Tour Website

This is an interesting discussion and really deserves more attention than it gets throughout the industry.

We have been producing "visual" tours for our listings and website for over three years now. This has proved to be reason we were selected listing agent in many cases. I did a study about a year ago of all active listings in our MLS at that time 9,986 and it turned out that only about 10% had any type of visual tour and those 10% were controlled by less than 2% of the agents. The average agent had just over 1 listing while the agents that used visual tours on their listings had just over 3 listings each (average). Proving, if nothing else, you have a good chance of improving your number of listings if you take the trouble to learn how to do a "visual" tour of any kind.

We have always concentrated on listings...My wife favorite saying is "List to Live" and since we really stepped up our marketing to focus primarily (I'd say over 95%) to on sellers our listing have shown a steady increase to the point we usually average over 50 active listings but in this down market, including our land listing we are approaching 100.

Our visual tours have evolved over the years from a simple photostory produced slideshow to our current full production tours that include visuals, transitions, titles, narrative and background music. Total cost of production software is under $200 and the website host we use charges $49 a month and we have yet to blow our bandwidth even with 50+ tours at an average of 10MB each. Our next step is to incorporate full motion video in lieu of multiple stills and we are researching video capture systems now. Podcasts are right behind that. So I'm hopeful that this forum will gain more members interested in pushing the technology with recommendations on what works and what doesn't.

Our visual tour website is www.thegilliggroup.com. Please visit and see what you think. Any and all comments appreciated. And yes the narrative is computer generated from a text file that we can also use with little modification for our "Audio" tours that are hosted through Arch Telecom and are referenced from all yard signs and print ads. We were having major issues in getting audio's recorded for both tours since no one in our group enjoys that task. This has proven to be a real time saver and the sellers have never raised it as an issue. And it does get the point across.

If anyone has specific questions regarding tour production or the website in general please do not hesitate to ask...