Realtors and floor plans: a story of a hard love.

Back in a day, when one wanted to buy a new home, they’d need to sort through columns of plain text listing properties only sparsely followed by a pixelated black and white picture. A brief description was enough to get the basic facts straight, like total size or the number of rooms. As you’d think, visiting a prospective future home felt more like going on a blind date, rather than just confirming what you already know about that property.

Then, the internet came. Newspapers lost a source of income (and gained quite a few pages to print the evening news on) and property portals became the king. Now, it was possible to look for a flat in the exact area one was interested in, or reject houses which were obviously too large. Photo galleries (which were taken using old-school digital cameras rather than smartphones) killed the blind date vibe in the real estate.

However, while most of the modern listings have lost their enigmatic thrill, the presentation quality still varies wildly. From agency to agency, they range anywhere from crude interior pictures to full-featured VR tours. Quite obviously, some of the realtors have introduced standards to ensure listings are consistent within their domain. In this way, the customers are attracted back to the websites that match their expected quality.

One of the key points of a property listing is its floor plan. Hence, it is expected that each will contain at least a rough sketch of the floor layout, so that the customer does not have to take the wild guess from the pictures. By providing this experience the client is likely to go back and rely on the service, so that they can view only those apartments he is likely to buy.

Unfortunately, most of the current listings do not have this feature. Does anyone have a good reason not to include the floor plan? While sounding a bit absurd, there are actually some subtle reasons not to.

The first most common reason is the availability. While all the apartments had their plans created at some point, those documents are often available to the building administration. It takes precious time to get them, which is the only resource one cannot buy.

Suppose the prospective property seller does have the floor plan. In this case, it might be outdated or worn out to be displayed near airbrushed photos of the interior. And in an even rarer case of a new building, where the plans can be crisply sharp, it might be impossible to fit a detailed architectural plan into the listing gallery. It might be not easy to understand for a layperson — those plans commonly include a deluge of unnecessary elements.

This leads to a lot of half-baked solutions. Floor plans that are re-drawn basing on the original, less aesthetic ones. Listings where only a fraction of properties do have a floor layout. Drawings which do not look professional or are drawn without the scale. Professional surveys which have great quality, but take much time and effort to complete.

At PanoRoom, we think that this situation can be radically changed. Recently smartphones got aware of the space, and are able to locate themselves with centimetre-level accuracy (a mere inches). We have successfully created plans of entire apartments in 10–15 minutes by using Augmented Reality solution. Also, we offer a level of accuracy which was not precedented: we consistently provide plans which correspond to the actual space.

We are currently working hard to change the way the property market works. While so far hard to get, floor layouts will eventually become a commodity. The ones who are most likely to profit from this change are the early adopters, who recognise the incoming opportunity in advance.

Recent advances in technology have changed the way we buy our future homes, and smartphones with Augmented Reality will bring it to the next level. While most of the industry still sticks to the no-floor-plan standard, we as a company want to change this. We are looking forward to you joining us this pursuit!