Given the current scenarios, it has become essential for realtors to adopt new strategies for connecting with customers while selling and leasing homes. Precisely why, many real estate agencies are encouraging realtors to switch to virtual house tours from in-person ones. This is where live video integration plays a key role.
Expansion of Virtual Tours with Live Video Annotation
Sure, it’s slightly odd for anyone to make a hefty investment of buying a house without physically visiting it. But a virtual tour helps to a great extent! When realtors offer virtual tours using live video, homebuyers can easily check every corner of the property, know all the details, enquire information and then if all works well, follow it up by visiting the house in person. This conversation can be hosted from the comfort of wherever they are or on the go.
To achieve this, many realtors have resorted to using standalone video calling applications such as Zoom, FaceTime, or even chat applications like WhatsApp for virtual tours. But here’s a glitch- even though these applications are seemingly useful, many lack the capability of offering in-app experiences where the buyer can filter a list of homes, select an agent, schedule an appointment, take a virtual tour and record it, all within the same app. Currently, homebuyers have to sweat themselves by using multiple applications to achieve all of this, which may result in losing contextual information.
In addition, buyers do not want to disclose their contact information in the initial buying cycle but popular apps such as WhatsApp would need phone numbers to connect.
The CPaaS Revolution
At this point, CPaaS platforms that provide flexible video calling & chat APIs and SDKs empower realty companies to integrate communication and collaborative features within their existing reality app or software. With easy-to-use communication APIs, companies can seamlessly add in their preferred communication channels within the application, with just a few lines of code.
Doing so encourages realtors and homebuyers to have an in-app, contextual, end-to-end experience. While on one end, realtors will be able to maintain a full context of homebuyers’ information and browsing history, buyers can also kickstart the house hunting and finalising process all within the same app.
In addition, CPaaS platforms also offer collaborative features such as co-browsing and annotation to assist buyer-agent communications. Realtors can take the advantage of recording their virtual house tours in advance and sharing it with prospective buyers so that the ones who are interested can watch it the very moment they feel like it.
Another important benefit of using CPaaS is that while developing the app, a developer can set up phone number proxies to keep both buyers and sellers from knowing each other’s phone numbers. The same technique can be used to send SMS to each other without revealing their personal phone numbers. This ability of number masking acts as a layer of security that protects both the buyers and sellers from fraudulent and dangerous threats.
Partnering with EnableX
By embedding video calls directly into a website or mobile applications with EnableX live video, realtors can accelerate the development process for the greater good. Using our Video API, realtors can initiate a one-on-one video call with buyers. Leveraging rich digital content and property images, realtors can also present a comprehensive, interactive house tour by showing apartment floorplans, community amenities, optional 3D video tours, pricing and availability information. While they are at it, they can also record the entire video call to be used later if required. Additionally, with the help of our SMS API, homebuyers can be notified of their appointment or any other updates.
EnableX Communications Solutions with Live Video Annotation simplify the virtual home selling process for both realtors and buyers by eliminating the need to conduct calls on multiple applications, each with its own rules and quirks.
Learn more about EnableX Video API
