A key challenge for the Commercial Real Estate (CRE) industry during the current lockdown situation is the need to continue business flow with the least physical interaction with customers as possible.
This is a huge change to most service providers, but for the CRE industry, it is disruptive.
Majority of CRE companies prefer the certainty and predictability that a one-on-one conversation brings. For most clients, dealing face-to-face was essential. Despite all the photos and videos, the final decision was made after visiting the premises in person. And we shouldn't expect this practice would change any time soon.
However, when every other competitor today provides virtual tours - do you want to be the one that doesn't do it? Do you remember the time when ads didn't have property pictures?
Times are changing and the Tech sector is helping businesses in this transition.
Here are the main tasks that our team was asked to help with during this lockdown. These are sorted by priority and importance mentioned by the company:
1. Internal collaboration
Zoom became exceedingly popular, mainly due to the ease of setting up large video conferences. However, for a performant teamwork just video calls are not enough. You need to:
quickly discuss topics with multiple people
share files
work together on the same document
Usually it was done via Emails, but the world moved on - and there is new tech that can become your new collaboration platform.
Today’s market currently has only two systems that can handle video calls and asynchronous work:
Both platforms are quite similar - you work in groups; and each group has their own set of channels.
For people who always worked next to each other in an office setup - Microsoft Teams and Slack became the only real alternative that could support remote work.
2. Virtual tours (Matterport or not?)
There has been a huge spike in demand for virtual tour technology. The pioneer in this market is Matterport (www.matterport.com). However, this company has a few important drawbacks:
All videos are published on their proprietary platform.
You need an expensive camera to capture images, which you either rent or buy.
Their camera is quite bulky, so not really handy
If you'd opt for an alternative 360-degree camera - the result wouldn't be as crisp.
In summary, you’ll need an expensive, bulky object that will need to be brought to each property, and passed on to every broker in your team, teach each one how to use it, and you get tied to using one platform for good.
Matterport is the leading service, but there are several alternatives:
Eyespy360 (www.eyespy360.com) - allows you to create virtual tours using your phone camera, but the end-result virtual tours still need to be hosted on their proprietary platform.
Zillow 3D Home Tour (www.zillow.com/marketing/3d-home/) – Best for Agents wanting to create free 3D tours with smartphones.
VPiX (www.vpix360.com) – Best for Realty professionals seeking to create branded virtual property tours for social media posts.
Pano2VR (ggnome.com/pano2vr) – Great for Professionals seeking to add advanced virtual tour customization like design skins.
TourWeaver 7 (www.easypano.com/virtual-tour-software.html) – Excellent for Agents wanting clickable 3D floor plans as navigation for virtual property walk-throughs.
3DVista (www.3dvista.com) – Best for Professionals who want to add their virtual property tours to Google Maps.
3. "Internal LinkedIn"
Another pressing concern for the CRE teams is collaboration in complex deals. Your large social network - is always helpful in B2B world. However not as many companies realise that leverage your "Internal LinkedIn" of relationships.
It can be challenging to find who is the best fellow broker to reach out about a customer. Who has the strongest relationship, who did "industrial" or "office" deals, which geography they are responsible for.
And if your organization has more than a few offices - this search could take hours.
Together with our customer, we have developed a solution that made relationships visible to other brokers and simple to find. In a couple of clicks, you could find the client's Real Estate manager and identify which broker worked with this client.
In essence, it is an "Internal LinkedIn" that shows the strength of a relationship. Because it is based on lease history and sale history to create that network. The idea is to help the sales team find the right contact for each customer or for the internal side.
4. Performance analysis
Being efficient is the most important during a crysis. And business intelligence solutions like Microsoft PowerBI, Tableau, QlickView can easily show your most crucial data:
Team performance
Property performance
Portfolio performance
A significant amount of any company's data is stored across different systems. Our task was to connect and organize different datasources into several easy dashboards.
To help focus on amount of revenue generated by each broker and speed of deal completion; team historic performance and how it dropped during this lockdown.
It was crucial to see actual numbers on different markets and regions. Information needed to be easily accessible and easy to understand.
There are several leaders on the market in business intelligence mentioned above. Their main advantage they could be easily built by anyone who ever customized Excel in the past.
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