Tours with a High WOW Factor

Since discovering buildatour.com yesterday I’ve built my own buildatour.com tour and I’m still excited about this type of tour. Buildatour.com lets you create an elegant slide show of up to 75 images that dissolve from one image to another with controllable background music track. You can associate text descriptions with each image and jump around and control the slide show easily. It provides a maps.google.com link for your listing address and allows a number of other links of your choice. And the tours are implemented in Flash so 97+% of viewers can see immediately see the slide show without downloading a viewer.

I think the most significant feature of these tours is the large (800x600) images. Large, wide-angle, high quality dissolving images have significantly more emotional impact than the typical images you typically see on real estate web sites. This large image impact is the reason I’ve been using full screen QuickTime images on my custom built tours for the last several years. However, full screen QuickTime is time consuming to shoot and to process and 35 to 40% of viewers don’t have QuickTime on their machine. While I was watching the buildatour.com demo a little voice in my head was saying, “These images have the nearly the same impact as full screen QuickTime but are much easier to create”.

These tours are a great example of why it can be worth the cost for a virtual tour to add impact to marketing your listing. Most of the other tour alternatives out there have little 360 images or movies that give you the feel you are looking through a key hole. Not buildatour.com you feel like you are there because the image nearly fills most screens.