THE MOST tenacious home hunter will take a break from real-estate shopping to spend a slow Sunday morning in bed instead of in a car. So the companies that make it easy to glance at a house via the Internet have made inroads with their virtual home tours.
Some people like to know what the street looks like.
Virtual tours are already used to market hotels, theme parks and sporting events. But only recently have they begun to be widely used to sell new and existing homes. Virtual tour operators can dispatch a photographer to shoot visuals of a home's exterior and interior and post them on the Internet within 24 hours, available to anyone who wants to look at the home. IPIX will also create a Web site for real-estate agents marketing the home. The hard part will be appealing to real-estate brokers and multiple listing services that make home listings available to buyers through the Internet, McCurdy said.