Take Five Up Your Marketing Game with 3D Tours With Garrett Bell TRT: 3:25 Transcription Garrett Bell directly addresses camera: Are you using 3D scans and 3D tours in your marketing? If not, you should. And, if you are, great! I’m Garrett Bell, a broker-associate with Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate in Melbourne. Let’s take five minutes to talk about how to use 3D scans and tours in unique ways to market your properties. I find 3D video to be extremely useful when working with out-of-town buyers. In fact, I was working with a buyer who bought a $400,000 home sight-unseen. How? Using the buyer’s specific criteria, I found a listing that I thought would be perfect, so I created a 3D video, highlighted certain characteristics of the home and sent it to the buyer. Because this type of tour allows the user to pan left and right and up and down, the buyer was able to feel like she was walking through the home. I hire a photographer to shoot my videos using a Matterport camera. It costs about $150 to $300 per listing but it’s worth the cost since it takes up to an hour to shoot a 2,000 square foot home. My time is better served elsewhere and there’s a high learning curve to filming these videos. Here are some ways I use the videos: First, I use it during listing presentations to get the WOW factor. I show the prospective sellers a video of a similar property. It’s an excellent tool to capture new business and close listing appointments. I also use the videos to remind myself about property details in case a buyer has a specific question. I may not remember every detail of the home during a tour, so I can review every square inch on the video rather than make a trip to the home. I find things that prospective buyers may miss. Because the video can be saved in different ways, I use pieces of the video for advertising. The dollhouse view captures the attention of someone scrolling through a Facebook news feed, and it’s something that can’t be created using traditional photography or video. I buy Facebook ads and use the dollhouse view as my main image to capture the attention of the reader. If the property has a nice room that you want to highlight, you can take the 3-D scan and turn it into a 360-degree photo on Facebook. Users can click on arrows to go up and down and side to side. I also like the caption function. A lot of users don’t take the time to add captions to the 3-D tour. Let’s say I shot video of a kitchen and want to highlight some of the appliances. In edit mode, I click on the stove and add a caption about the brand of the stove or some of the features. I might also add information about the kitchen countertops and other appliances. Finally, I use the technology to create 3D floor plans. The 3D scans can be used to create a traditional black-and-white floor plan. This allows prospective buyers to see a layout of the property just like a blueprint. Most real estate professionals who use the 3-D scans don’t use all the functionality that’s available. They’ll use the tour on the MLS but don’t take that and turn it into a video or dollhouse photo and market with it on social media. The return on investment is big and it adds to the WOW factor because it positions you as a sales associate who uses the latest tools available. It can really help you tell your story.