We've all been there: Your day is booked with back-to-back appointments to get tours of apartments or single-family homes.
Now one Tampa entrepreneur wants to alleviate that by offering tours that don't involve either party being on site.
"We're disrupting the idea that you have to visit a property before signing a lease," said Christopher Vasilakis, founder and CEO of Guided Virtual Tours. "Everyone is moving toward a mobile-centric offering — you can get food on demand, and now you can tour properties on demand."
Vasilakis, a longtime virtual reality entrepreneur, launched Guided Virtual Tours in November 2020.
"We knew it would be more efficient, but after Covid, it became a necessity," he said. "An apartment still needed to give tours, so this became a higher priority."
He acknowledges many apartment complexes already offer online virtual tours. But with his technology, the complex is able to integrate the both his and their systems together to offer a more thorough tour. The company has partnered with MatterPort virtual reality, which photographs the property and creates the tours in-house. That is then put together with a voice-over, allowing users to learn the highlights of the property.
"Normally [users] have to endlessly click through the property and you may not have seen everything," Vasilakis said. "It's not guiding you, you're wandering around this apartment or property and no one is explaining anything. It's the equivalent of giving the keys to someone and saying, 'Go look around,' and that's not how you sell. We try to replicate an organic property tour."
The tour comes with a guided voice-over allowing you to hit on the properties' key points. While a potential renter is not able to ask questions or receive answers, it's meant to serve as a stepping stone for the basic questions.
"That's what we tell everyone, it doesn't have to be the end all be all," he said. "But it will allow people to come to your property, interact with your site and then they can message you to take a tour or if they have more questions."
The big get, Vasilakis said, is a complex's ability to advertise to those not even looking at that particular location. Companies can have their tours placed as ads on YouTube, to reach those who hadn't considered changing complexes.
"If a complex uses it as an ad, they can target a prospect — their prospect could be watching a cat video but then their tour comes up next, and they spend time playing around with the interactive video," he said.
The company is currently bootstrapped and in 45 properties across the nation that are "quickly growing." The Tampa company, which is Vasilakis' fifth startup, has seven full-time employees. He is working on his next offering in the company, which will allow complexes to take photos of their own buildings and create their own tours.
"This is especially important with Covid now, but even if things are back to normal, you have to schedule a time to tour, and now you're doing that with five properties," he said. "Having this is basically like having your best leasing agent giving a tour. You can do it 24/7 around the clock and give thousands of tours a day, and the 'agent' never gets sick."
