Real Estate Brands See Bright Future In Augmented Reality

If you are shopping for a new home or property, augmented reality, A.R., is the new way to go.

“Mobile is well suited for searching for homes that are for sale, because you’re out and about. It’s a very compelling partner to desktop search. People use the Web on Mondays and Tuesdays, and use mobile search on weekends,” says Leslie Tyler of ZipRealty.  “The feedback we’re getting is that customers want all of the features from the Web in their hands."

ZipRealty.com in Emeryville, California, uses proprietary A.R. technology in an iPhone application called HomeScan. House photos, interior and exterior, value and size projections, and neighboring properties are all delivered live with the point of your phone’s camera. “As opposed to seeing the home as a pin on a map, you get it in 3-D. It’s the same info. But the experience of looking at it is more interesting,” continues Tyler.

ZipRealty’s daily web page views have jumped 150 percent since HomeScan’s debut, and is one of the favorite free downloads from iTunes App Store.

This mobile property-search phenomenon is going global. A.R. “mash-ups” are thriving in Europe. Julien Cheyssial, CTO and co-founder of French MeilleursAgents.com, says, “The feedback has been totally great so far. It didn’t cost us much to set up; we didn’t have to spend too much time on it, and we’ve won many clients through it."

MeilleursAgents.com’s application was developed by Layar, based in Amsterdam and just ten month’s old. Their technology uses A.R. and the phone’s camera to access global compass and positioning systems. Data and 3-D images are super-imposed on a live picture affording a user a single ‘snapshot’ complete with relevant statistics.

Layar, is an open platform and 1,000 developers have produced 2,000 programs for Google’s Android operating system and the iPhone 3GS already. Real estate companies in the U.S., Britain, the Netherlands, Korea, Japan, Australia and Russia are all in progress on similar apps according to Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, one of Layar’s founders. “There’s a lot of capital, a lot of money in real estate so we expect realtor brands to use it as a service to their customers and customers to use it just out of curiosity."

“Augmented reality is a new medium," continues Lens-FitzGerald. “We’ve thought of everything, but there are some things you can’t anticipate because those things aren’t yet possible. It’s part of the maturing of this medium."

Perhaps A.R. mobile mash-ups will be a boon to the sagging real estate market. A new medium for more discerning digital shoppers who value transparency and on-demand details.