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Utah company gives 360-degree virtual tours of homes for prospective buyers By
Nancy H. Austin
Editor's note: This story was written for Comm 3110, "Beyond the Inverted Pyramid," an advanced news-feature writing class in the USU department of journalism and communication. It's not an ordinary picture of a living room. With a click of the mouse, the picture revolves -- tiled entrance, then view from the window, then carved mantle and full circle back to the entrance. The future of real estate includes more than one-inch classified ads. 360House.com features properties in Louisiana, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and even some cities in Canada with interactive tours and more information than would be listed in a newspaper. Andy Evans, 26, started the business in July from his home in Salt Lake City . He got the idea when someone who knew about another business of his -- a website that displays virtual tours of Salt Lake City art galleries -- suggested doing the same thing with real estate. "I'm always looking for something to start up," Evans said. Evans asked around to find people who were interested in signing on and taking pictures of real estate in their area. One person who was interested was his brother-in-law Cody Edwards, who lives in Providence. They built the site and it was up and running in July. 360House.com wasn't the first to shoot pictures of real estate in a circle and put them on the web. The software is available and IPIX and Bamboo both do it. According to Edwards, their pictures aren't as good. They use a different lens, their shots include ceilings and "it makes you dizzy," to look at, he said. Edwards is 27 and has liked computers since he was in elementary school. He smiles and blinks hard when he's talking about his work, excited to be using his training. Edwards got a graphic design degree at Bridgerland Applied Technology Center, and he used it to get a job designing graphics for yearbooks at Herff-Jones. Edwards said he does nearly all his work there with computers. "I've always been an artist, but not so much with brush and paint, but with mouse and keyboard," he said. Edwards said that anyone can make a basic website with a "$40 program at Staples," but it takes someone who knows what he's doing to make pictures easy to download, create graphics and make pages interactive. Edwards has learned the tricks of making Web sites user friendly, but he says he's not much of a risk-taker and is glad he and his wife don't own the site. "It's ideal. We make the money, we do the job. We are our own boss, but yet Andy Evans has the major responsibility. It's the best of two worlds." Edwards' part of the process begins with selling the idea to real estate agents. Sometimes he does that himself, but when he's at Herff-Jones, his wife, Paige, takes over this part. She worked as a secretary for a real estate broker in Salt Lake when they were first married and feels comfortable making the presentation. Once agents decide to try it, 360House gives them a trial package. Edwards said they often want to put a hard-to-sell house on the site that first time. Edwards takes the pictures with his digital camera. He sets up a tripod then snaps 20 pictures to cover the circumference of a room. Once he has the pictures he needs, he goes to his home office. The office is cozy. A picture of Paige pregnant hangs on the wall, the family scrapbooks (Edwards does those with his digital camera and his computer) are stacked on the shelf, and 3-year-old Tyson wanders in and out. It's there that he uses computer programs that align the shots into a continuous circle. He sometimes has to lighten some areas or add some more wall to the picture, but the program makes it fairly simple. "It is time consuming, but I don't have to do much," he said. Paige, who took business classes when she attended Weber State, takes care of bookkeeping and runs errands for the business. If agents like the service, they pay to list other properties. The basic package includes pictures of five rooms and a page on the 360House site and costs $149. Twenty percent of the fee goes to Salt Lake, and the rest stays with Edwards. One of the houses listed on the site now is a $725,000 "Spanish Castle." Not everyone who pays for the service is trying to sell a mansion, though. "I thought that would be the case," said Edwards, "But some are just $90,000 homes." Century 21 real estate agent Gifford Baugh, who lists homes on the site, said Internet exposure is something his sellers want. "One of the biggest questions we get now is `is my home on the Internet?'" he said. "It's pretty much just this year that you hear people saying that. A lot of them don't really know a lot about the Internet, but they think it's like a magic wand if they're there." The home sellers like that Baugh offers the service; they want him to have something that sets him apart from other agents. So far, not enough agents have signed up in Cache Valley for Edwards to quit his day job at Herff-Jones, but business is growing and he hopes to work full time with 360House by this summer. The site has 1,263 houses listed right now. A lot, but since that includes U.S. cities and even part of Canada, there is definitely room for growth. Right now advertising for the site isn't aimed primarily at house buyers. Evans is concentrating on signing more representatives for the company and increasing visibility among real estate agents. Evans said he advertises in national digital photography, real estate and construction publications. Most homebuyers who know about the site were referred somehow by a real estate agent. Edwards said that with the $149 package comes a sign to hang under the "for sale" yard sign that advertises the 360House.com address. The address is also often listed in a newspaper ad for a house or real estate agency. Since agents who sign up for the service have their own place on the site, they can list an address that brings a buyer to an agent's particular offerings. When the word is out and thousands more properties are listed, 360House and its online peers could be the places to look for a home. Someone living in Utah could literally explore homes in upstate New York, read about the neighborhoods and school systems, and have houses in mind before flying out to house hunt. And if someone was really anxious to buy, he wouldn't have to set foot in the house before he owned it. As for the Edwards family, they found their little home on Main Street in Providence the old fashioned way- touring around. If there had been 360House three years ago, they still would have walked through the house, but Edwards said it would have been better. Since it's hard to remember the details of a house after you visit
it, "How cool it would be to go back through it?" Edwards said. |
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