In recent years, the real estate industry has witnessed an increased adoption of virtual tours as a means of showcasing properties to potential buyers. A virtual tour is a simulation of a property created with the use of specialized software and equipment that allows viewers to experience a 360-degree view of the property. In this blog post, we will discuss the benefits of using virtual tours in real estate.
Real estate listings can be a challenging and time-consuming task for both agents and buyers. Traditionally, real estate agents would need to visit each property, take photographs, and create virtual tours to showcase the property to potential buyers. However, with the advancements in technology, the use of drones has revolutionized the real estate industry.
The world of building and design has changed substantially in response to advancing technologies and building information management (BIM) modelling is one of the most significant improvements to come from this
When COVID hit it changed everything. All of a sudden families were stranded at home and there was a renewed focus on nesting, akin to what we saw immediately after 9-11.
In today's real estate market, technology continues to push the boundaries of how we explore, collaborate, and ultimately decide on our next living space. One of the most exciting advancements is the integration of live interactions within 3D virtual tours. This technology is not just changing how agents sell properties—it's redefining the entire buying experience.
The advent of 3D virtual tours is dramatically reshaping the landscape of the hospitality industry, providing a dynamic way for hotels, resorts, and other properties to enhance guest engagement and boost bookings. Here's an exploration of how this innovative technology is making waves, transforming the way establishments connect with potential guests, and enhancing the overall guest experience.
In recent years, the construction industry has seen a revolutionary shift in how inspections and verifications are conducted, thanks to the advent and integration of drone technology. Drone inspections have emerged as a game-changer, offering a blend of efficiency, safety, and precision that traditional methods struggle to match. This blog post explores how drones are transforming the landscape of construction and building inspections, making them more accessible, accurate, and efficient than ever before.
Gone are the days when scaffolding and ladders were the only means to inspect a building's facade or a construction site's progress. Drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), equipped with high-resolution cameras and other sensors, now offer a bird's-eye view, providing detailed visual data that was once hard or even impossible to obtain. This capability is not just about convenience; it's about creating a safer, more efficient, and cost-effective approach to construction and building inspections.
1. Enhanced Safety: Safety is a paramount concern in any construction project. Drones minimize the need for personnel to physically access dangerous or hard-to-reach areas, significantly reducing the risk of accidents.
2. Time and Cost Efficiency: Conducting inspections with drones is quicker than traditional methods, reducing downtime and labor costs. Drones can cover large areas in a fraction of the time it would take a human inspector, streamlining the inspection process.
3. Detailed and Accurate Data: Drones equipped with advanced imaging technology can capture detailed photographs, videos, and thermal images. This data is invaluable for identifying defects, ensuring compliance with plans, and monitoring the project's progress.
4. Improved Accessibility: Drones can easily access and inspect challenging locations, such as high roofs, tall structures, and expansive construction sites, ensuring no area is overlooked.
5. Environmental Monitoring: Beyond structural inspections, drones can also monitor environmental conditions and compliance, ensuring that construction projects adhere to environmental standards and regulations.
Drone inspections have found diverse applications in the construction industry, including:
Pre-construction Surveys: Drones can survey potential construction sites, providing crucial data for planning and design.
Ongoing Construction Monitoring: UAVs offer a way to continuously monitor construction progress, compare it against project timelines, and adjust workflows as needed.
Structural Inspections: Drones inspect buildings for structural integrity, damage, or wear and tear, facilitating regular maintenance and safety checks.
Compliance Verification: UAVs help verify that construction projects comply with architectural plans and building codes, ensuring quality and regulatory compliance.
Roof Inspections: Specifically, drones have revolutionized roof inspections, providing a safe and efficient way to assess conditions, identify issues, and estimate repair costs.
As drone technology continues to advance, the potential for its application in construction and building inspections grows. Innovations in AI and machine learning are making drones smarter, enabling automated inspections, real-time data analysis, and predictive maintenance. Furthermore, integration with Building Information Modeling (BIM) systems is enhancing the ability to manage projects and maintain buildings efficiently.
Drone inspections represent a significant leap forward in how we approach construction and building maintenance. By harnessing the power of UAV technology, the construction industry can achieve higher safety standards, better quality control, and increased operational efficiency. As drones become more sophisticated and integrated into construction processes, we can expect to see even greater improvements in how projects are planned, monitored, and executed. The sky's the limit for drones in construction, and the industry is just beginning to explore the full extent of their potential.
The adoption of drone technology in construction and building inspections is not just a trend; it's a testament to the industry's evolution towards embracing digital innovation for better outcomes. As we look to the future, drones will undoubtedly play a pivotal role in shaping the landscapes of our cities and the standards by which we build them.
In the evolving landscape of manufacturing, the adoption of innovative technologies is not just a trend but a necessity for staying competitive. Among these technologies, 3D digital twins stand out as a transformative tool for streamlining training and improving factory processes. This blog post explores how leveraging 3D digital twins can revolutionize manufacturing operations, enhance employee training, and significantly optimize production processes.
The Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industries are undergoing a significant transformation, driven by the integration of advanced technologies. Among these, laser scanning stands out as a pivotal innovation, revolutionizing project planning, execution, and management. This blog post delves into the myriad benefits of laser scanning, illustrating how it is reshaping the AEC industries.
In an era where the digital landscape shapes consumer decisions, the travel and hospitality industry stands on the brink of a revolution, courtesy of 3D tour technology. By digitizing their entire portfolio, businesses within this sector not only inspire potential visitors but also strategically reduce vacancy rates. This innovative approach allows for the meticulous management of property improvement projects and the stringent assurance of quality control, setting a new standard in customer engagement and satisfaction.
In an era where digital presence is as crucial as physical, retailers are constantly seeking innovative ways to engage customers and stand out in a competitive landscape. The advent of 3D virtual tours is revolutionizing the retail industry, offering a dynamic tool for retailers to plan and manage fresh, on-brand experiences efficiently and at scale.
In the rapidly evolving world of construction, staying ahead of the curve is not just an advantage; it's a necessity. Among the groundbreaking technologies reshaping the landscape, drone captures stand out, revolutionizing how large construction sites are documented, managed, and delivered. This innovative approach not only promises efficiency and precision but also introduces a new era of construction site management.
In today's fast-paced real estate environment, building managers face a myriad of challenges, from handling acquisitions and sub-leases to overseeing renovations and managing building assets. Navigating these tasks efficiently requires a robust solution that can simplify complexity and enhance decision-making. Enter 3D facilities management software – a revolutionary tool designed to transform the way building managers operate, offering unparalleled insights and control over their properties.
In the rapidly evolving world of commercial real estate, technological advancements have continuously paved the way for innovative marketing strategies. Among these, virtual tours have emerged as a game-changer, revolutionizing how properties are presented, explored, and ultimately, transacted. Virtual tours offer a dynamic and immersive way to showcase commercial spaces, providing a plethora of benefits that cater to the needs of sellers, buyers, and tenants alike. In this blog post, we delve into the transformative benefits of virtual tours for commercial real estate, highlighting how they are reshaping the industry landscape.
We are encountering a higher demand for our services, helping organizations stay open virtually and augmenting real estate listings with immersive 3D Matterport tours.
In order to keep everyone safe the following protocols are followed, no exceptions:
Properties must be vacant and prepared to be imaged. In case of commercial properties, only required essential staff should be present.
We will address your project requirements prior to appointment. Under no circumstances shall anyone other than us or essential staff be present at location.
If you suspect you have been in contact with Covid-19 or don’t feel well, please take care of yourself, be responsible and let us know! We are in this together and we offer you the same courtesy.
We follow strict safety precautions as recommended by health authorities. This means we move slower, wear protective gear and sanitize our equipment between appointments.
Now more than ever it matters what we do. We can beat this thing but only if we work together and practice social distancing. Stay well!
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From the Globe & Mail November 12, 2018 | By: SHANE DINGMAN, REAL ESTATE REPORTER
Two Toronto-area startups are betting that a combination of technology, regulatory changes and consumer behaviour have created the conditions necessary to finally bring about a transformation of the country’s traditional real estate model.
Regan McGee, chief executive of startup Nobul (which he describes as a marketplace platform where potential buyers and sellers get bids for service from realtors), says that, in recent years, accumulation of anti-trust and competition regulations in the United States and Canada have pushed the industry to a tipping point. “They created an environment where a company like us could exist. [Before now] it would have been really hard. This is the way everything is going,” he said.
“The industry is changing, and I could feel the change coming,” says Vicki Schmidt, co-founder and broker of record for Justo, a new twist on the online discount brokerage.
These two companies are just a few of the real estate-focused startups popping up or expanding across the country, but they have one thing in common: The market opportunity they sense is to put more negotiating power, and perhaps more cash, in the hands of the real estate buyers and sellers. That could also put pressure on the traditional commission structure and service offering from agents.
Justo’s idea is mainly a tech-enabled update on an old idea: the discount brokerage. Founded by Daphne De Groot, an Israeli immigrant on a startup visa (who has dabbled in real estate developing, reality television and marine biology in an interesting career path) who partnered with Ms. Schmidt to try to build something more like the real estate model in her home country.
“In Israel, when you go buy a house, you have something like Kijiji. You go on the site, you pick a house you like, you just buy it directly … you don’t do it with an agent, just a lawyer and that’s it,” Ms. De Groot said. “When I tried to do it here myself, I had no access to any of the data: who bought the house, when, comparables.”
With an outsiders eye, she dissected the traditional real estate model in Canada and realized two things: Agents were necessary here, for many reasons, and enough of the data were getting to the public that some of the functions of agents could be shared between buyer and agent. Justo is designed to keep the agent involved, while operating a VOW-type website that helps buyers and sellers see what’s happening in the market, and wrap it all up into a couple of lower fee options.
Justo’s fee model is calibrated for the expensive side of the GTA: If your home purchase is for more than $600,000 (which is about $150,000 lower than the region’s average detached-home selling price), you pay a flat $15,000 in commission. Additionally, while Justo will still split the full traditional 5-per-cent commission with listing agents, it will give buyer clients a chunk of the difference between the $15,000 and the 2.5-per-cent share as a cash-back bonus (the estimated cash-back is posted on all the Justo site’s online listings). “Its a reduction on your house, ‘Money out of the sky,’” Ms. De Groot said. If what you buy is less than $600,000 there’s no cashback and no flat fee, just the usual 2.5-per-cent fee.
For sellers, the structure is a simple reduced fee: 1.5-per-cent commission for 90 days at a guaranteed price, and if they don’t sell in that time, they will reduce the commission to 1 per cent.
Ms. Schmidt says the structure is similar to a friends-and-family deal, adding that what attracted her to Ms. De Groot’s vision was, “The idea of partnering with [clients] and sharing a bit of that commission with them, because they are a big part of that partnership.”
Mr. McGee’s startup, Nobul, comes at the industry with a similar ethos – that the client wants more service than what they get today – but his vision is built on an real estate insider’s view (he’s a former commercial realtor and still has his licence) of an industry that has managed to avoid fundamental change despite the existence of gigantic U.S. property tech companies such as Zillow and Redfin.
“Real estate is super entrenched in doing things the way it’s been done forever,” he said, arguing that no internet company has done to real estate what Uber and Airbnb have done to transportation or hospitality.
The concept is deceptively simple: Buyers or sellers come to Nobul to find an agent and agents on the platform offer a bid for that client, either a straight-up break on the commission or through expanded service offerings. Additionally, a combination of user ratings and reviews will help clients compare bidding agents (someday soon, Nobul also hopes to include agent performance metrics, such as list-price-to-sale ratios, in order to find who truly are the best negotiators).
Unlike traditional online brokerages, agents you find on Nobul don’t work for the startup (350 agents have been actively using the platform since its soft launch in April), they just use the site as a matchmaker to pitch their services.
“Most of the job of being a real estate agent is customer acquisition,” Mr. McGee said. “We’re seeing right now about three-to-one buyers to sellers [browsing on the platform] and a tonne of first-time buyers. Most of the people coming to our platform are millennials … they don’t have a relationship with some real estate agent who got their licence back in the seventies.” Right now, if a buyer is scrolling through Realtor.ca, there’s no easy way to find an agent to help you buy a dream house you spotted. There’s no reasons those buyers wouldn’t like to begin and end their property search online, Mr. McGee says: “This is the way that the whole world is going.”
Of course, open bidding does mean that Nobul could have the affect of compressing commission fees, which agents are often reluctant to do. “Sure, it’s inevitable,” he agrees, but points out that fee compression won’t hurt Nobul’s bottom line. “We make our money not on the commission, but on the property value. We get 20 basis points on the property value … which is $2,000 per million of property value. Fee compression over time will have zero impact on our revenue.”
Further, he says regulators Nobul has spoken with when negotiating entering new markets approve of the company’s goals. “Regulators are trying to achieve transparency, price competition, get rid of price fixing, they wanted the public to be happy with the biggest fees they pay in their lives. Everybody else talks about how it’s the biggest purchase in your life, they often forget to mention it’s the biggest fee you’ll ever pay, too.”
Nobul will need scale in order to work, which is why it is already expanding across Canada and into the United States. To help with that, it has attracted an enviable collection of investors in its multimillion-dollar seed fundraising, including some big-time real estate developers (a notoriously risk-averse group).
“People are looking to what makes life easy for them, where do they get a benefit? Clients want the cheapest quality brokers, this allows a buyer or seller to reach out to hundreds or thousands of brokers,” says Sheldon Fenton, CEO of Reserve Capital, which with Reserve Properties has built more than 12,000 housing units over the past 30 years. Mr. Fenton said that in addition to knowing Mr. McGee and his family, he liked the investing team and management (the board includes Canadian business notable Blake Goldring). “Developers are typically conservative. I invest in a limited number of tech opportunities that are not necessarily real estate driven. This is one we took a shine to – this is a small investment for us – but I put my money up and I believe in their concept.”
