Want to be part of an upcoming Modern Home Tour? Here’s what you need to know! Have a question not covered below? Contact us and we’ll help you out right away!
Our physical in-person events have been paused until further notice due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We absolutely will return to hosting physical Modern Home Tours as soon as we are able to conduct them safely for all involved. Our “best guess” right now is Q3 2021.
As a participant in one of our Modern Home Tours, your home is the star of the show – this does not change at all for our new virtual tours. If you’re an architect, designer, or builder, this is a rare opportunity to show off your work to design enthusiasts, colleagues, and prospective clients and homeowners. If you’re a homeowner, this is your day to shine as you show off your home and its features to an audience of modern design lovers. Be prepared for lots of humbling praise and compliments. Plus, you’ll help your architect/builder/designer garner some much-deserved spotlight for the day.
There is a small checklist of items that need to be gathered or prepared in advance of the tour:
- CLEANING and PREPARING for IMAGING: One of the first things that should happen is a basic cleaning of the home. Ideally, the home should be in standard home tour shape, or as if it were about to be listed for sale. This presents the best image possible to our audience as we walk through. We recommend removing personally identifiable items (anything with a name on it, family photos, etc.) and decluttering (all standard home photo session preparations).
- COORDINATING PHOTOGRAPHY: A photographer will visit the home to perform the 360˚ imaging in the weeks prior to the tour. Access inside the home is required by either the homeowner or architect/builder/designer.
- TAGGING: Once the 360˚ imaging has been rendered and completed, you will need to spend an hour or so moving through the home and adding tags. These are small icons that, when clicked, offer information and supplemental media to the tourgoers. Tourgoers and subscribers will be able to check these out on their own time when they explore the home after the tour.
- PLATFORM REGISTRATION: All participants must create a free account with the platform we use for our virtual events. It takes less than 5 minutes and is very easy.
- TECHNICAL REHEARSAL: The day before the LIVE segment, we will hold a technical run-through of the live event. Participants must plan on being available for a short time to conduct the test.
- SEGMENT FLOW: A basic outline of the path you would like to take, as we walk through the home, should be prepared in advance, along with some talking points. While the latter can remain in your head, we need the flow on paper to be prepared for our LIVE segment!
- FACT SHEET: We recommend creating a one-page fact sheet about your project that can be distributed to all tourgoers and subscribers during the tour.
- PROMOTIONS and MARKETING: Finally, in addition to marketing efforts on our end and traditional press coverage, we rely heavily on our participants to help get the word out about the tour! The benefit of our Virtual Modern Home Tour – everyone everywhere can participate and watch! We ask participants to reach out to their database of contacts, via email or social media channels. Promotions will continue to run after the tour as well, because all segments are taped and available to view after the live event. You’ll be able to host the segment on your site and promote your work in a virtual space. We are hopeful that people will find your segment and be encouraged to check us out and subscribe to our content for the year.
The Virtual Modern Home Tour means no more foot traffic or hundreds of visitors walking through your home! However, tourgoers will still be able to see the inside of your home.
The segments and the Matterport imaging will be available to tourgoers and subscribers after the event is over. To keep you safe and retain your privacy, we make sure not to publish any addresses. We encourage removing family photos or anything with the family name on it prior to the imaging session (standard practice for a home photo session). With those two practices in play, we can keep the home as a model of the architect’s work and not identifiable to a family or person. Homeowners only have to be as involved in the segment as they wish to be.
First and foremost, we want to talk with the architect or home designer. We also encourage the builder/contractor, homeowner, and interior designer to participate. We can have up to 3 feeds (cameras) coming into the HopIn “stage.” We can allow people to double-up on camera to increase the number of participants. The tour is more informative when lots of people involved in the project participate and give their story.
The 360˚ imaging is pre-shot. The walkthrough, interview chat, discussions, questions (and bloopers) are all LIVE!!
In short, YES, but in very restricted numbers. There are a few rules and stipulations that come with the acceptance of a for sale home to one of our tours:
- There is a $500 participation fee applied to all homes currently on the market (or planned to be within 6 months of the Modern Home Tour). This fee must be paid immediately after acceptance and is non-refundable.
- The home must be fully completed and staged.
- The home must be a truly fantastic example of modern architecture.
- The participant must agree to keep the home on the tour even if an offer comes in or the home becomes ‘in contract’ prior to the tour. The only exception: if the home is sold, sale completed, and the new owners have occupied the home, and do not wish to participate in the tour.
- Finally, most importantly, our event must remain an architecture and design tour. The LIVE virtual segment must include the architect, builder, or interior designer. It may NOT be just a real estate agent selling a home.
We utilize several avenues of promotion for our tours. First and foremost, we go for traditional, editorial coverage in the local papers. We also try to partner with a local magazine, and we reach out to TV, radio, blogs, event/calendar sites, news sites, community papers, and anyone else with a means to spread our message… of course, we hammer the promotions hard on social media as well. But we also rely on our participants (owners, architects, non-profits) to promote the event. We ask participants to help us by posting on Facebook and tweeting the event to everyone they know! To help, we will provide you with a marketing plan and outline about one month out from the event.
Possibly the best part about our new virtual modern home tour series is that anyone, anywhere can tune in and participate. This means everybody everywhere in the world can see your project and be a part of our event. Our virtual tour tickets are sold per device; one ticket sold could be one viewer, a couple, a pair of friends, or a whole family of 5 watching all day long. In addition, we promote the tour as a viewer’s choice of participating in the LIVE event or watching later at a convenient time. Segments will be available to everyone that subscribes to our MA+DS content (a model that is new for 2021). While it is hard to give a definitive attendance figure for each tour, we know that hundreds, perhaps thousands, over time are watching our segments and seeing your work.
According to a past survey, over 2/3rds of our visitors said they go on the Modern Home Tour specifically “…to get ideas or find resources for their own homes or builds.” And for almost one in five visitors (19%), the tour is an in-person search to find a professional with whom to work. That means that the Modern Home Tour is the perfect opportunity for you to engage architecture and design enthusiasts as well as potential customers in the very spaces that best reflect your expertise. While we don’t think the motivation for tuning in to our Virtual Modern Home Tours will stray from this, by going virtual we have opened the doors for lots more people all over the country to see your work!
We will provide instructions on how to redeem a complimentary pass code 8 days prior to the tour.