Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) are taking the technology world by storm.  Augmented reality is where you see images placed in the world around you.  Virtual reality is where you are transported to a location other than the one you physically occupy.  You can’t go to any tech event without seeing someone looking at the world around them through a device (AR) or wearing funny headset transported to  a world inside the glasses (VR).

In a June 15^th interview with Tim Cook, Businessweek’s Emily Murphy asked about augmented reality being at the heart of Apple’s future.  Tim responded “I think it is profound. I am so excited about it, I just want to yell out and scream. The first step in making it a mainstream kind of experience is to put it in the operating system. We’re building it into iOS 11, opening it to ­developers—and unleashing the creativity of millions of people.”  The wave of creativity is just starting and if this product evolution is anything like prior technologies, we can expect the technology to continue to improve, costs to fall, and AR and VR to proliferate.

Real estate is being transformed by these technologies.  While we aren’t quite to the place where you can walk into a home and see your furniture placed in key locations, you can sit at home and walk through a home hundreds or thousands of miles away as though you were there without leaving your living room.  Incredibly, you can have this experience with or without special VR goggles.

Matterport came onto the real estate scene in 2014 and transformed the way buyers view real estate.  They were introduced to the world by winning RealogyFWD, a real estate technology innovation summit.  This September at the 2017 event held in New York, there were two new technologies vying to enter the virtual reality space, verifying the strength of the movement to make the experience of viewing a home much faster and much easier.

No real estate firm has embraced the technology like ERA Brokers has.  Matterport technology is primarily deployed by contracted photographers, but this firm has brought the technology in house and is delivering it in such a way that they are now the number one Matterport vendor in the intermountain west.

“Our goal is to make the home buying experience better for the consumer” commented Matt Walter, CTO for ERA Brokers.  “We built a proprietary system to deliver this content and we are committed to making it more available to our clients.  Most people see quickly the benefit to buyers, but think of how much time and inconvenience sellers realize by only having committed, serious buyers walking through their home.  No more ‘just looking’ showings.”

To see how VR is transforming the home buying experience, click the button bellow.