Real estate agents have one goal — to sell a house or a building. Potential homeowners or businesspeople have the goal of buying them. Naturally, both of them can benefit greatly from immersive technology.
For years, real estate sales of homes were more or less the same. For example, a potential client looks at a catalog of houses (in print or online), visits the ones they’re interested in and talks to a real estate agent. They give them a tour of the house, talk about odds and ends of the property and, if all goes well, negotiate the price. However, for both parties, this is a time-consuming job, especially if they end up with no deal. But immersive technology can actually help them both.
Where and How Can Immersive Technology Help?
Using an AR or VR headset, a potential buyer can have a tour of the house as if they were in a 3D-generated environment. The only difference is that they would be going through actual footage of the house, taken with a 360-degree camera. Naturally, the footage would be up-to-date for every home. That way, real estate agents won’t go through the trouble of misrepresenting a home they’re selling.
As far as real estate agents themselves are concerned, they would have a set or two of VR devices themselves. In other words, they would be bringing immersive technology with them when they talk to clients. So instead of the client making the trip to the house, the real estate agent visits them at any location they choose and goes over the home there. For example, we can contact our agent and go to a local bar. While we’re there, the agent pulls out their headset and a laptop. While we’re browsing the house via the headset, they’re following alongside us by looking at the laptop’s screen. That way they can guide us and answer our questions without the effort of, say, climbing up and down stairs, walking around the house and the yard, etc.
Another added benefit of this method is that they can show us several houses on the spot. In other words, we are literally a click or two away from viewing the next house we’re interested in.
Real Estate User Base of Immersive Technology
To get a basic idea of the size of our potential user base, we decided to focus on four major real-estate markets globally. Those are the markets of the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany.
According to the National Association of Realtors, the USA has around 1.2 million registered real estate agents. OC&C Strategy Consultants give us the number of 32.000 registered agents in Germany and 22.000 in the UK. Finally, there are about 123.000 Japanese real estate agents, based on the statistics by the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism.
Potential Revenue in the Coming Years
Our conservative estimate is that the market for immersive technology in real estate will turn a profit of $2.6 billion by the year 2025. It’s important to note that this number takes into account only one-tenth of potential real estate agents as users or 130.000 AR/VR headset owners. Each headset is likely to cost about $5.000. In addition, this number of owners takes into account an annual 10% growth in total earnings.
Of course, this doesn’t take into account the actual buyers. With proper marketing, the immersive technology product sales revenue would increase within a base that goes beyond real estate agents.
