Using 3-8-tive, technical and virtual tour synergies within 3-8-tivity and  3-8-tive 360˚ , AroundMyProperty.com has been launched to fill a gap in the UK property market - that of providing high quality, yet affordable, virtual tours within the price range of most estate agents and landlords. By tapping into a network of selected virtual tour photographers and using high quality, fast turn-around, virtual tour production workflows that the two parent companies have pioneered and perfected - AroundMyProperty.com beats all the competition on price and time-to-market (not that there is much competition in this highly specialised and multi-disciplinary service industry).

3-8-tivity naturally has provided the start-up capital and web hosting and design resources. Our cloud computing resources are scalable to host fast, high resolution, virtual tours of every property in the UK and beyond...

There is no question that virtual tours are the best way to market properties and from a customer perspective they are the ultimate in convenience. Estate agents should find they need to finance fewer but higher-conversion-rate viewings because the quality of intent of the prospective customer will be so much higher when they have seen a virtual tour of the property before hand. Less time will be wasted all around. Customers will naturally gravitate towards estate agents who offer virtual tours, and sellers will also naturally gravitate to the same estate agents offering virtual tours because it is without doubt the best way to market their property and minimises the number of as-soon-as-they-turned-up-to-view-the-property-we-knew-they-were-not-interested "viewings".

On the lettings side, in addition to the clearly superior marketing they provide, virtual tours provide a detailed record of the state of the property - which is in the interests of both landlords and tenants.

We think money will gradually shift from archaic paper-based advertising, stills photography, and expensive high-street offices - to web-based virtual estate agencies offering exclusively virtual tours. These will have much lower overheads and therefore will be able to charge lower fees. In the short-to-medium term the first agencies to adopt the virtual estate agency model will be the long-term winners because they will get to a critical mass that others will find impossible to replicate (look at lastminute.com and Google).

It is early days yet, but in the not too distant future virtual tours will become the norm and not offering them will cast an air of suspicion over the property and/or the estate agency. Suffice to say that eventually all estate agents will have to offer virtual tours of all their properties if they are to survive...
November 2009