Technology is changing the way Realtors and photographers showcase luxury residential real estate properties, with cinematic videos beginning to replace virtual tours.
Realtors are using photos and videos of high-end properties—priced at $2 million or above—to sell sight-unseen listings to international and Mainland-based second home buyers.
“People don’t have to wait to buy here anymore, and they don’t have to see it in person—they just fly in for the inspection,” James Chan, a partner and Realtor for Locations, told Pacific Business News at a roundtable discussion this month. “We are using technology to make the property and the experience as realistic as possible as if they were there in person.”
Although this technology has created an opportunity to expand the reach of a property to more high-end buyers, Realtors still prefer to show the property in person due to the higher fall-out rate, which is about 30 percent for sight-unseen purchases.
Real estate companies are also using other ways to show properties such as 360-degree pictures and virtual reality tours, though this method may become a thing of the past as software advances and the average attention span shortens.
Kenji Croman, the founder of aerial photography company Kenji Croman Photography, said short cinematic videos are replacing 360-degree pictures of properties.
“The 360 stuff has been out there for a while, and it is getting a bit old. It’s just what they use for Google earth—it's nothing fancy,” Croman said. “The big thing now is highlight videos of a property. Attention spans are getting shorter, and so by concentrating on the best part of a house and creating a short, entertaining video, it garners enough interest to make people want more.”
Croman uses drones to film real estate properties, and then uses Adobe’s Premiere Pro to cut and edit the clips. Recently, Croman filmed one of the Alexander and Baldwin empty lots on Kahala Avenue for Hawaii Life, the company listing the property.
“It is a really nice empty property, and I used drones to create clips of the lot and then threw in some b-roll footage of flowers and the ocean to make it seem more appealing,” Croman said.
One way that Croman has utilized 360-degree pictures is when he partnered with Howard Hughes in taking aerial drone pictures of the Ward Village Aalii tower, which is still in the permitting process.
“They wanted panoramic, 360-degree views of where the tower was going to be built to show what the view from each floor would look like,” Croman said. “It was extremely challenging because they wanted exact measurements, and I only had about two feet of wiggle room.”
Look out for this week's PBN print issue to read more about the changing industry of residential real estate.