Answers

How do we put the link on the MLS system?

After the shoot and processing of the tours you will receive an email with a url(web address) of your virtual tours page. For Maui real estate we most often use the six digit MLS number so it would look like: www.Maui360Tours.com/324882 where 324882 is the MLS number. This address starting with the "www." needs to be typed or copied into the area labeled "Add a Virtual Tour" in the paragon/mls system after you log in and choose the property/listing to modify. The RAM office has been of great assistance when needed, but most find it pretty straight forward. Obviously, we do not have access to your Paragon/MLS account so we can not type in this address for you.

How much to add photos to tours?

The pricing for 3-4 tours alone is $195 and to add a photoshoot it’s an additional $80 compared to the normal $125 as a stand alone shoot. This $80 covers about 20mins of add'l shooting and 1.5 hours editing and cropping, etc.  $275 plus tax for both photos and tours basically.  If the unit is real large at times we have to charge a bit more, but that is the standard.   It includes 10-12 photos but we typically provide about 15-20 so there are plenty to choose from and we don’t have to spend add'l time and money working back and forth to figure out which photos.  We include MLS/web/email sized stock resort photographs for the units we shoot as well provided we have them.  Full size images as we can simply put them on an FTP folder and have you download them.  If we have to use computer time to copy them to a CD and mail them it’s an add’l $15 for the time and materials. Two CD's is $20. We can put you in contact with a supplier for large quanity CD's if you desire.

How do the tours work?

Virtual Tours are a computer run 360 degree display of a property that allows viewers/users to control the speed, direction and size of Virtual Tour Images from the internet any where in the world. They are actually photographs, not video which allows the user to control them as they'd like. They can not be printed nor put onto a DVD.  Computer web browsers use a program called Java to make them work. Basically a computer file folder is built containing an html file that is the page/skin people see on the web, the panoramic jpeg images and the java .jar viewer program as well as a few files that tell the tour where to begin, which direction to turn, which lead tour to use, what to label items, color and link definitions, license key, etc.

How are Virtual Tours made?

Virtual Tours are made by taking a precise series of photographs and digitally blending/stitching them together to form a full 360 circle or partial 360 circle image.  This image is then enhanced for quality, sized for the web and uploaded into the tour webpage that users see today.

Our Virtual Tour webpage/template uses an embedded JavaScript viewer for friendly and intuitive navigation while managing speed of download/viewing on the internet. After developing the virtual tours, we send you a simple website link(URL) that goes to your virtual tour which can be used on your other sites and other marketing by linking to your tour.

If you want to host the tours yourself or have your webmaster do it, you will not receive a link to a completed tour set, but simply the finished, edited, full size, panoramic tour .jpeg images of the unit(sample). Resort Stock and Maui Stock Panoramic VTour .jpeg images are sold seperately on OnoPhotos.com(to be completed in Dec '07).

How should we prepare for the shoot?

We want the property to look it's best so in 'show ready' condition is what we are looking for.

Reminders:

1. Open all windows coverings and blinds.
2. Turn on all lights, replace bulbs where needed.
3. Clear countertops and flooring as much as possible.
4. Straighten pictures and lamp shades.
5. Have trees and hedges trimmed where it matters such as with ocean views.
6. Remove most personal items from real estate sale properties.
7. Vacation Rentals should be set-up as they are for a check in.
8. We do not stage as personal preferrences vary greatly. The better a place looks, the better it will show in tours and photos.
9. Display outside and inside furniture in an appealing, comforting, welcoming way.
10. Remove garden hoses, trash cans, tools, toys, etc from the yard.
11. Try not to schedule the shoot during a garbage day or right after the sprinklers go on.
12. Considering Time of Day in scheduling your shoot. We want the colors to look the best while not shooting directly into a blazing sun. If your property often experiences cloud cover, you'll need to consider that in timing.
    

    We shoot what is there, but will help with opening windows. For furniture moving, a modest charge may be added for the photographers time and effort.

When is the best time of day for my photo shoot?

For perfect shoots we need good lighting. Clouds, cane smoke, VOG and haze immeditately diminish the quality of tours. Time of day affects colors, shadows and weather.

Some general rules of thumb from our experience:

1. Ask the owner! Find out from the owner when the most beautiful time of day is at their property - they may not know, but it's worth the question.
2. Sunny days are best - small white puffy clouds look great too as long as they are not casting shadows on us.
3. Ocean Views look best with the sun behind you: before noon for West facing and afternoon for East Facing. North and South facing depend on the season, but are best shot around noon time generally, but can have nice morning or afternoon possibilities too.
4. For ocean views we also must avoid glare from the sun being low on the horizon.
5. Shadows: shadows from palms trees, etc look great, but a shadow from condominium building as your view foreground looks terrible. Being in a large shadow not only pulls out the light, but also the colors and sharpness. We can digitally enhance and will, but best results are had when keeping shadows in mind. 10th floor unit is great at 8am, but ground floors should be done after 11am.
6. Some areas have clouds that begin forming in the late mornings such as places in upper Kula and Wailea/Makena - we try to start shoots here around 9am depending on the season.
7. Cancellations: we do not charge for cancellations due to weather made 1 hour before the shoot. If we have to drive and then cancel the shoot we will have to charge $35/hour of travel for gas and time - in half hour increments.

What happens if the weather is bad?

We are happy to update contact information and links, etc to your pages.  When first developing your tours modifications are included and we most often make quick changes w/o charge to you. We offer these tours at extremely low prices for the work involved, but you can't buy Tommy Bahama at Walmart and we can't give hours of extra editing to make them perfect w/o charging. For changes that take more time we charge a small fee for each half hour. We are fast and most often changes can be done free of charge. We guarantee our work which means we give the best we can up front, if you don't like the tours we are capable of producing in the time we have, we will not charge you and will gladly disconnect our tours.

How do I pay for the tours?

We guarantee our work, therefore you pay after we produce the results. If you are not satisfied with the product you will not be charged. If you are satisfied with the product we will send you an invoice via email and you can pay online with credit card or PayPal account or by check or money order at Maui360Tours.com/Rates

If you are not satisfied with the first draft tours and photos we are happy to put in a small amount of time focussing on the key things you'd like changed. Will we do everything possible to meet your every request? Sorry - no. We can do more, but we will talk to you about the add'l charge for editing time you can expect for the requested changes. 99% of the time we hit the mark with a minor name change or something very reasonable. Once in a while a client requires a lot of customization which we are not in a position to do for them given our insane volume of work. We try hard, but we are not afraid to give up and call it a failure if it doesn't work well for both of us :) This has happened 3 times now in the past 500 properties. ....We Live Aloha! and as the hawaiians intelligently say .... if can, can, if no can, no can.

New clients, not associated with the Real Estate Association of Maui(RAM) may be asked for a 50% deposit on the work as we have run into a couple of unscrupulous scoundrals :) whom loved the work, use the product, but choose not to pay.

Can we make changes to information after the tour is done

We are happy to update contact information and links, etc to your pages.  When first developing your tours modifications are included and we most often make quick changes w/o charge to you. Changes requested with a week of the completed tour being received are free within reason. For changes that take more time such as modifying a sky or doing a large amount of tours and photos we charge a small fee for each half hour. We are fast and most often changes can be done free of charge. We guarantee our work which means we give the best we can up front, if you don't like the tours we are capable of producing in the time we have, we will not charge you and will gladly disconnect our tours.

What are the req's for putting a virtual tour on VRBO.com ?

VRBO.com is fairly generous with allowing you to link your virtual tour, websites or videos to your listing. With one caviot: they want a link back to their site(vrbo.com or directly to your listing vrbo.com/123456). We do this all the time and have no trouble with vrbo.com and renters find virtual tours to be unbelieveably valueable in raising the trust and confidence of booking guests. A beautiful place is invaluable on a persons lifetime trip to paradise and full 360 virtual tours don't hide anything from your renters.

How do I add my virtual tour to my VRBO.com ?

When we finish the virtual tours for you we send you a link address, called a url, that links to the virtual tour. Log in to your vrbo.com account and go to your property and click where is says to edit or modify a listing. Across the top of the page there are a list of areas to modify or change. Look for hte

What are the req's for putting a virtual tour on Realtor.com ?

Realtor.com is the largest real estate sales website in America and is used extensively on the mainland. A number of agents on Maui have joined Realtor.com to increase exposure of their clients properties and inventories and with this comes the ability to add virtual tours to their listings. For Premier Realtor.com members there is no charge for tours as I understand it.

How do I add a virtual tour to Realtor.com ?

Realtor.com requires virtual tours to be added by professional virtual tour companies that understand the strict requirements for posting. We are a proud partner of Realtor.com since 2004 and do not charge our clients to add a tour to their listing. Simply inform us that you want a tour added to a Realtor.com listing, provide the exact address and mls number of hte property and we will add the tour within 48 hours in most cases much less.

What are the requirments for putting a video on VRBO.com ?

Check VRBO.com for the latest requirements but as of May'09 the following were listed:

Embedded Video Requirements

• To qualify for this feature, your listing must have 16 photos.
• Videos must be for the one single, specific unit displayed on the listing
  
• VRBO will NOT approve a video longer than 3 minutes in length.
• Content must be of your property (include interior) and views as seen from your property
• Your video must be uploaded to YouTube™ to be embedded on your listing page.  (Read more about Uploading Your Video to YouTube™ )
• You must include a link back to your listing page on VRBO.com within your YouTube™ Video description. Example - http://www.vrbo.com/yourlisting #  This is the only way a visitor viewing your video in YouTube™ can get to your listing and inquire about your property.
  

Things to avoid:

• Obscene material (profanity, nudity, etc.)
• Material for which you do not own the copyright
• Any content that may be misleading about the location of your property and the included amenities

To put your video on VRBO.com you can go directly to their instructions here: http://help.vrbo.com/help/ViewDocument.aspx?id=1197

Can you put my personal contact information on the virtual tour?

We can post whatever you'd like on your tour. For Real Estate agents, Maui's Real Estate Association (RAM) does not allow identifying information on virtual tours on the MLS system.  Therefore tours made for MLS do not include agent/broker information.  If you'd like your own 'Branded' tour website we are happy to make it for you for a small fee to setup the duplicate/sister site.

Can I buy the Images and Host the tours myself?

Yes,we will sell virtual tour images at OnoPhotos.com covering unlimited use, excluding resale of the image. You will need some type of 'viewer' to make these photos work as a computer virtual tour. There are some details to hosting a virtual tour which includes using any number of embedded java script viewers. Our viewer costs per image to purchase - discounts apply for high quantity orders. There are many other viewers on the market and many of our clients use other viewers or convert our images to quicktime.

Note: All viewers require different plug-ins or run mini-programs that help set up the scripting for the viewer. You or your webmaster will have to work with the viewer you use to figure out structure, scripting and display requirements. The viewer is a simple java script plug-in you can put on any .html webpage. The location of images and coding required to make it do what you want it to do is dependant on the viewer you use. For example, the viewer we use utilizes a Editor program that allows us to add the images to a basic structure, choose the starting points, labeling, tour speed, set up of starting point, color definitions and names and labels of nodes. A program called that easily lets you set it up and you can be off and running in an hour or two. It has has many advanced features such as mapping to a floor plan and adding hot spots for clients that want them.

Can I just pay for your to shoot the raw photos and I'll do the rest

Sure, we try to accomodate all kinds of jobs.  A one hour shoot with editing is $195, raw photos alone would be more around the $75/hour range depending how long the shoot takes and how far we have to drive. Understand of course, that raw images will NOT look as good as the photos we finish as we spend more time editing than shooting to make everything look it's best.  Cropping and composition play a large role as well in how a photo looks.

Can you put my contact information on the virtual tour?

YES.  For vacation rental and business owners, we encourage you adding all the picture and links and info you want on your tour.  We are happy to put your wording, logo, contact information, other websites, etc on your page.

Can these tours be used on VRBO, A1 Vacations, Great Rentals, etc type sites?

Yes, absolutely.  This is highly encouraged as you will most likely immediately see your bookings increase and several of our customers have rates above resort rack rates because people are happy to pay for something they know they will enjoy. Virtual Tours are a great way to help meet that need. We can either put the links all on one site or make duplicate 'sister' tour sites depending on what these marketing sites need.

The new owners want to use the real estate tours for vacation rentals, can they?

Two components here:  Ownership and Hosting

1) Ownership: The owner of the tours is the person whom pays Maui360Tours.com for the work. We own the copyright of images we take of course, but we transfer that along with to our paying clients so they call the shots. If this paying client/owner gives us the okay - we can use their tours and photographs.  It's customary that the new owners/agent split the cost with the old owners or real estate agent 50/50. We do not charge for a simple MLS number change and new tour link.

If hosting yourself: We can email 360 pixel high vtour images(sample), which are what we use on the web, to the owner of the tour images for them to do as they please. For full size images we charge $45.

2) Hosting: Hosting is FREE with our Maui360Tours.com or WindowToParadise.com banner. Modifications or changes to the tour are charged at our graphic artist rates.

If you prefer to not have our Maui360Tours.com banner then it's a one time $125 charge for non-branding which includes the time to add your banner to the tour. To support our Real Estate Association of Maui, MLS listed properties are hosted without charge while listed on MLS.

Please understand - hosting is not a simple stand alone product for this quality of tours - lesser quality tours(quicktime .mov can be made as a stand alone product and will not be charged any add'l cost if notified before we process the normal webpage). All viewers are different so building the tour will be dependant on how you want to do it. We use the PMVR viewer which uses another small program that automates the scripting details such as node names and start points. In the future we will offer QuickTime packaged stand alone tours without branding - let us know up front that you want these.

Note: Resort Stock images are not included in any tours.  They can only be used with branded tours and are owned fully by Maui360Tours.com. Various Size resort Stock photos can be purchased at OnoPhotos.com(if you don't see what you need there, please ask, we probably have it).

Tours done for agents on MLS expire after their listing is closed or cancelled. They most often can be resumed when the property relists. The images for these tours are 360pixels high and we can send them on the internet you will need to use a viewer and and some web programming knowledge to add this to your own site.

How do I pay for the tours?

Invoicing is done after the tour is complete.  We invoice twice per month so the invoice may not get out promptly.  We send you an invoice via email and you can send a check for payment or you may pay securely online at www.maui360tours.com/pay

Why do you charge for a CD of the images.

All files are sent or downloaded electronically in web sized versions. We will email or FTP the full size images you need at your request for no charge.

Since we are not a big company we do almost everything electronically to save costs to our clients.  To add files to a program and burn a CD only takes about 10 minutes and another 5 minutes to package it and mail it.  So 15 minutes plus about $4 in materials and you can have a CD of your product for $15.  Multiple CDs done at the exact time would only be $5 each with a limit of four CDs/DVDs.  Sorry - time is time and unfortunatley we're quite short of it. We do have a great contact for mutliple cds/dvds and are happy to share that with our clients.

What do your Photoshoots involve?  Do you bring lights, crew, etc

For our moderately priced photo shoots we send one photographer with a digital SLR camera and the best on-camera mounted flash available. We shoot all the standard, main areas normally used for property sales: View, Lanai, Living, Kitchen, Master, Dining, Bathrooms, Offices and other bedrooms, pool, etc. We do not shoot all closets, furniture detail, garages, etc, but we are happy to take a few of your directed shot while there. We cover

We shoot approx. 10,000 photos a month and are able to shoot nearly all spaces w/o extra lights and crew saving much of the cost due to powerful editing software now available.  Camera tricks and editing tricks help us pull it all together giving you a quality product w/o added expenses. If it doesn't work for you there is no charge.

For those looking for lights, reflectors, window coverings, real time computer shooting, etc, we charge a basic $195/hour fee with 2 hour minimum which includes working with the client and their stager/decorator/designer to achieve the perfect image you are looking for.  It genearally takes about 1-2 hours for each staged photograph as we all work on the computer at the location to ensure we hit the mark you are looking for.

Why do these tours cost so much to make?