Matterport at REA Group: 3D Tours on Australian Property Listings

This is Luke Chadwick’s work at REA Group, before Far Horizons existed. It is here because it is the clearest record of how he gets a new technology adopted inside an established business.

The challenge

In 2014, 3D property scanning was an expensive novelty. Matterport cameras existed, but nobody in Australian real estate knew what to do with them. The question was whether a 3D tour would change what buyers did.

Luke had left REA Group for a startup. He came back for a hack day, told Nigel Dalton he would return if he could work on the Oculus DK1, and Nigel said “done”. That was the start of REALABS, the lab inside REA Group that Luke co-founded and led.

The approach

Show, don’t tell. In 2014 Luke bought a Matterport camera at Matterport’s office in Mountain View and brought it back to Australia. In 2015 REALABS bought more cameras and lent them to real estate agents, so agents could create tours themselves. On realestate.com.au, a tour first appeared as a banner on the listing page, then as the second photo.

The demos did the persuading. Agents walked a virtual plank in VR, across a real wooden plank, at industry events. At AREC 2015, agents walked through a scanned house in Zero Latency’s free-roam VR.

The results

Listings with a Matterport tour got 95% more email enquiries and 140% more phone reveals
Matterport tours went from none to 5–6% of listings
The engagement numbers gave REALABS a concrete case to take to agents

The takeaway

Getting an established industry to adopt a new technology is mostly a demonstration problem. People struggle to picture what you describe. Show them, back it with numbers they care about, and fit it into the workflow they already have.

The full story, with photos, is on the REALABS timeline.