Most virtual tour marketing is written for sales, where a tour has to justify itself once per instruction against a large transaction. Lettings is the better fit for the technology, and it is under-served for a structural reason: the stock turns over too often for anything that requires a booking.
Why the arithmetic is different from sales
A sale involves one round of viewings by buyers who mostly live nearby. A let involves a stream of applicants, many of whom are moving from somewhere else, and it repeats every time the tenancy ends.
That changes what a tour is worth. In sales it improves the quality of a viewing list. In lettings it removes viewings altogether, because applicants rule themselves out before anybody drives to the property with a set of keys.
Student and HMO lettings
The clearest case. Applicants are typically in another city during the letting season, often deciding as a group, and frequently signing without seeing the property. A tour is not marketing here, it is the viewing.
It also settles the room-allocation argument that otherwise happens on move-in day, because a group can walk the house together and see which room is which before they sign.
Corporate and relocation lets
Applicants relocating for work commonly take a property unseen, and the alternative to a tour is a video call with an agent walking round holding a phone. A tour does that job once rather than every time, and it is available at the hour the applicant is actually free, which for an international relocation is rarely during your working day.
Void periods
The number a landlord cares about is days empty. Anything that lets an applicant qualify themselves at eleven at night compresses the gap between listing and let, which is the argument to make at the landlord pitch rather than any engagement statistic.
The constraint that has stopped this working
Lettings stock turns over constantly, marketing windows are short, and fees per property are a fraction of a sales fee. A tour that costs £250 and needs a photographer booked in is not viable on a two-bedroom flat relet three times in five years, which is why lettings has largely gone without.
That is the specific problem Spatia removes. The tour is built from the photographs already taken for the listing, so there is no visit to arrange and no kit for a busy lettings team to carry: £62 to £99 per listing with hosting included, live the same day. At that cost and that effort it works on the whole portfolio, including relets, rather than on the occasional premium instruction.
Two practical points for lettings specifically
- Reshoot on turnover, not on every enquiry. A tour of the property as it was two tenancies ago misrepresents it. Photographs get retaken at turnover anyway, so the tour regenerates from those.
- Keep the tour unbranded and honest about condition. An applicant who signs unseen and arrives to something different is a dispute, and in a market where much is taken on trust that reputation travels quickly.
The shot list that makes a tour work is here, and adding the link to a Zoopla listing is covered here.