View Your New Home Virtually with Shea Homes

Technology is amazing...Imagine buying your next new home from the comfort of your current home!

Today's struggling economy is driving the use of innovative technologies in new home sales and marketing. A growing trend is the use of Virtual Model Home Tours to replace the use of expensive model home complexes in communities across America.

America's homebuilders are uncovering new ways to cost-effectively market new homes to a new price-sensitive homebuyer: Virtual model homes!

These highly-detailed 3D videos create the spatial experience of walking through a model home and visualizing every detail, before the home is even built. Though the price to create these tours is far less than their physical counterpart, high quality tours can easily cost $10,000 or more. "If you are going to replace the tactile experience of walking through a real model home with a virtual home, it had better be astoundingly realistic or you might have the reverse effect and turn off your prospective homebuyer," said Steve Ormonde, Co-founder of Focus 360, and the inventor of this technology.

The cost of this level of quality and detail has been out of reach of many homebuilders. This is why this week Focus 360 introduced a new more affordable "Value Line" that addresses this price/quality issue head-on. "The biggest obstacle to builders' use of virtual model homes in the past has been the price tag associated with high quality tours," said Ormonde. "Our goal is to provide builders with a solution that is not only more affordable, but one that provides the high quality needed to engage home shoppers and present a builder's product in the best possible light."

Can virtual model tour videos drive sales while decreasing a builder's investment in model homes? "Absolutely!" stated Adam Hieb, Director, Sales and Marketing for Shea Homes. "The days are gone when we could afford to put up multi-million dollar model complexes. Every new Shea home community is different but in general, our use of high quality virtual model tours will greatly reduce the number of model homes needed. Instead of four models for instance, we might be able to get away with one, with the remaining models represented in 3D virtual reality. In some lower profile communities, virtual tours may eliminate models completely - a sales office might suffice. And while we have used Focus 360 for many years for our bigger budget, high profile projects, we are excited that we can now afford them for all our projects."

For more information on Shea Homes visit www.SheaHomes.com.

Excerpts for this post provided by EarthTimes.Org. The full article can be viewed at http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/homebuilders-are-increasing-the-use,1087301.shtml