3D technology has made it onto television screens — and now it’s changing the way real estate is bought and sold. WSJ’s Josh Barbanel reports. Photo: Agaton Strom for The Wall Street Journal
Soon apartment hunters in Manhattan may no longer be required to tramp from one open house to the next only to rule out unsuitable properties.
Instead, they will be able to take high-definition walk-throughs of listings through a sort of Google Street View for real estate.
Halstead Property, a brokerage with 1,200 agents in the New York metropolitan area, has just adopted the 3-D technology and says it will become a standard feature for many of its Manhattan listings.
The tool allows buyers to tour a property online, peering out of windows and checking details from kitchen appliances to bathroom fixtures. A mouse click allows a viewer to virtually descend right into a room.
It is the sort of technology that many in the real-estate world say could revolutionize their industry, following earlier innovations such as full-color print advertisements, web listings, photo slideshows and video tours.
“It is all about additional transparency for the consumer,” said Diane M. Ramirez, chief executive of Halstead Property. “That is what I find so exciting about it.”
While the edited videos “give you the essence of the apartment, this allows you to delve into the actual rooms,” she said.
A sister company, Brown Harris Stevens, also owned by Terra Holdings LLC, is planning to introduce 3-D walk-throughs of its listings early next year, a spokeswoman said. Among the city’s other top residential real-estate players, Douglas Elliman said it has been closely following developments in the field, while a spokesman for the Corcoran Group said it was “looking into the technology.”
In contrast to highly produced video tours, everything the 3-D camera sees appears as is and is essentially unedited. It is free of broker babble or spin, and is interactive and under the control of the viewer.
The 3-D system used by Halstead was introduced in July by Matterport Inc., a three-year-old Mountain View, Calif., startup. Matthew Leone, director of web marketing at Halstead, said the company had been testing the camera for months but waited until some bugs were fixed before putting it into production.
Meanwhile, Redfin Corp., a discount online real-estate broker, bought Matterport cameras for half of its 48 broker offices across the U.S. Its agents have produced more than 850 high-tech walk-throughs so far, a Redfin spokeswoman said.
“It is going to be used in any camera-ready home, homes that will shoot well,” said Mr. Leone of Halstead, “without regard to price point. Our job is to sell homes, and this initiative can help.”
The costs are low enough to be comparable to or less than professional photographs of apartment listings, Mr. Leone said. Prices on the Matterport website are $4,500 for a camera, plus $19 charged to the brokers for each produced tour, and monthly hosting fees.
Eventually 3-D capture technology will be built into cellphones, said Bill Brown, chief executive officer of Matterport, which is a partner of a Google-sponsored 3-D project known as Project Tango to create hardware and software needed for 3-D in smartphones.
In a four-bedroom duplex penthouse loft on West 22nd Street, videographer Ray Parada connected a tripod to the Matterport camera, a rectangular black box with a collection of lenses and sensors on the front.
Mr. Parada set it down in the 33-foot-wide living room, stepped into another room and pressed a button on an iPad. The camera began to hum as it spun around, pausing at intervals as it captured images and recorded distances between objects. The images and data were transmitted via Bluetooth to the iPad.
He then moved the camera dozens of times through the apartment. As the images were processed, a floor plan of the apartment began to fill out. When the shoot was done, the file was transmitted to Matterport, which created the 3-D showcase and put it on a server.
As a user navigates deep into a bedroom on the 3-D display for the penthouse, past an antique gold mirror, there is a surprise—a view through a window of a splash of green grass along the High Line.
Elissa Burke, a Halstead broker who also owns the condo listed for $7.2 million, said she expected the 3-D walk-through would be an important feature, especially for foreign buyers who want to screen properties remotely and for people who are undecided.
Even before 3-D, she said, “people who are undecided, they go back over to the pictures and the video over and over again.”
By: Josh Barbanel - The Wall Street Journal
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