TechTools Tuesday:  Cool Tools to Sell Homes

Prospective buyers who use the Internet to preview homes are often want to know what the homes are like on the inside. Photos and video tours can provide some information, but often it’s still hard for buyers to get a feel for room dimensions and home layout.

click for FloorPlanner demo

Two web 2.0 products now give prospective buyers that sense of space and dimension by allowing agents to include floorplans with their listing information.

Floorplanner lets agents create and share interactive 2-D or 3-D floorplans.  Using point-and-click, drag-and-drop tools, agents can easily create floorplans of their listings that can be saved, sent, printed, shared, or uploaded to their website.  To get an idea of how it works, click and watch the video above or try the free demo on the company’s website.

The interactive floorplan tours offered by FloorPlanOnline® let prospective buyers see a floorplan of the home and then click on various spots on the floorplan to see a photo of that room.  As they say themselves, “there’s no more guessing which photos go with which rooms.”  The company offers several different products and levels of service.  A self-service options, for example, lets agents submit their own photos and floorplan sketches which the company transforms into Internet and social media-ready floorplans with interactive tours.  Or, FloorPlanOnline® can send a professional to the home to take the photos and sketch the layout.  Click here to watch the video on their Fan Page or visit their website for a complete rundown of their products.

Web 2.0 is how “techsperts” are describing today’s World Wide Web.

The Web has changed from how it used to be.  In the beginning, Web content was overwhelmingly created by webmasters and corporate experts—people who wrote content and designed websites for Internet users to read.  Internet users, in turn, were mostly passive: reading what was written, learning what was presented to them.

Then came a new wave of Internet applications, applications that encouraged participation, collaboration, creativity on the part of users, and the sharing of information.

Web content today is often user created; Internet users write blogs and upload videos, they share photos and information about themselves, they collaborate to create encyclopedias and to identify the best web resources.  Today, you and I are the experts and we learn from each other.

Popular Examples of Web 2.0 Applications

Blogs allow anyone to publish to the Internet.

Mashups allow users to put content from different sources together on one application.  A common usage for brokers is to place listings onto Google Maps.

Podcasting allows users to create and upload audio content.

Social Networking site allow Internet users to communicate, interact, and share information.  The best current example is Facebook.

Wikis allow many users to collaborate on the same document or share their knowledge on a common website.  The most well known example is Wikipedia, the international encyclopedia that has been created by Internet users.

Video Sharing and Photo Sharing allow users to upload video content.  The most popular current examples are YouTube and Flickr, respectively.

Folksonomies allow users to identify and classify Internet content, making it easy for other users to find what they’re looking for on the Internet.   A popular example is del.icio.us.