When a billionaire decides to buy a yacht or private jet these days, chances are good he will use a virtual tour service developed in Vancouver before he cuts a $100 million cheque.
Prestige Vision caters to the rich and famous by providing boat and plane brokers with virtual walkthroughs. The company generated $720,000 in sales last year.
“This year we’re probably going to be double that,” said co-founder Vincent Finetti.
The company was founded at the height of the recession in 2008.
Born and raised in France, Finetti immigrated to Canada in 2006. He had always been interested in boats and turned that interest into a part-time business brokering sales for boat owners in Vancouver. He wasn’t making much money at it, so he took a job in a call centre, where he met his business partner, Michael Hrustaliov.
As a boat broker, Finetti found prospective clients would sometimes see a photo in an ad on a website, come take a look at the boat, then decide it didn’t live up to its billing. What was needed, Finetti realized, was a complete stem-to-stern visual tour.
Hrustaliov had some programming skills, and he helped Finetti develop a website that could host a virtual tour with photos taken with a fish-eye lens and stitched together with Photoshop into a 360-degree walk-through.
“Six months later, I sold a big yacht,” Finetti said.
With the commission, Finetti and Hrustaliov flew to Miami to try to sell the virtual tour service to boat brokers at a boat show.
The company later added private jets and luxury hotels to its virtual tour services.
“Now, three years later, we are serving over 170 shipyards or boating manufacturers worldwide,” said Finetti, who is now based in Nanaimo.
Prestige Vision gets most of its new clients by attending boat and air shows.
“Ninety per cent of our sales, since we started this company, have been trade shows,” Finetti said. “When they see you in Hong Kong, and the week after they see you in Sydney, Australia, and one month later they see you in Monaco, and then two months after they see you in Shanghai, they say, ‘Those guys are serious.’”
The company does not sell the boats and planes directly to buyers. It organizes virtual tours for brokers to put on their own websites and charges a flat fee – about $6,000 for a 100-foot yacht. Since 2008, the company has grown to a staff of 20, most of whom work in the company’s overseas offices, including the Philippines, where a dozen staff are employed Photoshopping images. •
