[3D Panorama Scanning Case Study] How Did Little Hinges, Australia's Largest Real Estate Marketing Company, Achieve a 20% Monthly Sales Increase?

【3D Panoramatic Scanning Case Study】How did Little Hinges, Australia's largest real estate marketing company, achieve 20% month-over-month sales growth?

Little Hinges real estate achievements:
►20% month-over-month sales growth
►Doubled lead generation
►Sold properties in one-quarter of the time
►50% faster leasing time

Buying a home is often the most expensive and important purchase in most people's lives. It is also one of the most valuable. In today's market, with low housing inventory and fierce bidding wars in many areas, homebuyers often have only a few minutes to inspect a home before making an offer. Remote home buying is becoming increasingly popular, but it presents challenges when in-person visits are not possible.

Little Hinges is a real estate marketing company that uses 3D guided tours to simplify the property experience for agents and homebuyers. CEO Josh Callaghan says, "Our mission is to digitize the entire property transaction, from listing to closing."

In just 18 months, Little Hinges has grown to become one of Australia's largest providers of virtual property tours. It combines Matterport Digital Twin technology with its own analytics and insights dashboard to provide agents and vendors with unique insights. Clients receive virtual tours captured by a Matterport Pro3 3D Panoramic Scanner, 10 real-time messages with Mattertags in the tour, floor plans, an analytics dashboard, weekly performance reports via email, and an integrated platform with customer information management systems.

( Source: Little Hinges Official Website )

The company was founded in early 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when businesses were closing, employees were leaving offices, and homeowners didn't want dozens of strangers touring their homes. But Josh Callaghan took on the responsibility of ensuring his employees could make a living, and he saw it as a good time for the real estate industry to transition to virtual tools.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Callaghan's co-founder Josh Kindred owned a chain of coffee shops and a real estate company, Kindred Property Group. When the coffee shops had to close during lockdown, he promised his team there would be no layoffs. Kindred trained baristas to become Matterport technicians. It was an excellent opportunity for him to grow his business while ensuring his employees still got paid.

Immersive and interactive 3D virtual home tour experience
3D real estate tours are not new, but many early 3D technologies were rigid. "The Matterport experience is completely different, and everyone who uses it feels it," says Callaghan. "It's like you're actually moving through the house, not jumping from point to point and having to reorient yourself with every mouse click."

↓Check out the 3D home tour effect below↓

Hawaiian Oceanside Villa

The once-popular "video marketing" is truly outdated!
From a marketing perspective, modern people are exposed to thousands of advertisements every day and need to capture an average attention span of 8 seconds. While video has a fixed playback time longer than 3D tours, in reality, every person visiting a home is interested in different things. Some prioritize the kitchen, while others focus more on the living room, bathroom, or layout. The fixed perspective of video forces everyone to view the same scenes, which prevents maximizing the selling points of the house.

But with Matterport tours, visitors can browse their virtual property at their own pace. They can decide where to look, what to zoom in on, and how long to stay before moving on.

Because interested buyers can see all the details – from the layout and flow of rooms to the tile craftsmanship and fixtures – they can confidently schedule in-person viewings or make offers, knowing beforehand which homes might be suitable for them, with enough rooms and space, appropriate configurations, etc., they can easily imagine what it would be like to live there.

One of the issues with in-person viewings is that interested buyers often have very little time to view a home, perhaps only 15-30 minutes at most. Those who spend an entire day viewing properties cannot possibly remember all the information about all the homes, what each kitchen looks like, or how large the living spaces are. However, those who can revisit a home virtually are better able to decide which homes they like best, and often without needing to schedule a second in-person viewing to confirm.

For some buyers, a Matterport tour provides enough meaningful information about the overall look and feel of a home to make a purchase decision. Callaghan recalls a visitor who made an offer on a property based solely on "two hours of Matterport touring."

Leverage analytics and actionable insights to make better decisions
New Little Hinges clients have started using 360-degree photography and 3D tour services from other companies, partly because of the immersive feel of Matterport tours, but also because of Little Hinges' analytics capabilities. The company collects data every time a visitor virtually tours a property and uses the Matterport API and SDK to build data visualization dashboards.

▼API (Application Program Interface) is a programming system. On the Matterport platform, you can customize the interface exactly how you want your customers to see it▼

 

"Callaghan says: "Agents can see who is viewing properties, even on a daily or minute-by-minute basis. They can see how many people are virtually viewing properties, what they're looking at during their visit, how long they stay, where they're viewing from, and which real estate portal they found the listing on. Agents can then use this information to make better decisions for their rental property marketing campaigns."

▼SDK (Software Development Kit) is a software development toolkit that visualizes many data presentations. The following are the applications mentioned by Callaghan▼

For example：If most visitors are drawn to the kitchen, the listing agent can use the kitchen as an opening selling point in their marketing materials to immediately capture the attention of potential clients, rather than relying on anecdotal evidence from properties without data.

Insight portals include more than just numbers

Agents can see regional and global maps with pins indicating the location of each visitor, some of whom come from thousands of miles away.

Few buyers planning to move to a new city from far away are willing to schedule an in-person viewing unless they are very confident they have found the right place. Matterport viewing services allow consumers to make quick decisions.

Callaghan said, "We had a client auctioning a property in Cairns, a remote area of northern Queensland. His buyers were from Sydney and Melbourne, over a thousand kilometers away. Both buyers flew in for the auction, and although they hadn't seen the house in person, they had virtually browsed it through Matterport. This was enough to convince them to hop on a plane and start bidding. At that auction, a local person won the bid, but the house sold for a higher price than it would have without out-of-state bidders."

He also added a key point: "It's one thing for us to say that 3D tours are better than photo and video tours, but it's another to prove how these tours attract the best buyers, drive up prices, and open up new markets."

Kindred Property Group reported that buyer inquiries have doubled since the company introduced 3D property tours for its listings. "Every month we're breaking buyer inquiry records, and we directly attribute this to the addition of virtual tours. We were receiving 600-700 buyer inquiries per month before Christmas, and this month we've received 1300 buyer inquiries, and these are all genuinely interested buyers for the properties we're showcasing," said Daniel Lyngcoln, Marketing Executive at Kindred Property Group.

RE/MAX Results (an American international real estate company) found that partnering with Little Hinges led to faster property rentals. "We're seeing a definite increase in properties being rented sight unseen, whether during busy periods, interstate relocations, or during isolation. Floor plans and photos, as part of the Little Hinges virtual tour, are a huge benefit for those looking to rent property, as it has proven that if virtual tours and floor plans are included in advertising, more people confidently apply to view properties," said Faith Williams, Property Manager at RE/MAX Results. "In today's super busy world, this technology allows my agency to rent properties almost 50% faster than competitors in the area."

Glen Williams, a top sales agent at Ray White Surfers Paradise Group, stated that since implementing Little Hinges virtual tours, he has sold properties in just one-quarter of the time. "In the past three months, I have sold 10 properties with an average listing time of just 34 days, and my most recent sale took only two weeks. This is a remarkable achievement compared to the 180-day average listing time for Surfers Paradise apartments," Williams said. "Through virtual viewings, I tracked nearly 2300 groups of clients for my recent 10 apartments, a significant portion of whom were from other states."

Achieving 20% monthly growth
There's an old saying in the West, "Little hinges swing big doors," and this perfectly describes Little Hinges. Although it's a new company, it has achieved 20% month-over-month growth and captures digital twins for hundreds of properties across Australia every month. Clients have responded very well to the analytics, and Little Hinges plans to delve deeper into data customization next year. "Little Hinges is able to attract more buyers from a wider range and sell properties at higher prices. Little Hinges is sure to thrive long-term, even after Covid-19 becomes a distant memory."

Matterport Pro3 features groundbreaking LiDAR innovation, capable of millions of measurements from dimly lit spaces to direct sunlight, allowing you to experience outdoor beauty immersively


 

 

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