The figures repeated across this industry are that listings with virtual tours generate around 49% more qualified leads and 87% more views. Those come from apartments.com and realtor.com. They are worth knowing, and they are worth being honest about, because an unsourced statistic put to an estate agent who knows their own numbers is the fastest way to lose the room.
What those numbers are, and are not
They are portal-published marketing figures drawn from listing performance data. That makes them real observations of real listings, and it also makes them observational rather than controlled.
The specific limits worth holding in mind:
- Selection effect. Listings with tours are not a random sample. They skew towards properties where somebody invested in marketing, which correlates with better photography, better copy, and often a more motivated vendor. Some of the uplift belongs to those things.
- US market, US portals. Rightmove and Zoopla behave differently from apartments.com, and UK buyer habits are not identical.
- Views and leads are not sales. Neither figure measures whether the property sold faster or for more.
None of that makes them useless. A listing that gets substantially more views and more enquiries is a better listing. It does mean the honest claim is narrower than the headline.
The effect that is easier to verify
The more reliable benefit is not the click count. It is what happens to the viewing list.
A buyer who has walked through a property online before booking has already answered the questions that cause a wasted Saturday: the layout, the actual size of the second bedroom, whether the kitchen opens the way the photographs implied. Buyers who would have withdrawn on arrival tend to withdraw earlier, and buyers who book have already decided they like it.
That shows up as fewer viewings per offer rather than as more enquiries, and it is measurable inside any agency without reference to a portal statistic. Anyone considering tours can check it directly: track viewings per offer for the listings that have one against the listings that do not, over a couple of months.
Where a tour makes the most difference
Not every listing gains equally. The effect concentrates:
- Properties with unusual layouts. Anything photographs badly explain. Split levels, conversions, rooms that lead into each other in a way a floor plan understates.
- Buyers who cannot easily attend. Relocations, overseas buyers, investors, and anyone shortlisting from several hours away.
- Competitive stock. Where several similar flats are listed in the same postcode at the same price, the one a buyer can walk through is the one they remember.
- Vendor acquisition. A tour on every instruction is a demonstrable difference at the valuation, which is a separate benefit from anything the buyer side produces.
Where the honest answer is no
A tour will not rescue a badly priced property, and it will not compensate for poor photographs, because the tour is built from the same view of the same rooms. On a small and straightforward flat that photographs well, a good set of photos and an accurate floor plan may carry the listing perfectly adequately on their own.
There is also a real cost to a bad tour. A dark, distorted or obviously stitched-together walkthrough reads as a property with something to hide.
The practical constraint
In most agencies the limiting factor has never been whether tours work. It is that producing one requires booking something, and so tours end up on the instructions somebody remembered to arrange rather than on all of them. A benefit that applies to one listing in five is a fifth of a benefit.
That is the reason the approaches that do not require a site visit matter more than their output quality alone would suggest, and why cost per listing is the number to compare.
Spatia exists for that constraint specifically. Because the tour is built from the photographs already taken, there is no visit to schedule and nothing to remember, so the benefit applies to the whole book rather than to the instructions that got special treatment. At £62 to £99 per listing with hosting included, putting one on every property is a decision an agency can actually carry out rather than one it intends to. The coverage argument is set out here.
Figures cited here are as published by apartments.com and realtor.com. Where they are used in marketing, they should be attributed, because a number with a named source is answerable and a bare percentage is not.