It was recently brought to our attention that the custom virtual tour links was not working for Internet Explorer (IE) web browsers. Ah yes, IE, the nemesis of all web developers. 😉 We’ve fixed this. Sorry for the hassle for any of you IE users that experienced this bug when building MLS-compliant links for your virtual tours.
In case you are wondering how to use this nifty feature, watch this 1 minute video tutorial on creating a non-branded / MLS-compliant link for your virtual tour.
Nov 20th Update: More customizable and no TourVista account required! Visit tourvista.com/craigslist
TourVista provides a free copy and paste Craigslist template to quickly post your property onto the world’s most popular real estate rental site. Your property will stand out with our 6 professionally designed templates, and you will save a ton of time when creating your post on Craigslist.
Here is a video tutorial for posting your TourVista virtual tour onto Craigslist:
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:
Walls
Room Labels
Note: when uploaded to TourVista the floor plan will be shrunk to around 350px wide.
Leverage the power of Facebook, Twitter and over 50 other social networks to help spread the word about your virtual tours. It is super easy to do and a great way to share & promote your real estate listings using the web’s hottest new technologies.
Instructions: Post your virtual tour on Facebook
Facebook will open in a new window and pre-populate a Profile post for your Wall that includes:
Add a personal note at the top if you’d like and click the Share button to update your Wall and your friend’s News Feeds.
Note: you have the option of “Send a Message” that will email your TourVista link to select friends directly from Facebook. We recommend using the Wall method described above because it allows visibility to all of your friends (present and future) and will generate more traffic for you. In this sense, the Wall post is less invasive on your friends and more permanent for your online marketing.
ps – speaking of Facebook, if you haven’t claimed your personal Facebook URL yet (e.g. www.facebook.com/mattcass) do it now – www.facebook.com/username. You can get one for your company page on Facebook but only if you have 25 fans. Of course, we’d love to have you become a fan of TourVista’s Facebook page!
update 12/21/09: link to your Facebook and Twitter accounts directly from your virtual tours!
TourVista creates a dedicated property website and link for each of your virtual tours. For example, www.tourvista.com/784. Link to this dedicated property website in your marketing materials to maximize your property views and increase your online brand.
Property sellers: be sure to include your TourVista link in your local MLS and get maximum exposure for your property. Most MLS’s will include this link in their data feed, meaning that your virtual tour link will show on many major real estate search portals.
Some MLS’s restrict the information that you can show online about your properties. TourVista allows you to customize which information is shown ensuring that you are in compliance with your MLS.
This short video gives a demonstration on how to create a non-branded, MLS-compliant link to your virtual tour website:
UPDATE: 06/29/2010 – we’ve improved the availability options. See this new blog post and short tutorial video.
A subtle but important addition is now showing on the Property Details page for your virtual tours, the availability date field:
Use this field to indicate if your property is not available until a certain calendar date. This is especially useful for rental properties that are currently occupied and becoming available in the near future.
If you have included an availability date for a virtual tour, your dedicated property website on TourVista and your widgets will automatically update to show the available date:
If you are using TourVista’s Community Website Templates, the availability for each of your properties is shown. Either the date will show, or “Available NOW” if you have left the availability date field empty. Here’s an example from a website currently powered by TourVista, www.UWStudentHouses.com:
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:
Another frequently requested improvement to TourVista is to include on each virtual tour links to the other virtual tours in your account. You’ve asked, we have delivered!
If you have setup multiple virtual tours in your TourVista account, they will now show on the left column of your dedicated property website, like so:
This addition is a great way to cross-market your other properties and take advantage of the traffic to each of your virtual tours.
TourVista is pleased to announce this newest update. Thanks for the feedback and keep it coming!
Update: as of November 2013 Craigslist is no longer allowing fancy templates or externally-hosted images (you can still show images on your posts but they must be uploaded directly to Craigslist). More info and a great solution provided free from TourVista here.
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Our free Craigslist templates have been improved to save you even more time. In addition to the main description HTML code that you can copy and paste into your Craigslist post, your property title, price and address are also shown. Just click to highlight them, copy and paste into Craigslist.
There is also a link to your virtual tour photos on TourVista. While our Craigslist templates include your first 7 photos, it’s also a good idea to upload at least one other photo using the “Add Images” form that Craigslist provides. This photo will show at the bottom of your post. We recommend using a photo that is not already included in the template code TourVista provides.
We are working on some new Craigslist templates and look forward to offering these in the near future!
(Update: 08-16-09) – Video tutorial for posting your virtual tour onto Craigslist in only 3 minutes.
Update March 2011: integrate Google Analytics with your virtual tours!
One of the most requested features from our users has been the ability to see a detail of each virtual tour’s traffic. While your tours have been tracking this information from the day you first created them, the only statistic available to users was the total number of views. Until now…
It is now possible to view information about every time your virtual tour has been viewed. The virtual tour viewing statistics are updated real-time, meaning you can know exactly when your tour is being viewed and which sites are sending that traffic. Use this data to make your marketing efforts more effective:
Note: stats are not counted when you are logged into TourVista and viewing your own tours. It’s easy to filter your viewing statistics by date. Filter by:
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Hope you like. Any suggestions? Let us know.
