Aria Property Group’s latest residential complex, managed by Aria Living, is a standout on the Brisbane rental market. Featuring a ground floor library, day spa, fitness centre with yoga studio and magnesium plunge pool, private media room, sky lounge and rooftop pool, the development had some pretty epic spaces that needed to be showcased to potential tenants. The group have used virtual tours in the past to showcase common areas but this time decided to take a different approach, scanning an entire apartment floor, allowing tenants to inspect every aspect of the building.
Aria Living General Manager, Zeyad Imam, said, “we wanted tenants to be able to spend as much time as they wanted inspecting the property, without having to do multiple inspections (or not be able to inspect at all, in some cases). Instead of having to go back through their phone or use static images from our website, the Little Hinges virtual tour brought a level of interactivity that helped make the rental campaign a success.”
We sat down with Zeyad to find out more about the campaign, and why he thinks virtual tours are a smart strategy.
The Standard, 15 Manning St, South Brisbane
LH: Why did you decide to add virtual tours to your marketing campaign?
ZI: It was really important for us to allow people to virtually inspect the building on their own time. Videos and photos are great, but they only allow you to see what the videographer or photographer decides is worth capturing. With a virtual tour, someone can spend as long as they like doing a deep dive into the property and taking a close look at all of the amenities that set our properties apart. We were surprised to see so many people spending over 5 minutes on average walking through the property, and coming back multiple times to refresh their memories throughout the application process.
We also see virtual tours as a complement to our standard inspection process and as a backup when we’re forced into lockdown. These sorts of tools allow us to keep the momentum going and the leasing process active, no matter what’s happening in the outside world.
“Videos and photos are great, but they only allow you to see what the videographer or photographer decides is worth capturing. With a virtual tour, someone can spend as long as they like doing a deep dive into the property and taking a close look at all of the amenities that set our properties apart.”
Virtual tours are also a future proofing tool for us when we start to see churn of residents and tenants. We set up the virtual tours of The Standard before any tenants moved in which meant we could fully control the outcome, and it’s a good asset to have for future marketing activities.
We definitely found that when someone turned up for a physical inspection they were already 90% over the line because they’d been able to make sure the property was right for them before coming to an open home, which meant we were able to save time dealing with parties who only needed to go through a few finer details before signing their lease.
LH: How has your marketing changed since adding virtual tours?
ZI: Our main marketing focus has always been to drive traffic to our website, where our virtual tours are embedded. From our website, potential renters can look at the virtual tour, imagery of all of the common areas and floor plans. While we’ve only ever scanned common areas in the past, we will be scanning apartments moving forward as this has proven to be something our tenants really love.
“The pandemic took us by surprise, and we want to continue to innovate, coming up with smart strategies to help deal with disruptions down the line. Virtual tours are one of the ways we’ll be doing this moving forward.”
LH: What made you choose Little Hinges?
ZI: It was important to us to support a local business, but your team also made it very easy to schedule and reschedule our tour. Given we were scanning outdoor areas, we needed the weather to be perfect and your team really understood those constraints. There was a personalised approach to the whole process that’s hard to top.
LH: How has using virtual tours contributed to your campaign success?
ZI: The rental campaign overall has been very successful, and the inclusion of the virtual tour has been a big contributing factor.
We’ll definitely be adding virtual tours to our marketing suite for future campaigns. I’ve been really impressed with the product, it looks and feels extremely professional to the end user. I’ve also been surprised with how many people have utilised the tour and the amount of time they’ve spent exploring the venue. More than 15,000 people viewed the property and potential renters spent an average of 5 minutes really making sure the property is right for them.
