I recently had an interaction with a home seller that got me thinking about the iGuide autoplay feature. I’m also starting to get more clients referring to what we do as a “video”, and I think more and more people are using the play button on an iGuide as their primary interaction, instead of exploring a property as we intend the iGuide to be used.
When you hit the play button, and watch the whole thing, the iGuide is very long. There are many rooms or parts of rooms that make sense to include in the standard iGuide exploration process, but these spaces don’t always make sense if a viewer is sitting back and watching the “video”.
It would be a nice option to have some direction control over what is displayed when a user uses the play button, instead of exploring.
I would like the following:
to be able to remove some spaces from the “video” but not from the normal iGuide
to be able to change the order of which spaces are displayed
to be able to decide which parts of spaces are displayed, and for how long
It would great to have the option of stopping the autoplay as soon as there is a click on the tour. Right now it doesn’t allow you to interact with the tour unless the stop button is being clicked.
In this case most viewer don’t know that they can interact with the tour if the realtor choose to start the tour with autoplay.
Stop on click anywhere if in Autoplay mode when iGuide loads is coming in few days. If Autoplay was started manually, however, it will still require button press. At the same time we will be adding a short animation on load as well to show that it is not a static picture.
Configurable Autoplay is on the roadmap, but not any time soon.
Agents have been referring to iGuide as “video” or “3D video” since forever. I guess anything that moves many people associate with video.
Honestly, unless I’m sponsoring a brokers’ open house or doing a trade show, I never use the Auto-Play feature and don’t know that any of our customers do as well. That’s not to say nobody out there uses it, I just don’t find many people using it around here.
Consider this feedback that I received last week from a seller:
"I am writing you to express my reaction to what Kim & I both thought was the most poorly done virtual tour video I’ve seen in a long time. I am extremely disappointed & angry about their presentation. My first question I would like you to answer for me is have you used this company before? We found this video extremely long, boring, & very poorly edited. There is no continuity in the video. It jumps from room to room in no logical order. It simply did not have any flow from room to room."
This from a $1MM listing, I’m sure you can imagine how my client was feeling.
The issue: client followed the iGuide link, clicked away the little help screen that displays, and went looking for the play button.
Ultimately after some phone calls and explanation I turned this client around, and once he realized how powerful the tool was he became extremely excited about it.
People use the button. The experience can be improved.
I don’t understand why the sellers are asking this. I’ve never had anyone–seller or realtor–ever ask anything about this. Not saying you’ve done anything wrong, just confused as to why it’s an issue.
I agree with your input points. If we could have control over the order in which the rooms are presented (after the iguide has been edited), as some homeowners, on second thought have preference to the order. Also, If there was somehow a toggle line or control for how much of a room is shown - for example, the camera view is somewhat in the corner of a room and you don’t want to show what’s behind the camera (the corner of the wall).
Until recently this issue had never come up for me. Now I have had two realtors receiving complaints almost word for word the way Doug worded his message at the beginning of this thread. I am now disabling the auto play feature. I would like if there was a global setting to not have the auto play, or possibly make the auto play option opt in instead of opt out.
Something that could make it far better would be to speed the panorama up substantially. The entire house should be viewable in 3 minutes or less. @Alex