Originally published on LinkedIn by our Senior Mobile Engineer & Director of Augmented Reality at Monstarlab, Roxana Nagy.
Competition in Real Estate is fierce, especially in a market like Dubai, where I actually got inspired to find out more on how Augmented Reality (AR) can be a game changer for this industry.
Whether it is viewing a building in 3D or virtually customizing your future dream home, AR delivers a unique and seamless experience for home buyers and property investors.
4 great ways to use Augmented Reality in Real Estate
- See and interact with the building in 3D
- See and interact with the floor plans in 3D
- Get personalized home stagings
- Visualize different customization options of a property
You can see a glimpse of the points above in this amazing conceptual video about the future of home buying put together by LNG Studios.
Benefits for the Buyer
Buying a property is one of the biggest financial investments in one’s life.
Sometimes, the buyers have to make this decision without being able to do in-person viewings, for example when a property is not fully built yet or if they want to make a purchase from overseas. Looking at 2D drawings of the floor plans, pictures or 3D miniature models of the buildings just seem behind our times, and they don’t provide a good overview of the space. With the use of Augmented Reality, they will be able to experience an interactive property hunting from the comfort of their homes, which will save them time and more importantly during a pandemic, keep them safe.
When visiting properties in real life, being able to better visualize their preferred furniture setup and even customize a property, for example the colors of the walls, can provide them with a more informed decision.
Image source: Dulux Paints
Benefits for the Seller
Get ahead of competitors with a forward thinking presence in the Real Estate market.
According to Statista, by 2023 there will be an estimated 2.4 billion mobile Augmented Reality users worldwide, which means that sellers can reach potential buyers, fast and at a large scale with the use of AR.
Real Estate sellers are able to create personal tours and customize unique experiences for each potential buyer, increasing the sell chance. Think of it as home stagings, but without the challenge of having to pick a style that will be liked by everybody.
Having an app where potential buyers can interact with properties opens up possibilities of great data. Sellers can implement Analytics, which can tell them how many people interacted with a property, for how long, what aesthetics they liked and many more indicators that can tell them where to invest more efforts.
Image source: The Future of Real Estate AR by LNG Studios
With the use of location based AR, future buildings can come to life in the exact location of the construction plot.
What you should keep in mind if you want to add AR capabilities to your Real Estate Business
The 3D models creation will constitute a large part of the budget needed for a solution like this. The advantage in this industry is that there might already be floor plans and models available digitally.
Always make sure to provide proper hints and guidelines to your users as AR is still a new field. Thankfully, many AR frameworks like ARKit already offer out of the box visual guides which are easy to implement and familiar to the users.
Bringing the idea to life
To validate the usage of Augmented Reality in Real Estate, I created a proof of concept demo which will give the users the possibility to view properties in AR.
Do you have a Real Estate business and would like to see this app in live action? Feel free to contact us for an extended demo.
Article Photo by Kent Tupas. Apartment Model by navi3d.
