While there has been an ease in lockdowns, currently most businesses are still working from home, and social distancing is still in force to contain the spread of the pandemic. Almost all business are relying on technology to ensure business continuity. While virtual and augmented reality are finding their way into more and more business applications, mixed reality is also making inroads into businesses. These technologies, when combined, are making experience so much more rich and real today.  In the case of mixed reality, the combination of VR and AR  offers best of both worlds- providing highly interactive aspects and addition of realistic projection to our surroundings.

In the real estate sphere, virtual reality and virtual tours have played a huge role in the recent past especially in the residential sector. Now due to the current situation, using virtual reality is a great way of looking at a  property, even in the commercial sphere. Virtual viewing allows a convenient way to display the property, highlight important spaces and allows a visitor to navigate the space on their own, checking  every detail of the property, taking time to analyse and select the best suitable option for them. Property owners can include information points where the client can click to get details and inform the viewers of exclusive features of the property. This technology is cost effective and consumes less time as compared to travelling miles to visit properties. Virtual tour software like 3D mapping, viewing of virtual floorplans allow real estate professionals to reach their customers,  interact with them, albeit in a virtual space.

Many companies believe that virtual tours are expensive and take time to create. However, this is not the case.  One such example is WordPress with a feature of exclusive plugin called WPVR that helps create a virtual tour without any hassle. It is as simple as plugging in 360 panorama images, linking the images and turning it into a virtual tour. There are other professional platforms which are tailormade for real estate requirements that can be used to create your own virtual tours, digital twin of the workspace and other such things. In fact, streaming technology has advanced to the point where video tours, floor plans and other interactive offerings are standard tools on most real estate websites.

While a great marketing tool for developers, with the ongoing pandemic, brokers are also taking advantage of this technology to engage with their clients, walking through sites and sharing the virtual walkthroughs with clients. Although not yet mainstream across markets, virtual walkthroughs are a great way to shortlist properties. In the near future we will see wider adoption of this technology, where one can view a property without having to travel miles. The time is not far away when the entire site selection process will be concluded over the digital scape.