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F O R I M M E D I A T E R E L E A S E VisualTour.com®
Contact: J. L. Winn, TRF Systems, Inc. VisualTour® pokes a finger at Eye Pix
© Copyright 2000, IRED.com, Inc. - by Pat Rioux June 15, 2000 Among the online features of real estate web sites that home buyers find valuable is "virtual tours", the 360 degree panoramic views of one or more rooms of a home for sale. According to The 2000 National Association of Realtors Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 45% of home buyers found virtual tours "extremely valuable", 25% found them "very valuable" and 24% found virtual tours "somewhat valuable." Being able to walk through the homes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week helps buyers identify homes that meet their criteria without physically making the trip to see a home in person. The dominant player in the market currently is iPIX but it looks like a new contender is getting ready to give them a run for the money. Internet Pictures Company (Nasdaq: IPIX) is the name of the new company formed by the merger of bamboo.com and Interactive Pictures (iPIX) early this year. They are a leading provider of visual content for web sites and provide capture, processing, hosting and distribution of Internet picture delivery. The company is headquartered in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and has co-headquarters in Palo Alto, California. The iPIX alliance with REALTOR.COM makes ordering easy for real estate agents. They can order online, fax their order or use the toll-free number. iPIX states that they have a network of photographers who service over 7,900 towns and cities in the United States. For $99.95, they will film four virtual scenes, interior or exterior shots. Additional scenes cost an additional $20.00 a piece. iPIX may have the jump on TRF Systems, a Coral Springs, Florida start-up but TRF plans to be a major competitor, vying for the real estate agents' attention and money in the market of over 4 million real estate sales each year. TRF has launched VisualTour.com® that makes money the main point of comparison in their chart of services offered by both companies. TRF Systems is currently promoting their brand of Visual Tours to real estate agents and emphasize that their software system puts the agent at the center of the process. TRF launched VisualTour.com® to teach real estate agents how to create walk-through virtual tours for their Web sites and to post on REALTOR.COM. Their price is $25 per tour versus the $99.95 per tour price charged by iPIX. They claim to allow Multimedia Guided Virtual Tours with up to 50 images, voice, captions and text to promote listings for sale. TRF emphasizes that there is no delay in getting virtual tours to the web with their system, in comparison to the up to two weeks it can take iPIX to have a tour filmed. TRF provides this description of how their new virtual tour service works: "The visualtour.com® patent-pending system includes software for the agent's computer, virtual tour-hosting services, and server-based applications that process and serve the tours. The complete system enables agents to create and publish guide tours of their properties directly on the Web -- without the expense of an outside service or even a Webmaster. The visual tours include photos, captions, unlimited text descriptions for each photo, voice descriptions, and the ability to send e-mail or pages to the agent directly from the tour page. Cost to the agent is $25 a tour." TRF states that they have more than 1,600 customers that include agents from every major franchise - Century 21, Coldwell Banker, ERA, Prudential, and RE/MAX. The tours can be saved to a floppy disk to be used for Open Houses, e-mailed to interested home buyers and even linked on agents' web pages. Another contender for the virtual tour market may be in the form of digital cameras that allow real estate agents to make a 1-minute "movie" with audio narration per floppy disk. The upfront purchase price will be paid back quickly as the real estate agent uses the camera over and over to create MPEG movies for listings. For example, the Sony Digital Mavica uses a floppy disk which allows the agents to capture the video, load to their computer's hard drive and share the images via web sites or on copied disks to hand out to home buyers. The fact that real estate agents can create the "movie" tours at the time of the listing may appeal to agents who want to impress their clients by posting their tours to the web instantaneously. *iPIX is a registered trademark of Internet Pictures Corporation
Reprint Rights To Electronic Publications Reprint rights to electronic publication are available, with written permission from IRED as follows: You are granted non-exclusive license to reprint specific articles on web sites in exchange for credit to the author, links to the author's e-mail address and web site and to www.ired.com The following notice of copyright ownership shall be included: "Copyright (c) IRED.Com, Inc., 2001" You are not authorized to make any changes in the text or to condense, summarize or paraphrase all or any portion of the article without approval of author and publisher. Your rights to reprint articles will commence once IRED has received your e-mail request and you print a reprint authorization notification from IRED. Please send your request for specific articles to reprints@ired.com Reprint Rights To Hardcopy Publication Hard copy reprint rights revert to authors so you must request permission in writing from the individual author to reprint or copy articles. About TRF Systems VisualTour.com®
is developed by TRF Systems, Inc. of Coral Springs, Florida. Incorporated
in 1991, TRF Systems, Inc. is the leading provider of innovative digital
photo management software and services in a number of vertical markets.
For more information, please contact J. L. Winn at TRF Systems at (954)
345-9701 x220 or by email at jlwinn@visualtour.com.
VisualTour® is a registered trademark of TRF Systems. |
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