As the real estate market adjusts to restrictions imposed by public health officials, one real estate brokerage said its requests for agent-led, video home tours have soared.
Redfin said it saw a 494 percent increase in requests for agent-led video home tours last week. Redfin said 18.9 percent of tour requests from Redfin.com were video-chat tour requests, up from 0.2 percent at the beginning of March.
“The future of real estate has come earlier than any of us could have anticipated,” Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman said in a release. “The way things are during the pandemic won’t last forever, but at the end of all this, things won’t go back to the way they were either. We hope we’re well prepared.”
On March 3, Redfin updated Redfin.com to encourage buyers to ask for video-chat tours, and March 17, Redfin upgraded Redfin.com’s tour-request forms to let homebuyers choose a video-chat tour with a single click.
“During video tours, I become the eye of the buyer,” Indianapolis Redfin agent Jill Thompson said. “I'm talking more than I would on a traditional tour, pointing out things that would be obvious in-person but that aren’t as clear through a camera lens, like the quality of workmanship on any repairs or whether or not a room would fit a king-size bed.”