TourBuzz Virtual Tour Community
Floor Plans
What about offering floors plans? From what I have read (including the article posted here on the forum) it seems floor plans are a big deal to a lot of people. In fact, there is an online company that offers just floor plans online, no tours, no photos, that seems to be all of the rage around here. Also, measuring homes, for those that want to do it, is great and quick way to make a little extra cash. What do you guys think of the floor plan idea?
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Jesse Turnquist on -
I was looking into that a little bit with Google sketch-up as the base for the floorplans. You can make really elaborate 3D models of floorplans which I thought it would go well with the high def tours through Tourbuzz. Simpler may be better, but the thought of adding the extra kick of a 3D model in with the tour is enticing. I'm still playing with it to see whether I'll add it to my toolbox. What software are you using for the floor plans? Are you using a laser to map out the rooms as you go through the house?
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Permalink Reply by Alan Pinstein on -
Wow that would be really cool to do. Not sure if it'd be worth the time it'd take. 3D modeling is definitely harder than 2d. Some of the floorplan-building tools might offer 3D views themselves. I think I've seen that before.
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Permalink Reply by Carlisle on -
Hi,
Well, I don't do any measuring as of yet but I have heard it takes about as much time to measure a home as it does to photograph it. As far as building the actual model goes I know there is software out there that creates the 3D model for you after the dimensions are entered, but I can't recall what it is. I think it would be cool though if we could somehow integrate this with tourbuzz. And perhaps even have a set of basic 3d stock furniture pieces to drag and drop around. I don't know how hard that would be to develop though.
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Permalink Reply by Chris Thomas on -
Calisle- see below- I listed one such program from www.3DVista.com. There are many. Mine is actually an old landscape architecture program that I've had in the cabinet for at least 5 years. The Google Sketch-up is another option. I didn't exactly find it quick but they do have a large online database of 2D/3D objects.
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Permalink Reply by Alan Pinstein on
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Floorplans are consistently ranked very high by homebuyers in terms of a feature they like to see on a home.
However, a very small percentage of homes have online floorplans. I think it depends on the market whether or not floorplans became a "standard feature".
As a provider it seems like a real pain to do. There are specialist companies that do it as well, and you could potentially use them and just mark it up yourself as a service that you provide, or of course do it yourself.
If you're interested in the name of the provider that you could outsource floorplans to, let me know and I'll try to find it. I think it's ~$100 to get done. No idea if they'd have coverage in your area.
As for which program to use if you DIY, I am not sure. There are lots of them online that should make things pretty easy. We are going to be adding a feature to make it so you can make clickable floorplans that go to the pics for that room in the future, but for now of course you could just upload the floorplans as pics since the TourBuzz Hi-Def would be plenty detailed to make it work.
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Permalink Reply by Chris Thomas on
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Recent discussion in the PFRE group on Flickr about floorplans. http://www.flickr.com/groups/photographyforrealestate/discuss/72157...
I'm going to use an old program I've had for a while to do basic line drawings. I would like to find a quicker way to do 2D graphical floorplans and find a way to use a floorplan with hotspots to call up commands for the viewer, like you can do with TW4 produced tours.
I found a client-based program to do this offered by 3Dvista. The interesting thing is it will integrate with their Show3 for custom tours, but their tour viewer is grossly inferior to the Beta we've been seeing from your guys, Alan.
It might be a secondary product, either offered through Tourbuzz or through the new site Neybor when you guys launch it. If you could create a very simple WYSIWYG type editor where someone can draw a line, enter the dimensions, and it will create a line drawing. Throw in hotspots in the form of thumbnails that when clicked have a flash based popup inside the floorplan that shows the image in full screen- similar to some flash photo galleries do.
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Permalink Reply by Alan Pinstein on
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We won't be re-inventing a program to draw floorplans, as there are lots of cheap ones.
We will be definitely adding the ability to upload them to a tour, mark up hotspots on them, and have them interact with the tour.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Basch on -
As far as floor plans go, if you don't want the hassle of running around, taking measurements and then heading to the office and laying out 2D floor plans, consider employing a student from a local school to do the work. Most schools have CAD classes and offer architectural drafting. I've hired students for as low as $10/hour to hand me a set of 2D schematics.
Mike
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Permalink Reply by Alan Pinstein on
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Just to add one more option, we are presently in negotiations with a company that provides turnkey floorplan service (give them address, schedule job, get PDFs of floorplans within 24 hours of job). We will integrate with their systems so that you can order a floorplan for a tour from within TourBuzz and have the final work automatically added to the tour possibly.
Of course you can use another company or make them yourself, but we hope that the turnkey offering will be a better option in many cases. It won't take you any time, and won't require any investment in software or time learning how to measure floorplans.
Alan
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