Three different things called a virtual tour
Agents, portals and suppliers all use the phrase to mean at least three separate products. Most of the wasted budget I see comes from someone buying one and expecting another.
Interactive 3D tour
Matterport-style. The property is scanned room by room and the buyer clicks through a dollhouse view, moving from point to point and measuring as they go. Strong on layout and self-guided exploration. Weak on feeling – nobody has ever fallen in love with a house inside a point cloud.
360 photo tour
The cheaper relation: one panoramic photograph per room, with hotspots to move between them. It does most of what a 3D scan does for less money, minus the measuring tools and the dollhouse. For a four-room flat this is usually all anybody needed in the first place.
Guided video walkthrough
A filmed walk through the property, stabilised, cut to ninety seconds or two minutes, sometimes with a short voiceover from the negotiator. This is the one that sells. It controls the order the buyer sees things in, it holds attention, and it works on Instagram and in portal video slots where an interactive tour simply cannot go.
The comparison, side by side
| Format | Typical cost | Time on site | Best for | Main weakness |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Interactive 3D scan | £150-£400 by floor area | 1.5-3 hours | Larger homes, new-builds, overseas buyers, complicated layouts | Monthly hosting fees; low engagement on ordinary flats |
| 360 photo tour | £100-£200 | 1-2 hours | Small flats and lettings where layout is the real question | No measuring tools, and looks dated beside a 3D scan |
| Guided video walkthrough | from £350 | 2-3 hours | Sales where the property has flow, plus social and portal video slots | A fixed edit; the buyer cannot explore on their own |
| Vertical social walkthrough | from £350 within a video package | Same visit | Instagram and TikTok reach, and pitching for instructions | Thirty to sixty seconds is not a substitute for a full tour |
| Floor plan plus strong photos | £180 plus £40-£70 | 1-1.5 hours | Most listings under £600,000 | Does nothing to differentiate a premium listing |
What buyers actually use
From the hosting dashboards I get sent, interactive tours are opened by a small minority of the people who view a listing – single-digit percentages on ordinary stock, considerably higher on anything over £1m or aimed at buyers who are not in the country. Video plays far more often, because it sits inline and starts with a tap rather than asking someone to enter a separate interface.
The asset that gets used more than any of them, though, is the floor plan. It answers the question every buyer has, which is whether the second bedroom takes a double and whether the kitchen is separate. If a branch has £250 to spend and no floor plan on the listing, the tour is the wrong purchase.
Worth knowing how the portals treat them, too. Rightmove and Zoopla each give you a slot for a tour link and a separate one for video, and the tour opens in a new window away from the listing while the video plays where the buyer already is. That one difference explains most of the engagement gap, and it is not going to change any time soon.
Sales versus lettings
Lettings is where tours earn their keep more consistently than most agents expect, and for an unglamorous reason: tenants often commit without viewing. A relocating tenant arriving from Singapore in three weeks, a student taking a room in September, a corporate let signed by an assistant – all of them are choosing from a screen. A 360 tour cuts void days there in a way it never quite does on a sale.
On sales the calculation is different. Buyers viewing something they will spend £600,000 on are going to visit regardless. What the tour does is filter, so the four people who book have already decided the layout works, and the ones who would have walked out after ninety seconds never book at all. That is worth real money to a negotiator’s diary, but only on properties that generate enough enquiries for filtering to matter.
Hosting, links and the expiry trap
This is the part that catches branches out. Interactive tours mostly live on a platform with a monthly hosting fee per model. Stop paying and the links die, and every listing, brochure, email campaign and social post that pointed at that tour goes to a dead page. I have seen an agency lose two years of tours in one billing dispute.
Four questions to ask any supplier before you buy:
- Who owns the tour and the underlying scan data?
- How many months of hosting are included, and what does it cost afterwards?
- What happens to live links if we stop paying, or if you stop trading?
- Do we get a downloadable file we can host ourselves?
Video does not have this problem. It is a file. You keep it, you re-upload it wherever you like, and it still plays in three years. That alone is a decent argument for video on anything you want in a portfolio.
What it costs and how to bundle it
The cheapest way to buy any of this is on one visit. A walkthrough video starts at £350, and adding it to a property photography booking from £180 means one set of access arrangements, one lot of vendor preparation, one Congestion Charge, and consistent light across stills and footage. Booking them separately typically costs 30 to 40 per cent more and doubles the prep burden on the vendor.
Practical note on timing: a video walkthrough needs the property tidier than photographs do. A camera moving through a hallway sees everything, including the bit behind the door that a still frame would have cropped out.
If I ran a branch in 2026
If I ran a branch in 2026, I would buy a guided video walkthrough on everything over about £700,000 and on every new-build or unusual layout, buy a 360 tour on lettings aimed at relocating or overseas tenants, and buy neither on a standard flat under £500,000 where a strong photo set, a floor plan and possibly a twilight exterior will do the whole job for less. The underlying logic is the same one behind why good property photography sells homes faster: spend where the marketing is doing the selling.
One more opinion, since agents ask. Do not buy an interactive tour to win an instruction and then never look at the analytics. If a format is not being opened, stop paying for it and put the money into video, which at least you own.
I shoot property video and tours across the city, including a lot of central London flats where access windows are tight and there is nowhere to park. Send me the address, the asking price and the launch date, and I’ll say which format is worth buying for that particular listing.