When it comes to homes for rent, vacant apartments, and sublets, CraigsList.com is the #1 classifieds website for the 21st century market. It’s free, easy to use, and everyone has heard of it. In a recent conversation with a friend in NYC, she explained to me how she found her apartment by saying, “everyone here uses Craiglist.” But how do your buyers/renters sort between listings? How do you stand out among a sea of others? The answer is simple. The seven simple rules to posting on Craigslist. Use these simple instructions while creating your TourVista Craigslist add for your real estate listing. The Tourvista Craigslist templates are easy to fill out, simple to view, and more professional looking than posting directly form Craigslist alone.

TourVista’s interactive floor plans are a great addition to your virtual tour.  If you already have floor plan graphics, you are ready to connect them to your photos and create interactive floor plans.

But how do you create the floor plan graphic in the first place?

You may be able to get floor plan graphics from an assessor or your home blueprints (if you can find them). Or you could just do it the old fashioned way: with a pencil and some graph paper!

Drawing a sketch of your floor plans and converting that sketch into a floor plan graphic is a fast and easy way to create your floor plans.  Here’s a tutorial on how to convert your sketches into floor plan graphics using Photoshop.

The video above follows these steps for creating a floor plan graphic from your hand-drawn sketches using Photoshop:

1. take a picture of the sketch from straight above
2. open picture in Photoshop and crop it; leave a small padding for the borders and dimensions should be at least 500px. if long and narrow, consider rotating it 90 degrees
3. add guides for each wall
4. draw exterior & interior walls on their own layers. hold “shift” key and click away
5. add room name labels
6. export for web as .gif
7. save .psd for future reference
8. upload floor plan graphic to your virtual tour on www.TourVista.com

Walls

• color: #777777 (gray)
• pencil width: 5px for exterior; 3px for interior

Room Labels

• Myriad Pro – Bold Condensed
• color: #000000 (black)
• Size: 18-36pt

Note: when uploaded to TourVista the floor plan will be shrunk to around 350px wide.

Interactive floor plans add context to your content, showing your viewers where they are each step of the way as they tour your property online.

One of the main reasons that we created TourVista was to provide more information about properties online. Interactive floor plans are a wonderful way to accomplish this because they allow your viewers to orient themselves as they view each photo. By providing a “You are here” icon for each property photo, you have created a more engaging and memorable experience for your potential customers. Your property will definitely stand out.

Here’s a demo on creating interactive floor plans using TourVista: