Does Virtual Reality Help Property Sales? Empirical Evidence from a Real Estate Platform

Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a transformative addition to real estate platforms, revolutionizing the presentation of property details. In contrast to traditional presentation technologies (e.g., pictures and videos), VR constructs an interactive three-dimensional (3D) environment for consumers to obtain property information. Prior literature mainly examined VR’s effects (e.g., vividness and interactivity) on selling low-involvement products such as books and apparel from a behavioral perspective. Real estate properties are typical high-involvement products, differing significantly in product value, importance, risk, and agent participation, necessitating comprehensive product information. We use a large-scale data set from a leading real estate platform to investigate VR’s influences on properties’ market outcomes (including the time-on-market and selling price) from an informative perspective. We find that VR is an “efficiency enhancer,” accelerating properties’ time-on-market rather than increasing properties’ selling price as a “market value influencer.” VR shows a greater acceleration effect for properties with higher product involvement, higher product quality, and lower agent service quality. This demonstrates VR’s ability in enhancing information richness to satisfy consumers’ information needs for a higher level of product involvement; establishing information credibility in discerning product quality; and serving as an alternative information source in lieu of low-quality agent services. We also disentangle the direct effect of VR Tour from the indirect effect of VR badge on consumers’ decision making to reveal VR’s effectiveness in product evaluation. This work contributes to the literature on nonimmersive VR and offers managerial implications, particularly in the context of property sales, high-involvement product marketing, and product presentation technologies in e-commerce.