VisualTour.com™ Contact: J. L. Winn, TRF Systems, Inc.
JLWinn@VisualTour.com 954.345.9701 ext 220

Source: National Relocation & Real Estate Magazine, November 1, 2001

By Mike Patrick

A few years ago, Prudential Preferred Realty was handling the relocation of a tech-savvy division of a major corporation. When the company asked partner and president Helen Sosso if her real estate firm had e-mail access, she said, "Of course it does."

Then, suddenly, agents used to receiving one or two e-mails a day were inundated with e-mail from some 400 relocating employees. That taught Sosso and her agents a lesson. Today, Prudential Preferred Realty (www.prudentialpreferred.com) prides itself for being ahead of the pack technologically. After her 24-year-old son, Scott Sosso, became the company's e-commerce director, the next great technological leap for Prudential Preferred Realty was providing VisualTour virtual tours.

"We were one of the original people who did virtual tours, and switched to VisualTour [from another provider] because it had more versatility," Helen Sosso says. "The real key is the versatility. It's an easy product to use."

It has to be. Not only does Sosso require the more than 500 agents in 22 offices throughout the Greater Pittsburgh area to be e-certified and encourage them to get laptops, she also requires that every Prudential Preferred Realty online listing have a virtual tour. Instead of having tours created by an outside service provider, VisualTour allows agents to use the Internet and special software to create virtual tours of their listings themselves.

The agent uses a standard digital camera and the VisualTour tools and services to create a multimedia virtual tour including 360-degree, panoramic and still images, text descriptions and even a voice narration. VisualTours can also be shown offline and used for diskette marketing, making them not only a powerful listing tool, but a marketing tool to capture that listing in the first place.

"I think in order for the real estate industry to keep pace with the customers in the corporate world today, we have to keep up in technological capabilities in the same way they are," she says. "We actually have a technology division, but my partner and I find Scott is the translator between the tech people and us. He's a young person that totally understands the real estate business but also understands the technology world."

Scott Sosso says even agents who rejected technological advances such as virtual tours in the past can understand their value when given the VisualTour results.

"Last year I went out to the offices and said we will be doing it and the agents weren't excited about it. You can tell them as much as you want, but if you don't give them results, they won't do it," Scott Sosso says. "When I told them recently that leads increased 100 percent and views increased 150 percent, they got excited once I started talking about things like that."

Although Prudential Preferred Realty went live with VisualTour a year ago, it was just six months ago that all the listings carried a virtual tour. And in that time, the Sossos say, not only have the leads increased, but so has the quality of those leads. "Statistics-wise, of all the leads we get on Internet, about 12 percent of them come from VisualTour," Scott Sosso says. "But the capture rate is probably a lot higher than the other leads we get. They're more qualified leads because they've already seen the inside of the house."

In fact, Helen Sosso says, people who otherwise would have refused to even visit a house based on a photo of the exterior have purchased the home based on a VisualTour image of the interior.

"We really think virtual tours are going to be more of a way buyers will be looking for homes," Helen Sosso says. "Instead of an agent taking you to 10 houses, you can sit through which houses you want to see and don't want to see." The company's success with VisualTour has led it to create a curious offshoot of the traditional real estate process-the virtual open house.

"If people want to, instead of going out to the houses, we actually advertise in the paper to go to the Web site. I think it helps free up more time for the agent so the agent doesn't have to spend three or four hours at the house that day," Scott Sosso says. "We've gotten direct sales off of VisualTours, which is very promising."

About VisualTour

VisualTour (www.VisualTour.com) is developed by TRF Systems, Inc. of Coral Springs, Florida. Incorporated in 1991, TRF Systems is the leading provider of innovative digital photo management software and services in a number of vertical markets. VisualTour.com is recommended by the Council of Residential Specialists, the Allen F. Hainge CyberStars™, and the Real Estate CyberSpace Society. For more information, please contact J. L. Winn at TRF Systems at 954.345.9701 or by email at JLWinn@VisualTour.com. VisualTour.com is a trademark of TRF Systems.