text:
Real EstateCoronavirus
Keller Williams app update lets homebuyers schedule virtual home tours
Homebuyers can keep their distance with virtual home tours
May 14, 2020, 3:48 pm By Julia Falcon
Keller Williams has updated its app, launched in February, with a new virtual home tour scheduling feature, something that has become more and more popular during the pandemic.
Image courtesy of Keller Williams. Click to enlarge.
According to Keller Williams, the first quarter this year saw 60 million home searches across its app, website and market center and agent websites.
"With this new feature inside our consumer app launched, we're capturing a slew of new data on virtual home tour scheduling that our AI can use to fuel prescriptive insights for our agents going forward," Keller Williams spokesperson Darryl Frost said.
Via the app, potential homebuyers can schedule a live video tour that fits their schedule.
Jessica Groff, product director at Keller Williams, said that potential homebuyers need to know that they can still tour homes from the comfort of their couch.
"What we came up with was, we wanted to quickly launch the ability to request a live video tour from the mobile app," Groff told HousingWire. "We built KW to respond to what the market threw at us. That philosophy allowed us to quickly shift and give consumers that ability to schedule a live video tour in a mobile app in just weeks."
Keller Williams also updated its user experience in regards to listing photos, allowing consumers to pinch-to-zoom and use landscape mode.
Also new is an agent's featured collection, featuring listings that provide options for the consumer based on specifications such as size, location, amenity preferences and affordability.
As far as adapting to the current environment, Groff said it's all about giving the consumers what they need, and helping agents.
"The need to buy homes doesn't stop, but my desire to go walk into other people's homes certainly did, and we wanted to bridge that gap," Groff said. "What we realized was, a lot of consumers didn't even know that they could ask [agents] to go and give a live showing via a video conferencing software, so surfacing that in the app was one of the things that we came up with."
Keller Williams has more recently collaborated with Facebook to give agents virtual home tour training as the whole company is working from home during shelter-in-place guidelines, and launched virtual home showings in light of the pandemic.