Host, Christine Karpinski: Today's guest is Ed Reese. He is a vacation rental owner, but he also owns this company called HomeHandler.com. Their website is www.HomeHandler.com if you want to check it out. His company does virtual tours.

When I think of virtual tours, I think back when virtual tours first came out and I tried them and I would get sick to my stomach because I get motion sickness really easily. We were back in the days of dial up and things were moving really slowly. But now when I think of virtual tours, I think of it as a different product altogether than it used to be. Ed is going to talk to us a little bit about it.

Hopefully he'll give us some useful information about how we can create a virtual tour of our own, or if you want to go to his company or maybe a similar company to use he'll give us some information about that as well.

Ed, thank you so much for joining us.

Ed Reese: You're welcome.

Christine: I'm excited to talk about this because I'll tell you I'm not a big fan of the old school virtual tours that we used to see on real estate websites and stuff years ago.

But now with the invention of U Tube and other kinds of video sharing websites out there I'm thinking more along the lines of something like that. Is that what we're going to talk a little bit about?

Ed: Yeah. We're going to get into all the different options, what's possible and what's out there. So it really just depends on what people want to do and what flavor they want for their home.

Christine: OK. So let's back up and let's just find out why would you want a virtual tour of your house?

Ed: It shows exactly what your house offers. For example, I have a very unique property called Sailor Shaw. It's listed as a two bedroom, one bath, but it's really a zero bedroom, one bath.

It's your European style, sixteen foot ceilings very long, kind of "L" shaped home. It has two different sleeping areas and they are separated by a wall, but it doesn't go all the way to the ceiling because the builder wanted everybody to see the water from wherever they were sleeping.

Christine: Oh, neat.

Ed: So it is listed as a two bedroom, but if people didn't see a virtual tour, they would kind of think it was fraudulent. They get there and there really aren't two bedrooms. So before I accept any bookings, I have them sign that they have seen the virtual tours and understand exactly how the home is configured in terms of the bedroom setup.

So for unique properties in particular, it's invaluable because it shows how close your neighbors are, how close are you to the water, and how close are people next door. What are the rooms really like?
It is easy to take that great photo of the beach, but were you using a 300mm lens to show the beach from two miles away or are you really there?

Christine: Right. I guess one of the things that you said kind of caught me a little by surprise, that you actually make them sign a document saying that they saw your virtual tour.

I think this goes back to something that I've always said to homeowners, and when I say it to vacation rental owners they look at me like I have two heads. I don't want everybody to stay in my house. There are people that my house is not the best house for, and if you don't want to stay there I don't want you to stay there.

Ed: Yeah.

Christine: I guess that's probably did you learn by a mistake? Did someone...

Ed: Yeah, we had an incident. This was not a proactive process by me, certainly.

Christine: Yeah, nothing ever is.

Ed: No. We had a guest stay at the Sailor's house. Though I had told them over the phone repeatedly the exact makeup of the house, they just didn't get it. And they got there and they were quite mortified that it was not in fact a two bedroom house in the traditional sense of the word.

Christine: Yeah, with doors and...

Ed: ...doors and privacy. You know, they had a teenage daughter that absolutely required privacy and she threw a fit.

Christine: Oh, my.

Ed: I was like look, this is Fourth of July weekend you're there.

Christine: And why does it always happen on the busy weekends?

Ed: It always happens on the Fourth of July, I don't know why. I don't know. I'm only going to serve myself on the Fourth of July moving forward.

I was like, look, you booked it, I told you the exact makeup whether or not you understood it or not, and they were quite upset...which they didn't get it even though I thought I had bludgeoned them over the head with the information. With a virtual tour they go oh, there are no walls, and I'm like yes, no walls.

Christine: Right. I'm curious about this house. We're going to have to put link to it out for the owner community because right now even with you describing it and I'm sure everybody's got the same thoughts in their head going heh?, no walls but it's a two bedroom but it's not a two bedroom?

Ed: Exactly.

Christine: I can't visualize this right now. So yeah, we'll definitely put a link on the owner community to this particular virtual tour so any imagination will be clearly stated for the rest of us that are listening.

So then you decided after the fact that you needed to have a virtual tour. So how did you go about doing that? I am not particularly savvy with anything.

I'm even embarrassed to admit that we got a new TV at home; it is one of those flat screen, blah, blah, blah, TV's. Well, I couldn't even figure out how to turn it off the other night. So I'm thinking how do I even go about taking a virtual tour of my home?

Ed: Sure. Let me separate that into two separate topics. How we did it is that my business partner is very tech savvy. He is a programmer. So he did a search of the best shareware programs for image stitching at the time.

We did a test to figure out which ones were available, what the costs were, what our licensing capability was, and he made alterations to those.

Christine: OK, but what is image stitching?

Ed: The way that virtual tours are produced is that you actually take several pictures and typically you put a camera on top of a tripod and you'll face it in one direction and shoot, rotate it 90 degrees and shoot another one, and keep rotating it.

So you'll either have four photos or eight photos, like if you turn 45 degrees snap, 45 degrees snap. Then it must be quote, unquote, stitched together.

Christine: Oh, neat.

Ed: So what that means is with the software they are doing an approximation of what the two separate images look like and it morphs them together. So it appears to be seamless although that's not the case.

Christine: Oh, now see here, I thought it was a video.

Ed: Nope. But there are video virtual tours as well so that's a different topic altogether.

Christine: Ah, ha.

Ed: That we can talk about in a bit, but our most popular package, and what people always ask for first are just the virtual tours of 360 degrees around a room or a scene outdoors or what have you.

That is almost always a camera on a tripod rotated 360 degrees so that you can spin it around and see exactly what is in that space.

Christine: Neat, neat. I had no idea. So if I wanted to do it and if I were to do it myself where I could put our camera on a tripod, I know what 45 degrees or 90 degrees, snap a picture, snap a picture, and snap a picture.

Now, how do I then "stitch" them together? Do I then send them to your company to stitch them together?

Ed: There's quite a few options. So what we do for what we call the [indecipherable] kit, is we actually send out the camera and instructions for people to do just that.

Christine: Does it require a special kind of camera?

Ed: Well, it can. There are some options that require the whole cameras and some that don't. So in our opinion, you do want a wide angle lens and a camera that makes it easier to take these photos.

Christine: OK, hold on one second.

Ed: Sure.

Christine: Why the angle lens with vacation rental properties? That to me is scary. I've seen some little tiny rooms look like humongous, vast open spaces! They are using wide angle lenses, so I'm kind of a little skeptical about that one. Help me here.

Ed: No, totally, I totally understand that. It depends on how it's produced. The reason that we use wide angle lenses is that you get the fuller ranged floor to ceiling.

So we open it up, you see exactly floor to ceiling and then we [indecipherable] it, so we're not zooming back so it's a whole fishy kind of a feel, just enough to get floor to ceiling so you can see the complete 360 around.

But there are also options that other providers have where you just license their software, the range is anywhere from like $79 to monthly fees of $29.95 per month and you use your own camera and your own tripod and you use their stitching software.

So a wide angle lens is not required at all, you can use existing ones as well. It just happens to be a choice that we make.

Christine: OK, so you were saying it's a per month charge?

Ed: Not for us, some companies charge that way.

Christine: OK, but if I didn't go through you, if I went through a different company, don't I only need to produce this once?

Ed: Well, that's the thing. A lot of companies have their business model in the hosting. So you would basically license their software, go off to their servers and they charge anywhere from $29, $39, $49 a month depending on how many virtual tours you have.

Christine: That's pretty expensive considering it's less than $30 a month to list on HomeAway.com.

Ed: Yes, exactly.

Christine: So that's a lot of money just for a virtual tour. I'm thinking you're better off trying to do it yourself hosted on your personal website. Can you upload something like that to YouTube?

Ed: You know, not to YouTube, you can host it on your own website and we help people set that up on their websites, so that's how we work with everyone. With YouTube, it does need to be straight video.

So you don't have the possibility of doing the directions and drag and click, you're just able to have the video play. I don't actually call them virtual tours; I just call them films or videos. We do have projects that we set up where you have a video that';s shot and it's a video camera that takes an event.

Like in my example, I filmed Seven Samurai in front of the house so it shows the exterior and I have a link on their website from a photo that links directly to YouTube. So you see that, so YouTube is serving that video.

Christine: Right.

Ed: And what you have on your website is that link. So I would recommend that as an option for people that want to expand and do that themselves and thus link more vantage points, more exposure the better.

I really don't care, from a marketing standpoint, if people are doing a flood image virtual tour that we would traditionally call a virtual tour, or if they do a handful of videos, as long as the customer and the possible guest can see exactly what your home offers and it's true to life, that's the goal. How is that accomplished, great power to you.

Christine: Right, right. It is really important to show your home in its exact state because you don't want somebody to show up and be surprised by, "Oh, that house, that's that close. Oh, the beach isn't this close as it looked in the pictures." When they show up in your home and they're mad, how would they treat your home?

Ed: I have a funny story about that, too. I forgot I have two virtual tour stories. At the Harper house, somebody stayed about four years ago and this is before I had launched the virtual tours to that house.

It was a couple from Dallas and they were quite wealthy and they drove their twin $125, 000 Mercedes and their 40 ft yacht that was being towed by their personal assistant to the Harper house.

Christine: Nice.

Ed: So the value of their automobiles and boat was more than enough.

Christine: Exceeded, gosh.

Ed: They had the boat moored out front which you can do where I live and they had their twin black Mercedes and they stayed three weeks at the Harper house.

At the end of two weeks, he called back and just said, "Well, Ed, you're a real nice guy and the house is I guess what you told us about it to be, but we thought it's going to be like a $10 million MTV Cribs kind of house. We got this million dollar thing near where Bill Gates lives and we're going to go there." And he didn't even have the refund, he didn't need a refund. He was like, "Well, whatever" and he left, like he thought that the Harper house was a $5 million property when it's a factor of 10 less than that, which I took as a great compliment for my skill as a marketer.

Christine: However?

Ed: However, you don't want to misrepresent. That's one of the things where videos and virtual tours are great because you do want the right people that are appropriate for you.

You know, I felt bad like I actually did give him a partial refund because I thought "Man, maybe I did over hype this" and that was not my intention. I just wanted good marketing; I did not want to over market.

Christine: Right, and there's that fine line, fine line between over marketing it we're not even talking of lying we're saying staging that';s set so well before you take your pictures, and writing such a perfect description that these people have this view of your house as, like you were saying, this multi million dollar home and they show up and they're like, "Well, it's nice but it's not exactly what I thought it was going to be."

Ed: Exactly.

Christine: And let me just say that it's OK to market your property but you never want to disappoint anybody.

Ed: Right.

Christine: Right. So that's what made you do a virtual tour. Again, it was the two stories that you've given, one where t didn't paint the picture exactly and then well actually both of them.

Ed: Yes.

Christine: So then since you've done your virtual tours, have you had any other problems?

Ed: There's always going to be snafus that happen in the vacation rental business. There's always going to be expectations that are not met, but it really has helped us a lot.

Christine: Right.

Ed: The only other thing that nothing could have possibly helped was something that happened last summer. A woman checked in to the Salish house and she said, "There's too much wood here." I was like, "OK, but what do you mean?" "Well, it's just wood everywhere." I'm like, "It's a cedar lodge."

And I talked all over the listing about this pristine, secluded cedar lodge. She said, "Yes, there's this wilderness and wood and woods and eagles. It's just not what I expected." I was like, "I don't know how you couldn't expect..." you know.

Christine: We all have those, like it goes back to my story about in the cabin where the people called me and they said the windows weren't clean enough and I'm like, "What? You're in a cabin in the woods; you're not at the Ritz Carlton, for God's sakes."

Ed: Right.

Christine: I mean, it's in the woods. As a matter of fact, I just had the windows cleaned, what do you want me to do? You're always going to have some of that, but I guess having the virtual tour sort of helps.

OK, so then the next thing that people are going to say is, "Yes, Christine, this is great, it's a great idea but Home Away and VRBO don't allow virtual tours." I do know as far as why they don't, it's a lot of bandwidth and it will slow the site down and probably stop inquiries and stuff like that.

I've seen during usability testing where people actually even just click off to a personal website and sometimes they get lost and then they'll close up the whole browser that it sometimes confuses things.

So what I would recommend is if you're on VRBO or you're on Home Away, you can always put a link to your personal website that has your virtual tour on it or you can set up an auto responder.

Anybody that inquires, then you can also set up a link in that auto responder saying, "Hey, I'll get back to you soon, but in the meantime why don't you have a virtual tour of my home." Do you think that that's the best solution given the fact?

Ed: Oh, yes. That's how I respond to every inquiry. I have the links both to my website and to my virtual tours on Home Away and VRBO and the listing sites that allow it.

In my responses to people in the auto responder, it's, "Thank you for the inquiry. I'm sure you're looking for additional links to research your stay." And I include a virtual tour link; I include links to movies, to my map, to my availability calendar, to my blog, to everything that I think will help provide that information.

So I don't think that virtual tours are the thing to lead with anyway. They are the thing just to help cement the confidence, so that it conveys exactly what your home has. It';s support, it's not the lead.

Christine: Right. Yes, that makes sense. Now, if I decide that I wanted to hire somebody to do this because I could take a picture well, maybe, not always a great picture, but OK I could put a camera on a iPod and I could take the picture how would I even begin to try to find a company that could seam them together and make a virtual tour?

Do I just do a Google of virtual tours or how do I know who's good? Any recommendations?

Ed: Yes, I would do just that actually. I would Google virtual tours in fact, I have that page in front of me right now and look at their samples and prices. You definitely want to see their body of work and a lot of them are focused real estate agents.

You definitely want to see and it really does make a difference you just want to make sure that you think that will market your house very well and accurately, and if you think the price and the process works with your budget and with how you want to work.

Christine: OK, wait, price, they can be all over the board. What do you consider a reasonable price for somebody like this?

Ed: If you can't do it yourself, a lot of companies are charging either $79 to $129 for the software and not hosting, and anywhere from $19 to 39 a month for a host solution, and that's with you doing it and somebody else hosting it.

If you want to have it in your website, I would recommend to have a pro shoot it. I consider myself a good photographer but for my static images, I hire a pro. It's important.

Christine: Right, I do the same thing.

Ed: Yes, a lot of photographers shoot virtual tours. Find out if your existing photographer or photographer in the area shoots them. When you're looking on virtual tours, a lot of the companies have networks of photographers that sell those solutions.

Then you can expect to pay anywhere from say $200 to $500 for somebody to come out and shoot your virtual tours. It's just going to depend on who you get and how they charge for their time. But then they're yours, you own them out right.

Christine: Right, that's not such a bad price. The hosting does kind of go, "Wow, that's a lot."

Ed: Especially over time, yes.

Christine: Yes, maybe I'm thinking you need to shoot a video and put it on YouTube.

Ed: You know what? My video has been seen a couple thousand times.

Christine: Wow, that's pretty cool.

Ed: It's just a video of the creek showing the salmon, it's nothing special.

Christine: Isn't that funny?

Ed: Yes.

Christine: Yes, so it means that people are actually going to it. So now, Ed, if somebody wants to get in contact with you or your company to do virtual tours, I imagine you've got a lot of information on your website about this. Can you give me that website one more time?

Ed: Yes, www.HomeHandler.com.

Christine: HomeHandler.com. Well, we've run out of time. Ed, thank you so much for helping us with virtual tours. I think that you've provided a lot of useful information that people could start thinking about whether or not they want to do a virtual tour of their vacation rental property. Thanks again.

Ed: Happy to do it and hope I answered questions.

Christine: Have a great day.