Online apartment listing service Apartments.com announced that it will be introducing virtual reality integration for all of their online content that is 3D.
Apartments.com is an online apartment listing website, used by renters across the United States. They rely on apartment communities to sign on to advertise with their website, which they then serve to their community of apartment hunters. They are currently running a high-profile campaign that stars Jeff Goldblum.
Apartments.com has been focused on technology for their user-experiences recently, announcing their enhanced map service that includes a “draw your own neighborhood” feature called Polygon. The feature was released in the Spring of 2015, and is targeted at apartment-hunters that want to get very granular in their search. This tool allows someone to get deeper than just searching with a zip code, which often gives too many results. If you know exactly where you want to live, you can draw that area on a map and get results that are only in that area.
The virtual reality integration announcement is their latest venture into technology, and what they deem a way “to stay ahead of the curve.” They are adopting CoreVR so that they can offer a virtual reality ecosystem as an enhanced experience for their website users. Soon, apartment hunters will be able to place themselves in the spaces that they are considering living in.
The real estate listing service will be offering this immersive home-selection experience by turning its Matterport Spaces into 3D and virtual reality tours. Matterport is a technology that builds the actual 3D files. It is a media solutions company that takes physical spaces and creates digital replicas that act as representations of the space for 3D and virtual reality purposes. The company is only about five years old, so it’s right in that space of crossing over from a startup. Working with a national company like Apartments.com on its apartment spaces project has probably worked in their favor.
Apartments.com lists that they currently have over 60,000 tours available that are already 3D. These 60,000 tours, however, only represent 20,000 properties. Still, they claim that these numbers represent the most 3D tours in the apartment listing industry. The 3D spaces allow you to view your potential homes in an enhanced way, but virtual reality searches will allow you to feel like you are actually in the space.
This is a pretty exciting development in apartment-hunting. While I’m still only slowly adapting to virtual reality, this is an area where I think it can do a lot for consumers. It would be much easier for me to narrow my search if I am able to enter a realistic representation of the spaces.
Would you use virtual reality for your apartment or house hunting?
