Australia’s BoxBrownie has built a new tool that lets agents, homeowners and developers showcase and tour properties that don’t yet exist.
A component of the company’s powerful 3D rendering and photography enhancement capabilities, the CGI VR Tour can be applied to renovation scenarios, architectural presentations and new construction sales.
Users tour a property as they would any other immersive, 3D experience. But what they see doesn’t yet exist, at least not in its final physical form.
Using arrows, hot spots and varying perspectives, a virtual room or property can be walked through, panned around and even viewed on an interactive floor plan.
Perhaps most impressive is the virtual render’s ability to offer multiple “package” views, or finish choices, ranging from different cabinet and countertop combos, to alternative flooring, paint schemes and appliance looks.
BoxBrownie’s Peter Schravemade told Inman in an email that the new service brings together the company’s render/CGI department with the recently launched virtual tour department.
“The product is largely requested by builders and developers,” he said. “The concept is to give the purchaser an immersive tour of a property that doesn’t exist or is being heavily renovated by rendering that space as a tour.”
Check out a few examples of the renderings:
Although interior rendering tools are common in architecture offices, they’re not so much marketed to the real estate industry or priced aggressively enough for small custom homebuilders, cabinet makers and other segments of the housing vertical.
Thanks to BoxBrownie’s pricing and creative flexibility, a technology that was once only accessible to the deep pockets of commercial developers and interior design firms is now available to a much broader market.
Schravemade said the pandemic became an unsuspecting driver of the new product’s growth within the construction space. Builders can use the new technology to avoid building a model home or partial display units, potentially helping them save hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“The crazy thing has been the demand,” he said. “No one really knew COVID was about to hit, and all of a sudden, builders and developers want a way to immerse the prospective purchaser in their new development.”
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
