Why Property Portals Need Listing Tech and How They Can Implement it

As any Product Manager working on a property portal will tell you, a thing as ostensibly simple as a new filter is by no means as simple as its end product might have you believe. The fact that UK challenger portal OnTheMarket managed to get their new filter to the front of the dev-queue in the middle of a global pandemic says a lot about the importance their team must have seen in that filter. OnTheMarket’s new filter, released into production back in May, lets users either prioritise listings that have 3d tours or filter out listings that do not. It can’t be long until filters remove property listings without features such as 3d viewings, virtual staging or 360 tours on portals across the world.

Another feature on property listings that we like is the virtual staging tool that idealista brought out around the same time as OnTheMarket’s filter. Smooth tongued agents might be able to paint a picture of how a property might or could look with some TLC, but there’s no substitute for a proper digital render.

What the appearance of both of these tools tells us is that users are becoming increasingly aware of the technology around property listings and increasingly expect as standard features that were considered niche only a year ago. No longer are computer-generated renders of what currently drab interiors could be only for soulless new builds and commercial properties that have been gutted between tenancies.

Even renders of properties that are just a glint in a home owner’s eye and an item on a developer’s to-do list are now able to be effectively marketed for pre-sales. To be able to sell a property that doesn’t yet exist with photo-realistic imagery was previously costly and cumbersome but has been brought into the mainstream by BoxBrownie.com as Co-Founder Mel Myers explained to us:

“For a long time, they’ve been lauded as a specialist output. Each render costs a lot of money, with long production times, but they do look like works of art.”

So we’ve established that these features are the future of listings and they’ll help to sell properties but whose job is it to implement them? Well, although there is some take-up among the forward-thinking among their number, agencies are far from the homogenous early-adopters that new technologies need to proliferate. What if property portals step in and add that value to their offering and produce the beautiful renders that get their users’ attention in-house? 

So far, so logical but here we come back up against the Product Managers in property portals and their notoriously fraught and blocked up dev-queues. Do they have time in the next couple of ‘sprints’ to get these new tools on the ‘roadmap’? Do their developers have the experience and the technical skills to bring 360 virtual tours and renders online and do the necessary QA control? This is where a company like BoxBrownie.com comes in. 

The Queensland Australia based company has been in the business of making property listings more attractive since 2014. They have worked with property portals around the world to create their own white-label technology and bring users property listings that they fall in love with. Property portals can now bring their development marketing agents a solution that drives pre-sales, as well as providing a fully immersive experience to potential buyers via their new 360° Render Virtual Tour. BoxBrownie.com is trusted by over 75,000 customers in 82 different countries, they have 24-hour customer service and, importantly, they are offering a free trial of 4 edits (image enhancements and the Day to Dusk product) to property portal readers of OnlineMarketplaces!

As we reported back in early April, BoxBrownie.com’s 360 tour technology is hardware agnostic meaning it is compatible with any of the increasing number of 360 cameras available on the market. The company also works on a pay as you go basis with prices for more basic products from $1.60 meaning that customers aren’t tied into contracts that might be tough to manage given the current global economic climate.

So take some of the strain off your dev-queue and some of the stress away from the Product Manager. Give the experts at BoxBrownie.com a call today (mentioning Online Marketplaces of course) and start giving your users the immersive renders they’re starting to expect as standard on all property listings.