Image above: The Malibu, Calif., mansion overlooks the Pacific Ocean. Source: REX
Standing in the living room of an oceanside $57.5 million home in Malibu, Calif., Jack Ryan, the founder of REX, an online brokerage, took in the view.
“The only way you can sell a house like this,” he said, as the shimmer of the Pacific glinted off gleaming white lawn furniture outside, “is have them walk through it, either physically or virtually.”
Ryan, a former partner at Goldman Sachs and a onetime opponent of Barack Obama for the Illinois Senate seat, founded REX in 2015 as a low-priced competitor to traditional real estate brokers. According to Ryan, whose business plan involves targeted online ads and charges a fraction of the normal broker’s fee, there’s an 80 percent chance that the buyer of an $800,000 home already lives within 15 miles of its location; still, as prices rise to levels only the super-rich can afford, that number plummets.
“For homes like this,” Ryan said, gesturing to the house’s fireplace, “there’s a 50 percent chance that the buyer is outside the U.S., in around 15 financial capitals—London, Shanghai, Paris, Beijing.”
To reach that elusive group of the super-rich, Ryan had to get creative, which is why he decided to pay Legend3D to map the house and create an interactive video.
“If someone’s in Moscow and sees a picture of this home, they say, ‘Eh, it’s over in Malibu, all I see is this photo; I’m not enthused,” Ryan said. “But if we send them a 3D, fully immersive experience, they can really see the waves and get a feel for this house and say: ‘it’s perfect for me.’”
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Image above: A view from the living room to the ocean. Source: REX
Selling It
Most people associate virtual reality (VR) with Oculus Rift and other video-game-oriented headsets, where users strap a black box onto their faces and enter a world where they can look up, down, and behind as the movie or game rolls along. But VR can also, it turns out, be a sales tool.
“It’s probably one of the only forms of marketing right now that consumers choose to actively engage with,” said Patrick Milling Smith, co-founder and chief executive officer of the VR production company Here Be Dragons, whose clients include Samsung, Nike, and NBC. “They actively engage with it with a sense of wonderment and excitement—you put on a headset, and you’re fully immersed.” (For an example, see the video below.)
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Source: Bloomberg