Matterport

Working in the property industry we are always looking into ways to minimise any disruption to our tenants when it comes to re-letting the properties.  With us being in the student lettings side of the industry this is a hard thing to do as we start letting for the next academic year 7 months in advance, as this is normal in our area. 

When COVID hit in March 2020 and the national lockdowns came into place, we knew that we would have to do things differently.  It was then that we started looking into online viewings and the best ways we could do this.  We asked some of our student tenants if they would film us walk throughs and email them across to us, we would then upload them to YouTube.  These, while serving a purpose at the time, were not the best and we knew that we would not be able to rely on these to help us rent our student homes.  We then came across a Derbyshire based company Rob Machon Media who specialised in doing online walk throughs of properties for the real estate industry.  After meeting up and having a video made of one of our properties, we knew that this would be the way forward for us!

So, to make the videos we would go into our properties during the empty summer period and dressed them with soft furnishings, fake plants, and decorations to show them at their full potential.  Once we had dressed the property scans were taken of the whole accommodation, every meter or so to build an accurate picture is made of the full property.  Once this has been downloaded from the camera and the full video checked to make sure there are no glitches, this is then uploaded to the Matterport website where we are able to change the details for the property and find links that we can send out to potential tenants and embed into our website.  The videos themselves are amazing! They offer a full 3D walk through of the property allowing the students to move around the property at their own pace and to look fully at all areas of the student home.  I am not going to lie, making the videos was exhausting.  We spent days lugging props round our student properties and running up and down stairs dressing and undressing rooms in the boiling hot heat wave! But looking back at the videos now it was so worth it!  The videos we have are amazing and they helped us no end during our letting season! 

We made a decision in our office in November 2020 that we would not be carrying out face to face viewings on our student properties and if any students wanted to view, we would send them the link to the Matterport viewings and copies of any floor plans that they would need.  This would let the students view the property from their own student homes and allow them to make an informed decision on whether or not they would wanted to sign for the student property.  We let a large amount of our properties off these videos, the properties which we struggled with were where we had not managed to get in to make a video and relied on a YouTube link filmed by the tenants.

Our plans for this year are to finish off getting Matterport videos made for the properties we didn’t manage to last summer as we have seen the success we have had this year and they will definitely help to minimise unnecessary viewings for our future lettings.

Why not look at how the videos look over on Rob Machon Media on this link https://www.robmachonmedia.com/real-estate-packages