Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa December - January 2014 | Page 16
COVER STORY
mobiles when new properties meeting specific
requirements are listed. They can list their
properties for sale privately at a very reasonable
cost and their properties to rent for free. They
can obtain contact details for sellers, agents and
landlords and they can sign up for notifications of
properties on auction.
They can even bid on properties on auction
online. The growth of online auctions is a
testament of the appeal of a virtual auction
environment that allows buyers to participate in
the excitement of bidding from their offices or
homes, regardless of location or time restrictions.
Buyers can also use technology such as ekaya.
co (http://ekaya.co) - a clever little show house
finder made especially for smartphones. It
allows homebuyers to discover, explore and find
show houses using their smartphone. It can, for
example, show you all the showhouses
on a particular Sunday in a certain
area, provide directions and contact
details, and a check-in feature.
Some technologies, such as virtual
property tours, may change the
role of show days. According to
Private Property, the benef its of
virtual tours are numerous. It saves
the seller, the agent and the buyer
time and money, by reducing the
physical visits to the property to
only serious buyers and shortening the time
to the conclusion of the contract. It provides
potential buyers with enhanced information,
as well as a better visual experience. For sellers
and agents, visual tours improve the quality of
listings, which results in higher search rankings
and additional exposure on YouTube, and this
results in more views by potential buyers and
consequently more quality leads.
Private Property has built a network of
professional virtual tour photographers, who
film more than 1 000 virtual tours a month
countrywide. The virtual tours are manually
stitched for best quality and also have a floor
plan included. To ensure their property portal
can deliver this type of rich content, served faster
than previously, Private Property launched its new
award-winning website earlier this year, hosted on
Microsoft’s Azure cloud environment - a first for a
large South African portal.
But it is not only the long-established players
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who are harnessing the technology. Jaco
Rademeyer Estates recently teamed up with
Bradley Millar of futureTECH and local
photographer Debbie Louw to devise a ‘new
experience for house hunters’ that eliminates the
time and hassle of obtaining floor plans from a
municipality. It involves an innovative digitally
mapping out of homes, and the floor plan – with
the exact dimensions and indicating square metres
- is then uploaded for viewing online. Another
innovation from the team is video tours posted on
YouTube, replacing distorted and cumbersome
virtual 3D tours.
Expecting that the total traffic on its mobile
website will overtake that of its web-based
portal within two years, Private Property also
recently released an iPad app, which became
South Africa’s number one free app in terms of
downloads, within a week of its release. Intuitive
“Technology is racing
ahead to produce
game-changing new
advancements”
and fun to use, the app allows house-hunters to
find their next “pad” via a text, location-based
or suburb navigation search. Browsers can also
access their favourite tools from anywhere in
the app using the nifty slide-menu and enjoy
easy access to estate agents, private sellers and
landlords through the in-app feature providing
contact details and allowing direct messaging.
The iPad app is free to download and use. Simply
search for it in the app store.
It is not only the buildings that potential buyers
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