Amanda Liu

I had a MIS (Management information system) group project, where we are the representatives of the company that we were assigned to in class and we were supposed to find strategies to improve the firm and assist them in reaching their missions and target markets. Through this project, I have used my marketing knowledge from what I’ve learned in class and incorporated into our project. All I can say is, it helped A LOT!! Our MIS group was assigned to VanRealty Company and we decided to choose International post-secondary students as our target market. Our group realized that most International post-secondary students have difficulties in searching up information about available housings in Canada (their need). Therefore, we decide to satisfy our target consumers with superior marketing & customer service, so we can minimize their effort and hassle that comes with finding. From marketing lectures, we learned that customers sees value in a service or product according to the benefits they receive not the features of the product.  Our group has used many strategies to reach our target customers, ensuring that they benefit far more than they would have if they go to other companies. In this blog, I will focus on explaining one of our strategies, Virtual Online Tour, and how our group used marketing to deliver the value of Virtual online Tour service.

As you all know, almost all real estate companies have their own websites and also use Google to allow clients to look at previous tenants’ reviews, and the available facilities in today’s market. VanRealty has already possessed these search engines on their websites like all other real estate companies. Therefore we want to provide our target consumers with something that other competitors don’t have and could maintain a sustainable advantage that differentiate us from other real estate companies. As a result, we introduced virtual online tour for our clients. Basically a virtual online tour is a representative of any houses you selected; it’s a video clip that shows you the inside of the house and the environment around it, providing consumers a clear idea of what it’s like in real life since photos sometimes could be deceiving. Youtube today is the second largest search site, and therefore our group would also link our videos to Youtube, widely marketing our houses to basically anyone who’s interested in purchasing.

We make sure that Virtual Online Tour provides the advantages and values that consumers seek in products where the benefits they receive are worth their hard-earned money and minimize their costs at all time.

Almost everyone go through the process where they first sit down and go online to search up houses available in today’s market using any search engines they have access of. They keep searching until they find one that they are interested in, and then travel to the location to see the house. However, it is quite often that clients don’t find the right housing during their first visit and therefore would have spent enormous amount of time and money to go through the whole cycle again. As Virtual online tour is introduced, not only post-secondary students with low to average income benefit from this tool, but almost everyone could take advantage of this program because  the tour assists consumers’ decision making process which allows customers to make more accurate decisions and can save money, time, and effort from going through the whole purchasing process again.

Furthermore, buyers coming from all over the world are able to see the houses right away, and could possibly find a desired housing in Great Vancouver through these videos. Therefore, they don’t need to spend enormous amount of time nor stress about finding residences when they’re in Canada and they could even move in right away since we provide a service where we take the role of contacting the seller and the buyer, faxing contracts to both participants, and setting agreements between the two in two different locations. As a result, this brings much convenience to any clients of the company.  Last but not least, Virtual Online tour allows Van Realty to target all consumers and increase our market share in the industry. Now we provide our clients with property flyers and photos, information of housing, Youtube videos, and virtual online tour. This program provides our company a sustainable competitive advantage that differentiates us from other competitors and consumers seek more benefits from us and indeed minimize their cost throughout the process.