Sometimes, an apartment is sold in the first 10 seconds of a prospective buyer’s visit. One brokerage group is now trying to bring the same experience to prospective buyers — even when they’re thousands of miles away.
The Bracha Group, a unit of Prudential Douglas Elliman, has started marketing properties online, using three-dimensional virtual technology that lets apartment hunters see what their new house would look like, even if they never cross its threshold.
Bracha’s e-furnishing program allows viewers to set up house without moving in by arranging furniture and changing the wallpaper. Think of it as “The Sims” for real estate buyers.
Lawrence Lee, a project manager and closing director at the Bracha Group, said the program is “taking furnishing to the next level.” As of press time, the group was still ironing out the details of the service, including costs, but Lee said the program is for new developments as well as resales. The target audience is mostly foreign and out-of-town buyers.
“I think it’s a really great concept to visualize being in a space that they can’t really be in,” Lee said.
Bracha hopes to make money on both ends of the service and is talking to interior designers and furniture sellers about licensing their brands for use in the program, or providing links that would allow homebuyers to order their furniture on the Web, after they’ve “seen” how it might look in their new apartments. The brokerage unit hopes to spin money out of licensing and branding agreements for designers and retailers. For example, instead of “placing” generic couches and chairs in a virtual apartment, buyers could see how Design Within Reach or West Elm furnishings look inside their homes.
“I think that the idea is a great idea. It just all depends on how complicated the interface is,” said Frank Lupo, a senior associate at FXFowle Architects, which is not involved in the Bracha project. FXFowle creates virtual renderings for developers to show them what the apartments would look like with furniture before they are built.
In order for Bracha’s program to be state-of-the-art, Lupo said, the user would have to be able to select furnishings and place them in a room — all in three-dimensional perspective — and see them from every viewpoint.
They would also see what doesn’t work.
“It’s there for the initial winnowing-out process,” Lupo said. But, he added, virtual furnishing has its limits, and can’t replace actually seeing an apartment. He said he’d be surprised if someone bought a place sight unseen after using the computer decorating program.
In the cases where a development isn’t built yet, potential buyers rely on visits to showrooms and looking at renderings and models to help decide whether to commit to a property. Lupo said that provides a more tangible sense of what an apartment will look like than a digital perspective.
Like Lupo, home stager Jill Vegas of Jill Vegas Staging, which decorates unsold properties to give buyers a sense of what an apartment might look like, said such computer programs won’t make her job obsolete.
“The reason they like what I do with the space is because they don’t have to use their own imagination to figure it out,” Vegas said.
A potential pitfall for the Bracha program is that buyers could be overwhelmed by too many furnishing choices, or not know how to design a room. But Vegas said the program could help potential buyers see beyond a seller’s ugly furniture or visualize what an empty space would look like furnished.
The Bracha Group’s proposal is innovative because it is applying virtual imaging to condos and furnished apartments, said Marc Lamoureux, president and CEO of North Miami-based Alpha Vision, which creates computer-generated renderings for home builders and developers.
“I just think it’s very cool to be immersed in the unit itself,” Lamoureux said.
The e-furnishing concept is a progression in brokerage’s online shopping offerings. The Corcoran Group Web site last year added “Arrange-a-Room,” which lets prospective buyers click and place furniture in some unfurnished listings, though it doesn’t offer as realistic a representation of a refurnished space as Bracha’s program.
“It’s just a flat plane,” FXFowle’s Lupo said, with no indication of existing architecture, such as windows, doors and radiators.
Halstead Property last March launched a room planning feature on its Web site. Viewers can look at a floor plan and drag furniture into the room, or can link to the feature through actual listings.
The Halstead system shows home buyers existing fixtures and appliances. Like Corcoran’s, Halstead’s program offers only a limited perspective. Halstead is also looking at potential furniture sponsors for digital staging, said Jim Cahill, executive vice president and chief information and technology officer for Terra Holdings, the parent company of Halstead and Brown Harris Stevens. But Halstead is focused on providing the technology only for high-end properties.
Regardless of the version of the technology, Cahill said, it does not eliminate the need to see an apartment in person.
“To me it’s watching a fireworks show on TV,” Cahill said. “You’ve got to get into the place.”
As for the efficacy of any of the e-furnishing technology, Cahill cautioned, “I wouldn’t give it any credit for selling an apartment. People aren’t really buying stuff sight unseen.”