At RTV, we’re all about quick and easy using our Virtual Tour Software. Using the RTV Tour Builder Kit, the tour creator takes a series of still images with the camera mounted on its side on our Custom Rotator, which achieves a wide-angle view. The RTV rotator takes a maximum of 12 photos at a pre-specified overlap. These photos are then seamlessly stitched into a 360-degree panorama using our Photo Stitching Process. Depending on how wide of a lens you have you might only need to take 6, 4, or in some cases only 3 images to complete a full 360.
Below are the easy steps involved in creating, customizing, and distributing virtual real estate property tours using our software:
Set up the tripod with attached rotator and camera in the best available viewing spot (usually the middle of the room). Use the bubble indicators on our rotator to ensure that your camera is level from front to back and side to side.
Start taking photos of the property from left to right. Each time a new photo is taken, turn the rotator to the right until you feel it click into place before taking the next picture.
Once you have completed your twelve shots, you can remove the card from your camera and place it into a card reader attached to your laptop. This will automatically begin the image assembly process, leaving your hands free to start photographing your next scene.
Place a second media card into your camera, move to your next scene, level your rotator, and take your next set of images. Meanwhile, the virtual tour software will be assembling your last batch of photos automatically.
Continue taking images until all of your desired rooms are stitched. Most real estate virtual tours will require about 4 - 10 panoramic scenes and 6-20 snapshot scenes to adequately showcase the property.
We recommend that you take all of your panoramic scenes first, followed by your still images scenes then, if the client has ordered any full motion video scenes, you can capture these at the very end.
You will repeat the steps above as you complete each of your orders throughout the day. Most RTV virtual tour providers are able to complete and deliver six to ten jobs a day using our proven method and virtual tour software.
Once back at your office you will login to your Fusion Tour Management System. Simply click on the “Create New Tour” button and you will be asked to point to the folder that contains your media for that particular property. Our system will then upload your media, resize, compress, and prepare your virtual tour for high definition playback. Our servers are located in Dallas, TX. We use cloud based technology and guarantee you 100% uptime. As soon as your tour is uploaded, our servers automatically perform the following tasks:
Tours are assigned a unique identification number
Each tour is scanned for city, state, zip code, and listing number
Tours are customized with owner/realtor theme, photo, logo, and contact information
Buttons and features are automatically added to the tools section of your presentation, including Google Map, Google Satellite, Local City and School Info, Download, Email to Friend, Add to Favorites, Send to Social Networking Sites, Mortgage Info, and more
You will then have the option to further enhance your presentation by performing any of the following tasks:
Organize your media using our easy drag and drop manager to create a start to finish path that your virtual tour will follow during playback.
Edit or customize any sill image effects using our built in Ken Burns editor
Modify and fine tune any panoramic effects, rotation directions, and rotation speed
Choose from one of our many pre-defined custom themes or create one of your own
Add interactive and animated hot spots that can link to audio files, full motion video clips, other websites, or link to other scenes within your presentation
Use one of our five built in animated voice over talents to narrate your virtual tour or you may use our Cloud Recorder to narrate your own tour
Turn on any one of our five lead capture options to ensure that your customer will get the most out of your virtual tour
Design from start to finish an elegant printable flyer using one of our preset flyer templates or create one of your own
Enhance your virtual tour with a fully interactive floor plan using our EZ Planner system that allows you to add in Hot Spots and connects automatically to our floor plan partner MagicPlan
Instantly push your virtual tour to hundreds of syndication partners using our Exposure Engine feature
Generate two styles of Craigslist ads that are sure to drive even more traffic to your virtual tour presentation
Use our EasyMLS feature to populate all of the most popular MLS fields saving you hours of data entry
Completely private label your tour links and URLS
Link your YouTube account so your entire presentation is automatically converted to video and sent to YouTube with the push of a button
Edit virtual tour META data to help your tour rank in the search engines with our SpiderLink technology
Place any advertisers onto your virtual tours which will be rotated and displayed in the lower left side of your virtual tour as a clickable link to your advertisers website
Preview your completed virtual tour
Send your completed virtual tour to your customer giving them several linking options including, embed code, download (offline tour), MLS compatible tour and more
For a full list of the powerful Fusion virtual tour system features please visit our Marketing Tools page. RealTour Fusion has more features than any other virtual tour system and we’re adding more each week!
Your client will automatically receive a weekly traffic report which will show them how many visits their tour is receiving on a daily and monthly basis. Our reports will even show how many mobile users viewed the virtual tour, how many leads have been generated, how many times the QR code had been scanned and how long the average user spends looking at the virtual tour. Our DeepStats are so amazing your clients will rave about them. Best of all, they come from you!
Fusion Interactive Virtual Media Presentations Look Better
From start to finish, this entire process will typically take about 45 minutes to one hour depending on the size of the property. Most real estate virtual tours are photographed in twenty to forty five minutes. The back office work listed above will take between fifteen minutes to a half hour depending on how many add-ons your client has ordered from you.
RTV will help you price your add-ons accordingly. Real Estate virtual tours will bring you a high volume of work while your business and commercial virtual tours will bring you a higher return on your time. Throughout a given years most real estate tours will yield an average of $125.00 to $150.00 in profit while business and commercial virtual tours will average several hundred and even thousands of dollars.
Your virtual tour remains on our servers, where you can enjoy unlimited usage and edits to them. Real Estate virtual tours never expire.
Click photos to see larger images
Why do you need the RTV Rotator (Panoramic Tripod Head) above?
The purpose of a panoramic tripod head as shown above is to allow you to accurately position your camera so that when you turn it, you're turning it about the VERY center of your cameras lens known in the industry as the nodal point (no-parallax-point). When you rotate your digital camera about this point you're able to completely avoid parallax errors in your images which lead to stitching errors. This is not something that can be achieved by using an ordinary bogen, or slick leveler head that sits on top of your tripod. Even if your tripod flips to one side you would not be rotating accurately about your nodal point. As you can see in the photographs above, the RTV Rotator will screw on top of the leveling part of your tripod.
All professionals within the virtual tour industry use a panoramic head. Parallax errors WILL result in a poor quality picture, massive stitching errors, longer tour creation time and most likely you not wanting anything to do with the industry overall. No matter how many tours you would like to create on a monthly basis you'll want to make sure you have a panoramic head so you can get the best possible pictures and therefore create the best possible panoramic images for your customers. Our RTV Rotator or panoramic tripod head also makes shooting the pictures much more systematic, and simple so this means that you will spend less time trying to stitch the pictures together afterwards and therefore run a profitable virtual tour business.
