  
  
• Santa Fe 1
  
  
• Santa Fe 2

Pew Internet & American Life just released a study of online virtual tour users:

Since the dawn of the Web in the early 1990s, internet advocates have argued that one of the Web’s most powerful applications would be to open up new worlds to people and help them easily experience faraway places.

A new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that 45% of online American adults have taken advantage of this internet application and taken virtual tours of another location online. That represents 54 million adults who have used the internet to venture somewhere else.

On a typical day, more than two million people are using the internet to take a virtual tour.

Some of the most popular virtual tour destinations include museums, tourist and vacation locales, colleges and prep schools, real estate, historical exhibits, parks and nature preserves, public places such as the White House and the Taj Mahal, and hotels and motels.

Vivian Toy:

IN real estate, a picture can be worth more than a thousand words. Much, much more. When selling properties online, agents and Web designers say that the pictures buyers see of houses and apartments for sale are often the first — and sometimes the only — chance for a seller to make a good impression. Less-than-flattering pictures can turn buyers off and lead to lonely open houses.

Ann Brenoff:

A picture may be worth a mere 1,000 words in other circles, but in real estate, it enters the realm of deal or no deal.

With an estimated 80% of home buyers starting their search on the Internet, photos are to home sales today what curb appeal used to be: the place where first impressions are made.

According to a National Assn. of Realtors survey of the Web features that buyers found "very useful," 83% mentioned photos, 81% liked detailed property information and 60% named virtual tours.

Every day, decisions about which homes to see — and which to skip — are made based on what a buyer sees online.

"If you can't get them in the door," said Coldwell Banker agent Kenny Bellini of Santa Monica, "you can't sell the house."

Bellini and his wife, Izumi Tanaka, generally shoot their listing photos themselves, as do many other realty agents. And, as he is quick to admit, photography skills aren't part of an agent's training — even though posting quality photos on the Web has now become one of the services an agent must offer clients to stay competitive.

Kimberly Stevens:

THERE has always been a certain status attached to owning a home that is featured in a magazine. And a certain pleasure, for a homeowner, in leaving the evidence lying casually on the coffee table.

But now there’s another way to flaunt the importance of your house, and your affection for it: hire a well-known photographer yourself to immortalize it. To some, that’s even better than a magazine photo spread, because the results can be displayed in entry halls and over fireplaces, just like any piece of art, or bound in a book.

“We fetishize homes now, in a way that we never used to,” said Todd Eberle, a photographer whose work appears in Vanity Fair and in prominent museums. He has been hired by many celebrities, including Martha Stewart and Bill Clinton, to document their homes and offices. His clients, he said, want him both to memorialize their homes as they really are, and at the same time to “take it to a different level, and somehow improve upon the reality.”

Jon Miller, an architectural photographer and an owner of Hedrich Blessing, a firm in Chicago that has been documenting American architecture since the 1930s, said he had seen a marked increase in homeowner commissions in recent years.

“People have a lot of pride in their homes, and they want to glamorize them,” he said.

Lauren Baier Kim:

Considering the bleak state of the housing market, one would think that agents and sellers would be working overtime to market what’s out there. Yet when Developments visits real-estate sites, we see many listings featuring poorly taken, grainy photos that do little to show what a home looks like, let alone what might be special about it. Worse, some listings include no photos at all.

The other day we came across a Jupiter, Fla., listing (at right) for a $665,000 home featuring just one shot of a home half-obscured by some sort of shrubbery.

We called the listing agent, and you can imagine our surprise when we learned that the brokers, a husband-and-wife team, actually own the home. Carla and John Morris of Prima Properties of Jupiter have placed their house on and off the market multiple times, according to Ms. Morris. She wouldn’t say how long the home has been for sale. They haven’t been able to add extra photos yet, but they plan to, she says, “It’s good to have the photos.”