A NYC-based, 360-degree tour provider adds a few sharp touches to make its offering stand above others on the market. With 4,700 tours in NYC, the company plans call for expansion to Miami and LA.
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Peek is a 360-degree tour creation platform and property search portal.
Platforms: Browser, iOS app
Ideal for: All agents and teams, property managers
Top selling points:
- In-tour property detail overlays
- Tour admin dashboard
- Regional location data
- Proprietary camera for listing capture
Top concerns:
Peek has partnered with manufacturer to pair a camera with its app, as opposed to using common camera options. Agents wanting to use their smartphone or for example, a Ricoh Theta or Insta360, will have to look elsewhere.
What you should know
I’m confident that Peek will at some point rethink its decision to partner its app with proprietary camera. Even Matterport did eventually. But that doesn’t mean Peek isn’t a sharp platform for marketing listings and managing immersive 360-degree tour content. It is.
The tour quality is what you should expect: fast and high-resolution. Prospective buyers should have little problem fully understanding a property before seeing it in person.
Still images can be grabbed from any moment in a tour and used in a variety of marketing purposes, such as in social media and print promotion.
The touches that make Peek standout involve its “heads-up” sliding displays of property details, regional retail amenities and general location highlights. Clicking the location icon on the tour footer will reveal the nearest Trader Joe’s or health club, things that apartment hunters use to make leasing decisions.
Users don’t have to leave the tour to command a view of a local park, a property’s exterior or its location in comparison to a nearby shopping center or workplace.
This feature stems from the app’s primary focus on New York City high-rise buildings and apartments, 4,700 of which can be found on Peek’s platform. The company smartly pursues partnerships with notable developers (Greystar and Centennial, for example) and landlords, allowing them inroads for creating tour content.
The Folio feature is a nifty way to categorize tours for like properties. Listings with lake views or in buildings with gyms can be grouped together for easy marketing on a website.
The Peek Network allows agents to select unique properties from other agents they want to add to their site or marketing outreach to buyers.
The administrative backend gives you access to build the aforementioned Folio and choose Peek Network options, as well as manage your tours, share them and find embed codes for website publishing.
If you don’t have to capture a property, Peek can send out a contractor to do it.
Peek is confident it can break the industry’s collective resistance to VR headset tours, so they’re working on an app for it. The roadmap also includes efforts to further their productivity and partner integrations.
For individual agents plans start as low as $99. The company operates in New York City, New Jersey, Westchester, Long Island, Washington DC, northern Virginia, South Florida, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix and Raleigh, with plans for additional national expansion in 2021.
The Peek app is only for iPhones at the moment.
Peek’s ambitions go beyond 360 tours. The company has launched virtual staging and QR-code linked tours for quickly calling up tours on mobile phones. This makes them more of a virtual property marketing platform than merely a tour content provider. I would expect them to continue in this direction, as the talent and tech is clearly in place.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
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