Virtual Real Estate

Anna and Christina Singleton have stepped into a virtual world with their company Show My Property, and according to the British sisters, digital storytelling online is the future of selling real estate. Founded in 2011 by Chief Executive Anna Singleton, the boutique digital marketing agency employs digital technology to create virtual tours of luxury homes and apartments. Property owners use these virtual realty tours as a marketing tool. Based in North Hollywood, Show My Property hires film crews nationwide to give the prospective buyer the closest approximation of a walk-through short of experiencing it in person. “In L.A., we’re constantly battling traffic,” said Anna Singleton, explaining how much easier it is for a client to view five homes virtually rather than physically visiting every location. That logic is even more applicable to out-of-state buyers. Show My Property’s clientele ranges from individuals to large property management companies. Locally, they’ve filmed properties in Toluca Lake and Camarillo. “We tend to find that mid-range companies are the best clients,” Christina said. Business is booming, the sisters say, because a year ago websites operated by Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. began supporting 360-degree videos. “Our clients can now show their clients a VR tour using their smartphone or simply through directing them to Facebook or You Tube,” Anna Singleton said. “Once these common platforms started pushing this, it almost overnight became something that our clients wanted to be a part of.” TV acting career The Singletons’ bond dates back to their childhood in Maidenhead, just outside London. In the United Kingdom, elder sister Anna Singleton became a television personality on “GMTV,” the British equivalent of “Good Morning, America.” According to IMDb, she played a minor role in the movie “Atonement” and appeared on the British reality show “Shipwrecked: Battle of the Islands” in the mid-2000s. After marrying her husband, Anna Singleton headed to California in 2011, first living at the Beachfronter apartments in Ventura. The switch from a full-throttle career in central London to California was “a really tough transition. I didn’t have a job, didn’t have any friends, and was very, very bored,” she recalled. On a whim, she produced and starred in a short video showcasing her downtown Ventura apartment. A week later, the impressed Beachfronter’s proprietor asked her to film 15 more units, and the business was born. Today, Show My Property – with 10 full-time employees and a nationwide network of videographers, photographers and drone pilots – shoots such videos by the hundreds. Management hand-off Christina Singleton, who ran yoga studios while living in London and Sydney, said she did not hesitate to leave both Australia and her old profession behind when her sister, then pregnant with her first child, asked her to take over Show My Property’s day-to-day operations. When she arrived in Los Angeles in 2014 and started at the company, she had no idea what to do. “But within a few months, I was rolling,” she said Upon returning from maternity leave, Anna Singleton learned she was pregnant with her second child, further extending her sister’s management term. By 2016, Christina Singleton said she “somehow improved sales of the business” and exceeded the company’s previous year’s revenue. The Singleton sisters intend to continue growing Show My Property, insisting the days of old-fashioned brochures are numbered. “Video – and especially VR – is the future,” said Anna Singleton, who now lives in Topanga Canyon. Yet the future is quickly getting crowded. In a GlobeSt.com interview last month, AppFolio Vice President of Product Management Nate Kunes singled out virtual reality home tours as among “the technological innovations that are disrupting real estate.” But plenty of companies plan to provide brokers and property owners with 3D video, ranging from 2011 startup Matterport to Google partner roomy to Virtual Xperience, which specializes in properties still in the conceptual or construction stage. In 2015, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter told Forbes he believed Facebook’s 2014 $2-billion purchase of Oculus VR was motivated by VR’s real-estate potential. The Singletons appear unfazed by competition. “Our name is known in the industry,” Christina Singleton said. “We’ve got the relationships in place.”