Can VR revolutionise commercial real estate marketing?

The commercial real estate industry in Australia employs all sorts of marketing tricks to entice potential tenants, but vacancies are still getting harder to fill – even for the perfect office spaces at great locations.

This failure to fill vacancies is not for lack of effort. In fact, brokers invest a lot of their energy and time in explaining the best features of an unfurnished space; however, what they fail to realise is that words can hardly help a potential tenant visualise these features.

No matter how great you are with words, you can’t present all the great possibilities that a perfect office space offers in a convincing way. A lot is left to the tenant’s imagination. For example, it would be extremely difficult for a broker to explain the exterior and interior of a property that isn’t built yet so that clients can see what’s being offered.

This communication gap is the primary reason for brokers’ difficulties in filling vacancies in the commercial real estate industry. Focusing on how to get rid of this communication gap can pay huge dividends. The trick is to use visualisation rather than words to convey your marketing messages. And when it comes to visualisation, there is no better tool than Virtual Reality (VR).

While more or more professionals are incorporating revolutionary technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) in various industries, the commercial real estate industry is slow to adapt.

Here are the three reasons why you should start incorporating VR in your marketing campaigns for commercial real estate immediately:

It helps tenants see a space before it’s even furnished

Virtual Reality solves this problem easily. Just by putting on VR headsets or goggles, your clients can see how their office would look after it has been furnished. In fact, they can rearrange furniture and redesign spaces in a more immersive VR experience.

Other industries, such as hospitality, can also benefit greatly from VR. If you run a hotel, you can put your guests right there in the room before they commit to a booking.

One can take VR’s immersive experience further with the help of Augmented Reality (AR). You can transform a space captured by a camera with the help of AR and modify the space, whether changing the cabinetry’s colour or adding furniture from an e-commerce catalogue.

Offers your clients convenience

If you want to rent a large office space in a prime location, your potential clients will likely be businesspersons. Taking time out from their busy schedules to tour the property may be very inconvenient for them. You can make it extremely easier for them to tour the property from any place with the help of VR. This is especially true for international clients.

VR is the next big revolution in visual marketing.

Visuals have been an integral part of marketing for decades. Businesses used photos and then started focusing on videos. Drones have been in the trend for a while now as they made it possible to see a property in a whole new way, but the next big revolution in VR.

Billions of dollars are being invested in making this technology more accessible, immersive and cost-effective. Those who adopt it now will have a definitive edge over their competitors in the long run. They will find it easier to keep pace with the advancement of this technology.

Despite all these benefits, many believe that VR is not cost-effective. Instead of measuring the ROI that VR can provide, they take into account its up-front costs and write it off. However, the reality is that losses that a month’s vacancy can incur are usually far greater than VR marketing costs.

In conclusion, VR is the technology of the present and the future. Forward-looking professionals in the commercial real estate industry can benefit greatly by incorporating it into their marketing campaigns.