Podcast: TourIt Media - Champions DFW Commercial Realty

TourIt Media is taking you on a virtual tour of the properties for sale and lease from Champions DFW Commercial Realty. You can view their work on the social media and website of Champions DFW, but Patti Murray and Sam Eldridge of TourIt Media discussed their expertise in this edition of the Champions DFW radio show and podcast with Jim Kelley and Ron Taylor.

Patti Murray of TourIt Media: We are excited. TourIt Media is kind of it’s what I would call my fourth child. It is a company that my husband and I incorporated about a year and a half ago. Our background…he is an aerospace engineer, robotics engineer. I wrote books for years. So not in the commercial real estate world necessarily.

But we did have our own a real estate company in Oklahoma. Just investment real estate, small homes. And we’re about ankle deep into a condo development that we were financing, and excited about. And he came home one day with some gaming technology. We’re going to let you try out here in just a little bit.

And he said, “I don’t know what we’re going to do with this. But we’re going to do something. It’s too revolutionary.” And so we kind of all of our worlds merged at that point, and we decided that we’re going to take the latest and greatest technology, visualization technology out there and we’re going to introduce it to commercial real estate. We saw a big lack there that they were not taking advantage of what was available.

And so we set out on a mission, and the heart of our mission is to bring the latest in technology but also the best in artistry because we’re creating marketing material. And so that’s what my staff does. We have the techiest people in the world. And then we have the most artistic as well.

Jim Kelley: Patti–where are you guys based, and how many make up your team?

Patti Murray: Okay. We have offices in Plano. Just north of George Bush. And right now we have a team of six. I have 3D artists, 3D designers. I have developers that do all of our coding. We have a marketing staff and then, of course, myself. I’m in it, you know, full time as well. We’re growing rapidly. We’re landing projects that are reshaping the Dallas skyline, which is fun because we get to build them before they’re even built. But yeah, we’re really growing and flourishing.

Jim Kelley: Can you talk to us about the services, and the process, and the technology that you’re now using in commercial real estate to impact commercial real estate?

Patti Murray: Sure. We started…our foundational product was a service that we call 3D scanning, or 3D virtual tours. And like you said, this has its foot in the residential world but had yet to really be introduced to commercial. And what we do and what our technology allows us to do is go in and capture the 3D data of a space. We use a hybrid of laser technology, and camera technology that lets us capture the dimensions.

And then overlay basically photography. End result is you get a game-like experience, again, back to that video game idea of a space. So if you have a client, for example, Jim in California, that’s wanting to look at an office space. 2D pictures don’t give you any sense of the actual space. It gives you a few visuals but no real true a sense of floor plan, and then walking around in it.

And so our technology allows you via a link to send out that entire space where you can walk through it. You can pull out and see top level down. You can see floor plan. It’s very, very immersive and informative for clients. And so that’s where we started. And then from that, we grew into our clients’ needs basically of, “Hey, my building doesn’t exist yet. What can you do?”

And that’s where we dug in even more to the gaming technology, and I thought…and we found out, “Hey, we can build you a video game basically.” We can build your space, and then once it’s built, I can make you a commercial. I can give you a walkthrough. I can put you in the new thing, which they’re saying, guys, that virtual reality is going to be as revolutionary as smartphones.

So, you know, I know you’re talking about the whole millennials run the world. I think that’s very true because they’re saying this is about to change everything. So with this virtual reality, which we’ll look at later, you can put on a headset and actually be in the space. Unlike anything that we’ve ever seen before.

Hear the complete story behind TourIt Media in the podcast below or on iTunes.