Newmark Homes of Austin, Texas, one of the first builders to offer virtual reality tours of model homes and the construction process, is now one of the first to provide daily inventory updates at www.newmarkhomes.com.
Newmark Live! replaces the company’s first website and offers a comprehensive overview of housing inventories in six different cities.
| In response to consumer preferences, Newmark Live! has foregone virtual reality model tours in favor of daily inventory updates. |
Eric Rome, president of Newmark’s Texas division said the decision to move away from the virtual reality home tours was made because many customers have slow modems and the majority of home shoppers are more interested in knowing if a particular home is still available in a particular community.
"Although our previous website attracted considerable interest, won some design concept awards and generated a multitude of sales, we found that home shoppers really wanted detailed, specific information about homes and communities," says Rome.
Users can also search for information by city, community, school district, price point or home style in a format Rome terms "a flexible storefront for the end user."
Another groundbreaking aspect of the new website is Geographic Information System (GIS) technology. This allows home shoppers to calculate distances between the address of their desired home and local area amenities. While Newmark eliminated virtual home tours in lieu of buyer preference and modem speed, the construction tours still exist on the website.
"The QuickTime tours were extremely popular," says Rome. "They were simply ahead of their time when we introduced our first website."
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