More than ever, 360 virtual home tours are critical, especially as COVID has hit pause on public open houses. As a real estate agent, in 2020, you have to adopt 360 virtual home tours, along with your professional property photos and videos. These 3D home tours offer prospective home buyers a detailed 360 experience of each room, and allows them to walk from room-to-room, all from the comfort and safety of their own home. By offering these immersive home experiences, it also allows you, as the agent, to save time by only providing in-person home showings to more serious prospective buyers.
These days, there are countless virtual tour software options, but we’re going to focus our list on platforms that meet certain criteria. Each of the options we detail below must be:
- primarily targeted to real estate
- relatively easy to use
- embeddable on any website
This shortlist of requirements filter out a lot of the virtual tour software in the market that has features, complexity, and pricing that are more targeted to architectural, industrial, commercial, and retail applications.
When choosing the right 360 virtual tour platform for you, you’ll want to keep in mind some common features these platforms might have:
- Custom Hotspots
- This lets you create clickable spots in the room to show more information or move to different parts of the room
- Floorplans
- This lets you either create or upload floorplans so the viewer can navigate to different rooms in the property
- Some of the more advanced options create a “dollhouse” 3D rendering of your property based on the 360 scans of the rooms
- Branding
- This lets you customize the virtual tour with your custom logo and brand
- Music
- This lets you have music accompany your virtual tour
- Automated Tours
- This lets the viewer “play” through a walk-through of the property
- Thumbnail Gallery
- This lets the viewer navigate to various rooms by clicking on the room thumbnails
- Panoramic file uploads
- Some platforms require you to put the tour together using the app and camera while you’re capturing the images. Other platforms let you create a virtual tour by uploading existing panoramic images you’ve already taken using any 360 camera outputting standard panoramic file formats.
Without further ado, here are the 6 top 360-virtual home tour platforms for real estate, and an embedded sample virtual home tour from each platform.
Matterport
Sample Virtual Tour
Pricing
- Free – 1 active space / 1 users
- $10 /month – 5 active spaces / 1 user
- $69 /month – 25 active spaces / 5 users / +premium features (most popular plan)
Equipment Needed
Matterport does not support uploading of panoramic images. It requires one of the 360 cameras below:
- Ricoh Theta Z1
- Ricoh Theta V
- Insta360 ONEX
- Matterport Pro2 Camera
- Leica BLK360
- iPhone 6 and up
App Type
Web, iOS, Android (beta)
Zillow 3D Home
Sample Virtual Tour
Pricing
- Free
Equipment Needed
Zillow 3D Home does not support uploading of panoramic images. It requires one of the 360 cameras below:
- Ricoh Theta V
- Ricoh Theta Z1
- iPhone
App Type
Web and iOS
Kuula
Sample Virtual Tour
Pricing
- Free – 100 public upload /month
- $16 /month – unlimited tours
Equipment Needed
Kuula supports panoramic uploads from any 360 camera.
App Type
Web only
iStaging
Sample Virtual Tour
Pricing
- $5 /month – 3 Live Tours
- additional Live Tours $2.50 each
Equipment Needed
iStaging supports panoramic uploads from any 360 camera. It also supports in-app capture with the following cameras:
- Samsung Gear 360
- Ricoh Theta Z1
- Insta360 ONE X
- Panono
App Type
Web, iOS, and Android
EyeSpy360
Sample Virtual Tour
Pricing
- $0 – 3 active virtual tours / 5 scenes per tour
- $14 /month – 3 active virtual tours / 10 scenes per tour
- $35 /month – 10 active virtual tours / unlimited scenes per tour
- $70 /month – 25 active virtual tours / unlimited scenes per tour
Equipment Needed
EyeSpy360 supports panoramic uploads from any 360 camera.
App Type
Web only
CloudPano
Sample Virtual Tour
Pricing
- $49 /month – Unlimited Tours and Unlimited Scenes
Equipment Needed
CloudPano supports panoramic uploads from any 360 camera.
App Type
Web only