Steve Street offers an interesting insight on salesmanship.

Street is president of a New Hampshire company named Icovia, which markets a web-based floor planning application called Icovia Space Planner Real Estate Edition. A major new release of its software, which real estate licensees can buy for use on their websites, was introduced yesterday (Aug. 23, 2006).

Icovia lets website visitors see floorplans of the inside of homes in which they're interested. It also provides scale drawings of various types and sizes of furniture and appliances. Using a mouse, visitors can drag-and-drop pieces of virtual furniture from the Icovia inventory onto the floorplan, and position them just as they would if they were moving into the rooms themselves. They can "play house" without being in the house.

That's Street's insight. The beauty of interactive applications like Icovia, he said in a press release, are that they do more than just present properties in an appealing way. When prospective buyers "open a floor plan of a home and add their furniture to it," according to Street, "a sense of ownership develops. Once a person starts to test layout scenarios with their own possessions, the mindset changes from looking at someone else's property ... to envisioning it as their own."

Think of how you buy a car. You don't just see it on a showroom floor; you test-drive it. When you purchase clothes, you don't just take them from a rack to the cashier; you try them on first for fit, for color, and to ensure they flatter your figure. Icovia, and similar competing software packages from Obeo Space Designer and Floor Plan Online -- in fact, the entire range of virtual tour and virtual space features now available for real estate websites -- give prospects the chance to test-drive and test-fit homes to their lives.

Not surprisingly, they also keep visitors glued longer to websites themselves. Studies conducted by Realtor.com indicate consumers are 40-percent more likely to view listings with virtual tours than those without them. The more they see, the greater their chance to be sold. A survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project back in 2004 estimated that 2 million people a day were taking virtual tours on the web; surely that number is significantly higher now, as better computers with more memory are connected to faster Internet pipelines.

Has Street revealed anything new with his insight? Admittedly, no. But far too many real estate agents and brokers underestimate consumer demand for web interactivity, and continually fail to understand the need to make their website content "sticky," and that's why Steve Street sounds like a prophet.