Hello Active Rain Community!

I just wanted to share with you all a recent morsel of success my new do-it-yourself virtual tour service, TourVista, recently received.  The Techwatch section of Realtor.org's November newsletter written by Michael Antoniak mentioned us - focusing particularly about our interactive floor plans!

Read the article here: http://www.realtor.org/rmotechnology/techwatch/columns/0811_techwatch_virtualtours

For others in our boat - trying to bootstrap a company offering a great service to real estate professionals - keep up your hard work.  Hopefully everyone gets a taste of some success to keep them pursuing their goals!

Remember, TourVista is free to use throughout the rest of 2008 - and in 2009, we'll be introducing a free and premium version.  Try us out, we're easy to use and free - and I'm sure we can enhance your online marketing efforts!  You can visit us at www.tourvista.com to learn more.

-Jason Houghton

Hello Active Rain community -I've recently joined a group in Active Rain about free tools for online marketing.  Well, online marketing and virtual tours are what I do with TourVista Virtual Tours.  And I'd like to know what is it that everyone out there would want to make a perfect online marketing tool for their listings?

I'm constantly trying to make sure we have all the right features and tools for our users at TourVista Virtual Tours. This seems like a great forum for you to tell me just what you're looking for? Here's what TourVista offers now - give us a try for free and then please come back and tell me what else you might want. We'll see how we can add it to TourVista. Our whole goal of designing TourVista was for it to be a useful tool for those involved in selling real estate and using the web to help market their homes online.

• Free to use through 2008! All our features and tools are at your disposal through 2008 and in 2009 we'll be creating a free and premium version for users to choose what best suits their needs. Or you never know, we might just stay completely free.
• Interactive floor plans - sync and link your photos or video right up to your floor plans so viewers get the best experience possible. We want you to get more eyeballs on your listing so you have the best chance to get the most potential customers!
• Flexibility to choose photos or video or both!
• Attractive Craigslist templates for you to choose to help in the online marketing effort.
• An easy to use, step by step user interface designed to help you get an amazing tour set up in minutes full of all the features you'd expect in a high-quality virtual tour.
• A do-it-yourself tour or hire a pro feature that lets you contact a local photographer or videographer to hire - or hire TourVista's Turnkey Solution for one price and get the whole thing done for you!

Please take a moment to think about what you would want from your online marketing tools and provide me with some feedback.  It would be great to know what Active Rain members want so we can continually improve our product to meet those needs.  If you haven't yet, please check out TourVista and see what you think.  You can set up a free account and begin making great virtual tours immediately!

Sincerely,

Jason Houghton
Co-founder TourVista Virtual Tours

Over 80% of home shoppers begin the process by looking online.  Attract these viewers first and engage them with great tools like Interactive Floor Plans!  TourVista gives you a simple process to easily create a virtual tour that will help your online listings stand out from the crowd and bring you more viewers - which means more potential customers.

Home shoppers are becoming more and more savvy and they want more information.  Use TourVista to bring that to them.  With interactive floor plans and your choice of photos, video or both - you can showcase your home online with a tour that you know viewers will want to watch.  And that's the key.  Getting eyeballs on your listing.  The more viewers you can get to watch your tour, the more they will get involved in the process of considering your home.  Viewers aren't satisfied with just a few stale photos - bring them more with interactive photos linked right up to the floor plan of the home you are showing.

Try out TourVista - you can get started today for free!

Here's an idea for those who are having trouble getting the price they want and are anticipating taking their home off the market - rent it out as corporate housing.

See this article from USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/2008-10-07-home-sellers-rent_N.htm?csp=DailyBriefing&POE=click-refer

Seems like this is a good way to wait out some of the downturn in the market - if you can afford to rent out your home.  Probably would have to be a second home or an investment property.  But apparently there are some advantages to renting it as corporate housing rather than as a traditional rental unit.

Want to expand your online marketing reach in order to showcase your listings to a much larger audience?  If you haven't looked into using virtual tours, now is a great time.  There are many out there to compare/contrast, but I want to introduce you to:

Try out TourVista Virtual Tours - it's free through 2008!

TourVista's tours are easy to set up, give you the flexibility of using photos, video, or both, and offer great features like a Craigslist template and Interactive Floor Plans.  You can do it yourself or hire a pro!

Increase your productivity and help your clients by using the best tools on the internet to show their homes.

I came across a great article online today by Bruce W. McKinnon, MBA (I don't know him, but his data was from the US National Association of Realtors and his analysis was very useful).  I encourage those interested in learning more about the causes of the financial difficulty we face now and it's effect on home prices to browse this chart he has put together and read his analysis - it's very brief and easy to understand.

You can find it here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/3675699/US-National-Association-of-Realtor-Statistics-19682008-Median-Price-on-Home-Sales-62508

He compiled this data two months ago and reflects the home prices after July 2008.  Obviously this situation has worsened but I think you can still get a lot of useful information from taking a look at this.

In addition, it's nice to see what home prices have done historically - which he has included in the data attached to his chart.  Thought this would be useful for everyone here to take a look at.  Hang in there, historically the housing market will return and probably strongly.

Hello Active Rain community!

I'm going to get myself involved with this community to try to meet real estate professionals and encourage anyone and everyone to become a user of today's exciting and new virtual tours.  I happen to be a proponent of virtual tours for two very important reasons; first is simply because I have been working over the last two years to bring a great virtual tour product to the world called TourVista Virtual Tours; and second and more importantly because I want to improve the home shopping experience that we know how much the Internet is influencing each and every day.

There are many selections of virtual tours for you to choose from.  I'd recommend searching for one that fits your needs and budget and trying out a few to see which ones are:

• affordable
• easy to use
• showcase properties in the best way and provide the most information
• are flexible
• actually help you market your homes online and not just simply create a tour
• that you like

TourVista has a lot to offer such as fully interactive floor plans, the flexibility for you to use photos or video or both, an easy to use interface, a great Craigslist template, and we're free to use for the rest of 2008!  We're excited to be working on a free and premium version of our virtual tour for 2009, but for now we're letting anyone try it out at no cost.

We would love for your feedback and any comments you have for us.  Our goal in developing TourVista was to improve the home shopping experience and we want those selling homes to have the best tools out there to help them do just that!

I look forward to meeting more and more of the Active Rain community as I can tell through my experience here so far that the members here really are here to help each other.  I would love to provide a genuinely useful tool in TourVista that helps this community reach out to the consumer in the most effective way possible!

Sincerely,

Jason Houghton