When buying an apartment during the construction phase, people have to focus on the layout, often printed on a black-and-white printer, or on a beautiful color booklet, giving about as much information. When the house is already built, buyers have the opportunity to live to look at their future housing - or rather, on the concrete box, which always seems less than it will be after the repair.
For real estate developers and sellers, it is important to show exactly how it will live in order not to deal with unjustified expectations. And here comes to the rescue 3D-visualization of the house along with furniture and virtual reality glasses, which allow you to carefully look at the future house.
Aleksey Yozhikov, Business
Solutions Director for
Planoplan, told how VR helps customers not to take a “cat in a bag”.
The main financial goal of 25% of Russians is to buy an apartment. One of the scenarios is as follows: first, the family saves a long time on the initial payment on the mortgage, and then pays the remaining amount for 20-30 years. For Krasnogorsk near Moscow, a down payment of 15% will be about 750,000 rubles for a one-room apartment and about 1,125,000 for a two-room apartment, while the monthly payment at a rate of 12% will be 37,000 and 56,000, respectively.
Most often they buy apartments in the
primary market , in three cases out of four - before putting the house into operation. About half of such housing - small, this studio and odnushki.
With an average salary in the Moscow region of about 46,410 rubles in January 2018, mortgage payments become the main sources of family spending. And they still need to add repair - this is 20-50% of the price of housing. For many, this is the biggest purchase in life, and it is done blindly, people buy a “cat in a bag”, not knowing how high the ceiling is, whether these 42 or 60 square meters will be spacious and what they will look like after repairs.
Planoplan has been working in the B2B segment since its inception, offering 3D and VR layouts to developers, which they use to show face with the help of the Lenovo Explorer virtual reality helmet. “We are in favor of the fact that an ordinary Russian is worthy to see the housing in which he will move in. Not with the purchase of luxury housing, but with the purchase of an ordinary studio apartment on the outskirts of the city. And we help to visualize just such housing, ”says Alexei Yozhikov, the company's position.
What Planoplan does
Service Planoplan appeared in 2012 as a subsidiary of the real estate agency "Kelnik", offering various services for promotion to developers. Service began to be used as a tool to help sell apartments. Planoplan was designed to create layouts and interior design of apartments, as well as any other premises - warehouses, retail space. Alexey Yozhikov, Planoplan: “We started using a solution for apartment visualization. When you want to sell an apartment to a client, especially at the construction stage, you want to show what he is waiting for. He should buy not just square meters and a plan, a person should know what his housing space will be. ”
Planoplan has been monetizing services in B2B since 2012, but it also works in B2C: out of 410,000 unique registered users, about 40,000 are active at least once a month. Among them are people who are doing or are preparing to make repairs at home, they can visualize the results of the repair of one room with the help of the service. Interior designers who want to save on 3D Max also use the service. ”
“And all the same time we were trying to carry the light to the developers and explained why they should do a 3D layout,” adds Alexei Yozhikov. The main task of visualization in VR is to show the product, to answer the questions of potential consumers. This may be housing, furniture or household appliances. The virtual reality helps the buyer to see how a particular kitchen set will look in his apartment, whether a certain tile and accessories, household appliances will suit him. This is necessary to reduce the likelihood of incorrect expectations from a future result.
It is with apartments that the question of various concerns, doubts and expectations is particularly acute. At the construction stage, the maximum that the seller can show is the plan of the apartment on the plane and the apartment itself in the form of a concrete box - in the best case it will be exactly the living space into which the buyer will have to move in a few years, and at worst - just an apartment with a similar planning in another house on another floor. Pitfalls can open later, when after a move a person finds that he has a very large kitchen - due to the storage room, which for some reason is not there, and that the wall between the toilet and the bathroom cannot be removed because of the ventilation duct, and the apartment was shown in another house type
But it is important to remember that 3D and VR content is a communication tool, not a conversion tool. In isolation from the work of managers, he can not raise sales. There is no exact answer in figures about how much it increases sales to developers in Russia. Alexei Yozhikov notes that this is a problem of Russian developers: they do not know how to pilot projects and measure the result. In March 2018, at the
International Summit on Real Estate Technologies , organized by Ernst & Young, Alexei Yozhikov gave a
presentation on this issue: he said that developers need to use CRM, which will show which buyers used a virtual reality helmet when choosing an apartment, who is not, and how much efficiency is different in either case. It is important that the results should be calculated in the sale of apartments for specific objects, and that the developer must be large enough to minimize the statistical error.
“We searched all year for ways of this situation. We conducted testing at one of the developers' sites. It was shown that the conversion to a call increased by 10%. But it is rather a side effect. ”
The results of adding the function “Virtual tour” to the site of the residential complex “Vienna quarter”Representatives of developers speak about the effectiveness of using VR during exhibitions, when in 2-3 days a large number of people passing through the stands make the first contact with the company using a virtual reality helmet. “In such conditions, VR- and 3D-glasses allow to process quite a large number of clients in one unit of time,” says Alexey Filippov, St. Petersburg Renovation.
Another confirmation of the positive impact of such a demonstration on customers is the results of a survey of the Association of Virtual and Augmented Reality
VRARA : more than 40% of apartment buyers confirmed that panoramic tours play an important role in making a purchase decision. Interestingly, the audience at the age of 30-39 more often appreciates the 3D and VR tools for comparing apartments than buyers of 20-29 years old - 61.9% versus 57.1% and as a tool for making the purchase decision more quickly.
Thanks to the 3D visualization and the virtual reality helmet Lenovo Explorer, the developer gets a competitive advantage: the ability to show a real apartment. He can answer the questions “50 meters is how much and what will fit there?” Not on fingers or a booklet, but with the help of a real excursion in virtual reality. Even the ceiling height the buyer can estimate in advance.
The service forms an ecosystem on which it plans to unite developers, manufacturers of kitchens and other furniture, suppliers of refrigerators, stoves and other household appliances, interior designers, manufacturers of finishing materials together with end-users of housing. The goal is to make sure that the buyer of any of these categories could see in the virtual reality helmet not just a layout with an example of furniture from standard IKEA furniture, but the results of repairing a room with concrete wallpaper and a stretch ceiling, concrete furniture and appliances.
For demonstrations, Planoplan chose Lenovo Explorer's virtual reality headset. Among the advantages, the company notes fast response and high image quality. The absence of external sensors has reduced the installation time of equipment at the field demonstrations three times. The helmet is convenient for putting on, as well as for hygienic cleaning - and this is very important when a large flow of people is using the helmet, be it a developer’s office or an exhibition. In this case, in order to organize a demonstration stand in the case of this software, it is not necessary to have a very powerful computer with an expensive video card. Testing has shown that even a ThinkPad P51 notebook with a Quadro M1200 card will do well.