I support the removal of pricings from the general website.
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Wow! I have been doing this for 10 years and never noticed that. Hopefully my customers haven’t either but yes that whole link needs to be removed. When I go to the dentist they don’t have published how much it costs them for a crown to be made. I’m sure it would piss me off.
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Yes, we don’t know the cost price at a retail store or what the meal actually costs at a high end restaurant. How is iGUIDE any different.
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Welcome to the business world folks. Would you have bought a camera before iGUIDE disclosed processing fees? If your clients are looking into camera costs and processing fees then you’ve done a very poor job of selling your value to them. I presume you’ve done the math yourself - an agent would need to do at least 25 listings a year to break even the first year. At $500K per listing, that’s $12.5 M in annual sales - at 2% min commission that’s $250K a year in income. Likely closer to half a million. Do you really think an agent that successful would think for one second they could save time and money by doing their own iGUIDEs? And frankly, whoever claimed that iGUIDE’s publishing of processing fees is going to cost them a client who could give them 500 projects - sorry to break it to you, but your client should be buying several Planix R1s and hiring several people to train on the system - because they will save money and have full control over the work. I don’t think iGUIDE should be able to sell a camera to anyone within 100 miles of me. When people search iGUIDE on the internet my business should be the only one that comes up. I don’t think DJI should sell Mavic 4 drones to unlicensed agents to capture their own video and photos. I don’t think AI Virtual Staging companies should be allowed to charge 25 cents an image when I charge $25. But that’s life! I am pretty confident that my agents are intelligent enough to know that I don’t work for free, so there’s a mark-up on what I pay to iGUIDE. I am proud to promote that I am an iGUIDE operator. One of the best recognized brands in this industry. Why would I want to white-wash that away? I might as well do Cubicasa instead.
Hi Tom,
I agree with your points about real estate. Agents don’t have the time. In my case, working with builders, your point is also true. But that does not mean my point is invalid. I do expect the builder to move it internally at one point, at which point I will offer to train his team on using the iGuide. I don’t want to lose the opportunity immediately due to the link. And I did sell the value to them as they asked me to do one house as an example. Now, I want to get some business out of them before they switch internally.
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I think the issue at hand here is that iguide sells to two different kinds of customer bases. One group are the people who want to offer a service to others and the other group is the people/entities who want to execute the same service in-house. So iguide should be mindful of this very distinction. Even before digging through showing the pricing issue, I do not want iguide’s links and logos and other advertising things all over my company’s deliverables. It makes my company look less professional. And it makes it easier for my customers to find an alternative provider or at least have more ammo to try and reduce my rates, which I will not do. No I haven’t had this issue yet because my customers so far are smaller builders who are too busy to want to do it on their own.
As for the notion that agents or companies will have too many listings to want to scan in-house, that is a very short-sighted view. I can’t speak for all markets but I can for my area. There is definitely a threshold of the numbers where it makes more sense for them to scan in-house. The larger builders here already scan and fly drones with their own employees (I offer drone services too). Most of the medium, and all of the large real estate brokers, have their own marketing team or person who takes their images in-house and posts the listings. Will it look as good as hiring out? No, but good enough and at a large enough cost savings for them overall.
Even in the beginning of my useage I have been looking for a time efficient way to remove the iguide branding from my deliverables. I have ways, but it is a bit time-consuming. I have also been researching alternatives because of this. The simplest solution is for iguide to ask a simple question in the account creation (or individual guide creation). “Are you offering this iguide as a service?” If yes, automatically whitelist (no iguide branding or links whatsoever, even better to replace with ours). If no (meaning in-house), list it as usual.
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With the competition out there of Matterport, Giraffe, etc, I am already seeing my agents buying their own cameras and doing their own tours. Iam in a small town and I know of two agencies now that have their own cameras and doing pics in house. There are about 8 of us photographers all vying for their business. Iam trying to be well rounded and offer a one man band. I hate to say it, but agents are trying to go as inexpensive as possible now with the new NAR changes. We all need to make a living. This is a simple fix for IGUIDE I would hope, and I would hope they put more value in us photographers to make this change. I stand by what I have posted, the pricing needs to go and the logo as well. Market and sell your cameras a different way then through us. Please!!
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I agree, the link and any info on pricing should be removed.
Please remove this ASAP.
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Well… I have a proposal on how this could be done. Let me preface this with…It’s JUST a starting point to get the discussion going and ideas rolling. No need for bashing ideas. We’re on the same team here lol.
1.White Labeling Options
• Custom Branding: Allow operators to replace the company logo and name with their branding in virtual tours, reports, and other deliverables.
• Removing Default Links: Offer the option to remove or replace links that direct viewers to iGuide’s website. This ensures customers perceive the operator as the primary service provider.
• Branded Subdomains: Provide operators with branded subdomains (e.g., tours.operatorname.com) for hosting virtual tours, ensuring the service remains visually under the operator’s control. — I realize this is an additional cost and could get expensive. However, most web hosts allow for subdomains in their packages. Perhaps the development of iGuide Content Management System or WordPress Plugin that could be installed on a server to host these iGuides under own domain. Just an idea?? Thoughts?
2. Hiding Pricing Models from the Public
• Login Requirement for Pricing: Require interested parties to sign up for an account or request access to view pricing details. This approach keeps pricing private while still accessible to serious inquiries.
• Price Inquiry Forms: Replace direct pricing with a contact form where users can request a quote, allowing operators to filter leads and provide pricing on a case-by-case basis.
• Operator-Specific Pricing Pages: Create a separate portal or pricing structure visible only to operators, not the public. Some companies even provide editable pricing templates that operators can share with their clients.
3. Supporting Operators with Public-Inquiry Solutions
• Operator Directory: Since iGuide lists its operators on its website, to avoid displaying pricing and instead include a “Contact an Operator” link, directing inquiries to the reseller/operator network.
• Custom Quote Tools: Provide a tool operators can embed on their website, allowing users to calculate pricing based on factors like property size, with operator-controlled markups automatically applied.
Feel free to build on this. But just some food for thought :)
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All of these suggestions would be excellent.
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You really put some thought into this Evan, great job. Now I hope IGuide will follow through and help us out! Thank you
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Just chiming in to agree with the OP and many others commenting. Been a couple years for me and I did not know this was the case. It’s disappointing to say the least.
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Evan, thank you so much for your efforts. I discussed this issue last week during an onboarding call and told them about branded subdomains. I already have tours.3DFlightMaryland.com for CloudPano, and Godaddy.com allows for that.
Your other suggestions are on point. Regarding custom branding, I have read posts about customers who don’t want any branding on their tours, so that helps them, too.
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yes, As a former Marketing Manager within a fortune top 30 … politely, I could never understand why a dealer based business would publish pricing in an open way, choose to communicate that to competition, and to it’s end-buyers… so, with me coming back on-line as a iGuide contributor following a recent move into Detroit - it still does not make sense. Particularly communicating the iGuide pricing to your competitor.
I do thank iGude management for the technical evolution in the drive to create a solid niche, and their opening the niche to where it is and further. I hope they enhance the dealer aspect of their channel, and most likely will. Matt
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As a first-time user, I feel the same; the product and the customer service have been great! But you are correct, why would want to publish your pricing for your competition.
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First off, if this doesn’t make much sense from what I type below, It’s 12:30 am and tired. So I apologize lol… I will clarify anything after if some of you have questions.
After doing some deep diving into the iGuide portal and looking at the options on the back end for embedding the iGuide tour into another website (I’ll admit… I haven’t done much reading on all the features, but here I am reading on them now lol). The embedding tool has some really cool features. That still allows for the analytics to work. However, there’s still no control over iGuide branding, as much as I hoped to find something buried.
Embedding Tool
There are url query parameters that you can use to start the iGuide tour without the preview image.
I did a test run on a subdomain. I did modify the embedding code because the generated one didn’t work well on WordPress. I tested it in 7 different common browsers, and it wasn’t responsive device friendly.
However, this does provide the branded url feature some of you are after and was really easy to do.
Here is my sample – Temp Feature Image (Social Share Image For Facebook), didn’t put in any page description for this quick test but a SEO WordPress plugin such as RankMath would help with this and a good caching plugin (I use WP-Rocket).
So with that all said, a Branded URL is possible. If you’re a little tech-savvy, I feel like anyone could set this up themselves.
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Evan,
Thanks for checking through that. Many of us know how to embed a branded iguide. As you know iguide creates both a branded and unbranded tour to use as needed. The issue at hand is the iguide branding all over our deliverables and their links going back to iguide’s site. Though i did notice that yours at least didn’t link to iguide. That’s a plus. But the iguide branding is still all over your tour and the pdf floorplan. Again, we can take time to dig through every tour and change the files, but that takes time that only multiplies when you have more tours. Iguide needs to make this an automatic feature to protect it’s customers that offer tours as a service…plus it just looks much more professional for us.
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That is interesting, Evan. When I asked last week during the onboarding call, they stated that this was not possible. You would still see www.myiguide.com/xxxx, where xxxx could be customized.
A branded URL is nice but not my main concern. As I share the tour offline the logo and link are my main concern.
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Good morning, everyone. I just joined this Forum, and I must say that this topic really caught my attention. I agree with all of you and am confident that the wonderful iGuide Team will listen to our voices and do everything possible to satisfy us (I truly hope so!). Thank you all for being here and contributing to the continuous improvement of this fantastic platform. Wishing you all a wonderful day.
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I know it’s not the problem at hand. However, being told myself that you cannot do what I did. It is possible. I know the branding is still there. I’ve already made my points on my proposal. That’s something they’ll have to do on their end to make the rest of it work.
Sharing for those who aren’t aware of what you can do. 
.
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