Bill and Debbie Harris of Salt Lake City spent only one day house hunting in Spokane, Wash., before they made an offer on a property there.
Using Web sites that provide online tours of homes for sale, the Harrises narrowed their search to a dozen homes before they even arrived in Washington, where they plan to move next month.
“It enabled us to save a tremendous amount of time,” said Bill Harris, who listed the Salt Lake City home they just sold on the Internet as well.
Real estate Web sites once contained only listings of homes for sale. The more sophisticated ones included a photo of the front of the home. Few people looked at the sites before buying homes.
These days, real estate Web pages get thousands of hits every day from visitors who access high-quality digital images that provide tours of not only home exteriors, but interiors as well. Some Web pages also feature images of the neighborhood or even aerial views of the property.
While some of the pages include static images of each room, others provide moving images and even 360-degree views of each part of the house.
Online tours have become an increasingly popular way to advertise homes.
Popular sites that provide both types of online tours include www.realtor.com, www.bamboo.com, www.slcity.com and www.360house.com.
Buyers and sellers like online tours for two reasons: cost and quality.
Spencer Passey, a Realtor with Re/Max in Midvale, Utah, passed over online tours because he believed the cost did not justify an online ad featuring one photo of the exterior of a client’s home.
“Now the quality is much better and the price is much more feasible,” he said.
Most homes advertised on the Web using online tours are priced at more than $250,000.
But a growing number of online listings are those like the Harrises’ home, which sold several weeks ago for about $140,000.
The cost to put images on a Web site ranges from $50 to several hundred dollars, depending on the number and complexity of the digital images. Realtors typically manage the bill for their clients, just as they do for classified advertisements and other forms of marketing.
Scott Harwell, principal of www.slcity.com, said although the quality of online tours has increased in recent years and the cost has declined, some drawbacks persist.
For starters, home buyers must have access to a computer less than a few years old with speed and memory capable of handling huge digital files.
Another downside is that while static images can be printed, moving images cannot.
And, he said, only a fraction of the homes for sale in any city have photos online.
“Sometimes Realtors get nervous these Web pages will replace them,” Harwell said. “But all it is is another marketing tool–they need to learn to use it.”
