Multi-Family Housing and The Metaverse: Opportunities Await in the Virtual World

The Metaverse appears to be mainly penetrating the fashion and retail worlds at the moment, but its impact on the multi-family sector is fast approaching. While there is some speculation about real estate companies beginning to buy and sell properties in the Metaverse, like Earth 2, we believe the Metaverse and virtual world will, first and foremost, become a game-changing marketing tool for leasing properties.

3D virtual tours (linked 360-degree photos of an existing physical space that make it feel 3D) became a prominent leasing strategy during the pandemic as they allowed potential residents the ability to see amenity spaces and available apartments in a 360 format without leaving the safety of their existing space. As John Piedrahita, Chief Marketing Officer of Amherst, noted, “It can be hard to get people to sign a lease if they aren’t able to touch, feel, and experience things,” which is a barrier to entirely replacing in-person leasing tours with Metaverse tours.

Architecture is designed in conjunction with natural elements like wind, sun, and geography, of which the Metaverse is not able to capture and present in the subconscious way that the world is constantly providing us through spatial cues. When considering Metaverse multi-family buildings and experiences, Mark Shraiberg, Vice President of Development Management at Trammell Crow Company, observed that “in the Metaverse, you are only ever experiencing with two of your senses. The metaverse takes the humanness of the equation out.”

Many real estate companies have integrated 3D virtual tours into their leasing programs, such as the virtual tour for Cameo (featured above). Yet there is still one obvious downside to that practice: the space must be designed physically – meaning items need to be purchased, shipped, installed, hung, fluffed, and then photographed. If a model apartment was solely showcased digitally, it could theoretically be designed by a design firm and then digitally created without purchasing physical furniture or art. This would eliminate lead times, the cost of furniture, and décor for staging and allow for more flexibility in style and the ability to update model apartments with annual trends without much additional effort or cost. This would be most useful while a building is being built and could then be used as a layer to a physical leasing tour to help residents visualize their furniture in the new space.

"When I worked in multifamily, one of the things we looked at was potentially providing a virtual reality experience on how someone could outfit a space," says Piedrahita. "A perfect example is studios – people often have a hard time imagining how they can live in that space. In theory, using this technology, you can select a floor plan and furnish it so someone can put on VR goggles and experience it in a way that allows them to understand, "this is how it would work. That's a queen size bed, that's a desk and a dresser,' and see how they can maximize the space."

A “digital twin” is a digital representation of a physical object – in multi-family housing, this could be a building itself, its amenities, and/or its surrounding neighborhood. When used to supplement a physical leasing tour, a digital twin of a multi-family building in the Metaverse would make a potential resident's Metaverse tour experience more personal and organic when assessing the viability of a new community.

A Metaverse tour would allow the potential resident to see the restaurant and retail options near their future home, imagine their weekend strolls, or experience a semblance of the building’s amenities in digital form. Shraiberg was toying with the idea of being able to experience a tour on your own in the Metaverse without a leasing agent on hand, further sharing, “[imagine that] you can sit somewhere [in the digital twin] and read a book. If you could record real sounds from the space and play those while someone is experiencing a courtyard, for example, that would be a big benefit to a potential resident.”

From Piedrahita’s perspective, he challenges us to go beyond the building, adding, “It would be interesting to think about someone’s experience walking down a sidewalk in the neighborhood, with all of the activations in a single-family neighborhood like the kids, the birds, the dogs, etc., and I think that would go a long way toward people signing the dotted line.”

One final idea that we have been considering is digital amenities, such as a location in a virtual world that only building residents can experience, essentially creating a virtual escape or a community-building tool. Mark Shraiberg believes that a Metaverse amenity option “could support community engagement in different ways, which is always a good thing. People tend to take care of their environment when they are engaged with the community that inhabits it.”