Based in London and rooted in retail, this video tour app gives users a simple, cool way to explore homes and reduces the anxiety many agents have about creating listing videos.
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Holofy Spaces is a video content creation and marketing app.
Platforms: iPhone, Android, browsers
Ideal for: Teams and brokerages seeking to leverage video content, individual agents
Top selling points:
- Promotion of vertical video
- Room-by-room labels
- Website embeds
- QR code integrations
- Per-room analytics
Top concern:
We may have long championed horizontal video, but TikTok and Instagram Reels are quickly changing how we view video. Will it be a match for real estate consumers?
What you should know
I’ve been wrong plenty of times. I didn’t think QR codes were ever going to amount to much. But here we are, loving them again. The same can be said for vertical video, a one-time marketing no-no. Also not the case anymore.
Holofy Spaces is an app that started out in London retail, “connecting people with spaces.” After helping a brokerage with some content as a sort of one-off project, the company realized that it can combine the marketing cache of the social media trend du jour with people’s absolute obsession with scrolling real estate portals. And here we are.
The app gives users a simple, cool way to explore homes and also reduces the anxiety many agents have about creating listing videos.
Think about it: It’s way easier to tap the red record button and pan a phone around a room than stopping to think about turning it on its long edge under the stress of hoping it looks as good as that “top producer’s videos who keeps getting all the listings!”
This is something I hadn’t thought about much until seeing Holofy Spaces. The future of social video is vertical, so why shouldn’t agents embrace it? The team at New York City’s Replay Listings knew this months ago. If only I noticed.
Holofy’s app allows creators to tag rooms with labels that can also help viewers jump from one to the next, similar to Matterport’s “teleport” feature.
There are calls to action on the screen for contacting the agent via text, email and for setting up appointments via a Calend.ly integration.
Videos come with embed codes for website snippets, as well as QR codes for print materials. Every listing has a unique URL, too.
A viewer can scroll through a home’s videos like they would a Facebook story. The same format can be used for an agent’s Holofy account, something they deem “Holofy TV.”
An entire home can be captured in about 20 minutes, but I’d suggest not doing the whole thing unless specifically necessary.
You can use the room-by-room viewer metrics to determine what rooms are popular and how often certain viewers are watching. Charts share number of impressions, call-to-action performance and overall watch time.
Individual tours can be managed per team or brokerage, and published and shared directly from the central dashboard.
In a pretty surprisingly high-tech twist, Holofy Spaces stores its users’ videos and all of its metadata in the blockchain.
Every video you create has a separate hash-key for access, meaning it all can be store securely for pretty much as long as you like. That’s not something you find associated with this kind of app. In other words: They care about user and content security.
The app rests on both major mobile platforms for teams and brokerages, and costs are based on volume of data streamed. (Thus, the team and brokerage focus.) They also have a payment plan based on paying for only what you stream, a way to avoid paying for more bandwidth than you need.
I like this app for its simple approach to solving a problem a lot of real estate agents have: producing engaging video. It doesn’t need to be overcooked. Point and shoot.
Then sell.
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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