Table of Contents
- What Are Real Estate Virtual House Tours and Video Tours?
- How to Know When to Use Which House Tour?
- Are Virtual House Tours and Video Tours Effective?
- How to Create a Professional Virtual House Tour
- Quickly Creating a Professional Video House Tour
- Trust PhotoUp for All Your Real Estate Marketing Needs!
Can’t decide whether to use a real estate virtual house tour or video tour to market a new listing?
Both are fantastic real estate marketing tools. The challenge is to know the distinct benefits and uses of each one.
Virtual and video real estate tours help potential buyers understand what it’s like to be in the property. But they have differences that help you determine when to use them.
In this post, we’ll compare real estate virtual house tours to video tours to see which is best to market a listing.
However, let’s first explore these two highly-useful real estate marketing tools in more detail.
What Are Real Estate Virtual House Tours and Video Tours?
A real estate virtual house tour uses a 3D virtual floor plan or a 3D rendering of the property to give prospective buyers a realistic online experience of being in the property. The virtual house tour uses hot spots that, when clicked, provide the buyer with more information on a room, feature, or space.
In contrast, a real estate video tour uses video and photos to promote a home or commercial property. The camera guides the viewer through the entire property, typically accompanied by narration and music.
Both marketing tools have their benefits and best uses. For example, consider the following benefits of real estate video house tours:
- Video tours are easy to use – the potential buyers simply hit play
- On a video house tour, a real estate agent directs the tour, focusing the camera on the listing’s best features
- The tour experience is from eye level, so it feels like you are actually going through the house
Likewise, a virtual house tour also has its particular uses and benefits, such as:
- The buyer directs the tour and can examine any room or space from any angle or perspective
- Additionally, the buyer determines the pace of the tour and how much time they spend in each room
- Most virtual tours contain measurements and dimensions so a buyer can see if a space will meet their needs and if their current furnishings will fit
So, now you see that both tour types have particular uses and benefits. And the tech-savvy real estate sales professional would likely use both to market a listing!
How to Know When to Use Which House Tour?
Are you uncertain as to when to use which house tour? Let us help.
While both tour types are effective marketing tools for selling a listing, they each have distinct uses. For example, we recommend that you use a virtual house tour for the following:
- As the featured house tour on the main listing page
- In your first round of email marketing campaigns
- Linked by a QR code in postcard marketing
- And as the featured house tour on a single property website
Likewise, we suggest you use video house tours in the following situations:
- For easy sharing across social media platforms
- To place on YouTube – a popular site with buyers to help their search
- In texts to interested buyers
- In second-wave email marketing efforts
- In small online ads
The reality is that both house tour types can be easily used in most marketing situations. So consider experimenting with using both!
Now, are you wondering if these tours work to help sell listings? Let’s go ahead and answer that question.
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Are Virtual House Tours and Video Tours Effective?
The answer is clearly yes. The following statistics on virtual and video house tours make a powerful case for their marketing and sales effectiveness.
For example, here are several key statistics for virtual house tours:
- 67% of home buyers expect to see a virtual tour when looking at a listing
- 50% of buyers would rather see a virtual tour than just photography
- Listings featuring a virtual house tour get 87% more views
- 54% of buyers won’t see a listing in person if it doesn’t include a virtual tour
- Listings with virtual tours closed 31% quicker than those not featuring a tour
- In a recent nationwide survey, nearly 50% of buyers said they would make an offer on a home based solely on a virtual tour
And next, here are some equally eye-opening numbers concerning video house tours:
- Real estate listings featuring a video tour had 403% more follow-up inquiries than listings without one
- Zillow’s data shows that video tours help listings 14% faster than listings without one
- Century 21 caused a 20% increase in sales after they implemented video tours on all their listings
- 51% of homebuyers use YouTube to help find a home
So, as you can see, both real estate virtual house tours and video tours are popular and effective.
Next, let us share how easy it is to create either type of real estate house tour.
How to Easily Create a Professional Virtual House Tour
A PhotoUp virtual house tour can be created in around 5 minutes. It’s really that quick and easy, and here’s the process:
- First, there’s no need for an expensive special camera – any 360 camera that shoots JPEGs will work
- Next, PhotoUp engages AI technology to construct the tour perfectly
- Third, we make hot spots easy through simple pinning
- Further, you determine the focus of the house tour, selecting the hot spots and calling attention to the listing’s best features
- Finally, there is easy custom branding – PhotoUp’s virtual house tours can also be White Labeled
And that’s not all – you can also easily add floor plans and virtual staging to your virtual house tour.
But perhaps the best feature of PhotoUp’s virtual tours is that they are affordable:
- PhotoUp’s Micro Plan – ideal for the person who wants to try our services and this marketing tool – costs $9 per month for 2 active virtual tours and 2 single property websites
- PhotoUp’s Starter plan – ideal for individual real estate photographers and agents – costs $29 per month for 5 active virtual tours and 5 single property websites
- And the Pro plan – perfect for real estate brokerages and teams – is $79.00 per month and features up to 50 virtual tours and 50 single property websites at any given time with unlimited hosting
PhotoUp Virtual Tour Demo
To see just how easy it is to create your virtual apartment tour, take a look at this short video tutorial:
Quickly Creating a Professional Video House Tour
For around just $30, PhotoUp can take your raw footage and turn it into a polished and persuasive video house tour.
PhotoUp’s walkthrough video house tour editing service includes:
- Clip review, expert editing, and arrangement
- Adding your logo, an intro, an outro, and contact info
- And adding commercially licensed music for a more engaging tour experience
In just 2 simple steps, you’ll get a professional-quality video:
1. Upload
Upload the parts and pieces of the tour – video clips, branding, and audio files to Dropbox, Google Drive, or another delivery link, and include that link on your order.
2. Delivery
Typically, we deliver your edited video within 24-36 hours if uploaded on weekdays and before 9:00 PM on a Friday, local time.
We aim to have your final video be between 2-3 minutes long and delivered in 1080p quality. 4K quality is available for a slightly additional cost.
So, as you can see, PhotoUp makes it easy to create effective real estate virtual and video house tours.
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Trust PhotoUp for All Your Real Estate Marketing Needs!
PhotoUp is a global industry leader in visual real estate marketing solutions. In addition to virtual house and video tours, we offer practical marketing tools for any real estate sales situation:
- Real estate photo editing
- Virtual staging
- Real estate photographer websites
- Single property websites
- Floor plans
- Property flyers
- House portraits
- Virtual Assistants
- And more!
Explore all the ways PhotoUp can help grow your real estate sales business.
Sign up for a free PhotoUp account, and we’ll help you take your real estate marketing to the next level!
We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this post comparing virtual house tours with video tours. Also, please feel free to explore these other related resources, too:
