On a virtual tour of London’s office realty

London: Prospective London office tenants and investors can now take interactive virtual tours of buildings, including some of the capital’s best-known skyscrapers, using technology akin to Google Street View.

CBRE, the world’s largest property services company by revenues, announced a two-year partnership with Virtual Walkthrough, a London-based start-up, to enable 360-degree digital capture of UK offices available to let. The deal comes as digital capture and virtual reality move into real estate’s mainstream, partly driven by the internationalisation of the industry.

Virtual Walkthrough has captured offices in London’s Heron Tower at 110 Bishopsgate and Tower 42, the City’s oldest skyscraper. It expects to produce tours of other towers as part of the deal with CBRE, which has handled lettings in buildings such as the Shard.

A series of residential property agents also adopted the technology in 2015, enabling buyers to take digital tours of luxury homes including some on The Bishops’ Avenue, a north London street known as “billionaire’s row”.

The retail landlord Hammerson this year mapped all its UK shopping centres and retail parks using Virtual Walkthrough, which integrates 360-degree photography with floor plans. “We feel this counts as a first viewing — people are usually going to physically do the second viewing but this helps to better qualify them and speed up the sales cycle,” said James Morris-Manuel, chief commercial officer at Virtual Walkthrough.

“We’ve had clients in Dubai buy [residential] properties off-plan from the virtual tour, but that’s the exception.”

A series of companies are vying to replicate buildings in digital form, including the US start-ups Matterport and Studio 216, which use three-dimensional imaging that works on headsets such as the Oculus Rift. Virtual Walkthrough also plans to make its tours available on the headsets.

In the UK, rivals include 360 Imagery, run by a chartered surveyor, which is working with British Land and the Greater London Authority. Superyacht providers and hotel chains are also experimenting with virtual tours.

Los Angeles based CBRE has tripled its spending on technology in the past four years to almost $350 million (Dh1.3 billion) as it anticipates digital disruption in the real estate industry, affecting areas such as valuations as well as viewings. Savills, another estate agency, this year began offering virtual tours of high-end homes in collaboration with iViewing, including on Oculus Rift headsets.

Virtual Walkthrough charges on a sliding scale depending on office size, with “capture” of a 10,000 square foot office costing 1,000 pounds (Dh5455.8). It says it does not allow landlords to airbrush their properties to conceal flaws, but has on occasion used Photoshop for security reasons.

“It’s a question we get asked more on the luxury residential properties: ‘I’ve got a Picasso on the wall, would you mind airbrushing it out?’” Morris-Manuel said.

Financial Times