Savvy Homes Portal aims to make it easy and affordable for real estate agents to integrate virtual reality into their business. I caught up with Lauren Taylor for a chat on the benefits of virtual reality for realtors and the real estate market.

HH: Ok, thanks for joining us today Miss. Taylor, so I understand you’re with Savvy Homes Portal. Could you tell me about the services you provide?

Lauren Taylor: Yes, absolutely! So Savvy Homes Portal is the very first virtual reality house hunting platform for realtor agent and what that really means is that, it allows our agents to use our membership subscription to set up private space with their home buyers online. Where they can easily facilitate a video and virtual reality house hunting. So we train our agents to instead of going out and taking their clients out on Saturday and Sunday to see the house in person, to really provide more of a concierge service through virtual reality by going to the properties in creating three sixty tours of the homes during the week so that way their clients can enjoy them by their own timeframe. A lot of our buyers love to go home and now sharing lots of wine on the couch with their spouse and do a little bit house hunting before they ever spend any time in the car driving around to actually see houses.

HH: So what sorts of benefits would realtors see by integrating for virtual reality into their businesses?

Lauren Taylor: A lot! that’s a great question. My team here in San Diego has been using this system in this process for about the last year and in the last nine months we’ve closed about three hundred thousand dollars in commission directly from this. Our agents work eighty-five percent less weekends. Weekends are a huge hurdle in our business, so they definitely enjoy the change in the schedule, they also enjoy a scalability of the buyer side that we’ve never really seen before so the average agent can usually help between one to two homebuyers on the weekends because of the limitations with showing properties. But by using virtual house hunting where instead of twenty-five minute showings on the weekends with each property, you’re doing a seven-minute video Monday through Friday. Our agents are actually able to help, which means five to seven buyers a week versus one to two buyers a week that we typically see, so it’s really been the first steps in our industry towards scaling the buyer side of the business that we’ve already seen on the listing side, now we’re bringing it to the other one.

HH: So which types of future homeowners would benefit most from you using virtual reality to help them choose a home?

Lauren Taylor: That’s a great question, so we have a couple demographics which obviously have a tendency to really be drawn towards our technology, the first one being the average busy house hunter. So any home with a family and anyone who is taking kids along with house hunting knows it’s not the greatest experience and getting someone to watch your kids on the weekend, while you go and look for house isn’t always easy either. So a lot of our parents with young kids are actually opting for this service because they want to make sure that the time they spend at the house they want to see is actually the house that they want to see first. There’s two other demographics, one would be relocating professionals, so for instance here in Southern California we have a new hospital that’s opening up that’s about sixty miles away from the two previous hospitals so we’re seeing a huge influx of people requesting the service in that area because we have about thirty thousand people who are relocating because of this big opening. So any type of big professional change, a new hospital opening, and then, obviously, with the military community, we’re also very big. These are individuals who have to find their homes in a very tight timeline and they’re moving whether there’s a house there or not so we’ve had a tremendous amount of support within the military community, who are really asking for their agents to provide the service so they can house hunt from across the world.

HH: So what are some of the obstacles to adopt in virtual reality by realtor and how do your services at Savvy Homes Portal help to solve them?

Lauren Taylor: In the real estate industry, we don’t have widespread adoption. Right now the cost of entry to provide virtual reality has been the greatest hurdle in regards to adoption in our industry. We as a company have really put ourselves in the position to be able to bring this to the medium price point across the country and the median homeowner/home buyer across the country. Just based on the fact that opposed to it costing an agent three to four hundred dollars to create one virtual tour, our service costs about ninety-nine dollars a month and you can create twenty-five. So we really want to position ourselves to be able to take this to the masses and take the cost away from it and use the technology that has become much more inexpensive over the last six to twelve months and put it in places where more people can take advantage of it.

HH: Well that’s all the questions I’ve got, anything you’d like to add?

Lauren Taylor: No, just that I’m we’re already receiving buyer inquiries through our website which are basically buyers who are looking for more agents who are providing this service. So we anticipate sending out those buyers to our members and we’re excited to see our masses of agent’s crowd not only here in the U.S. cross the world.

HH: Also thank you

Lauren Taylor: No problem, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

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