What is a virtual tour, and how to make one for a listing

A virtual tour is a way to walk a buyer through a home from a screen before they visit it. Zillow defines virtual tours, also called 3D tours or 3D walkthroughs, as a way for buyers to tour a for-sale home digitally. In listing marketing the term covers three things: a 360 or 3D scan the buyer steers room by room, a video walkthrough filmed at the property, and a video tour generated from the listing photos. All three go on the listing, in the MLS virtual-tour field and on the property page. They differ in what you need, what they cost and how long they take, and that decides which one you make.

The 360 or 3D route scans the home one spot at a time. With the Matterport app on an iPhone or Android phone, a supported 360 camera or a Matterport camera, you stand in a spot, rotate in a full circle, move five to eight feet and repeat until the house is covered, then upload. The free plan holds one active space; Professional starts at $108 a month for ten spaces, or $1,080 a year. If you would rather not scan it yourself, Matterport Capture Services sends a technician with a Pro camera: a base fee of $223.75 for a home up to 1,000 square feet, adjusted up to 30% by location, a paid plan required, and the model in your account 24 to 48 hours after the appointment.

Zillow's 3D Home app is the free version of the same route. It runs on an iPhone, an Android phone or a supported 360 camera, with no per-home, service or hosting fees. A hand-held tour of 10 to 15 panoramas processes within about four hours; a 360-camera capture takes 10 to 20 minutes to shoot and about 30 minutes to process. The tour posts to Zillow and Trulia, syndicates to Redfin and Realtor.com, and comes with an unbranded link for the MLS. An interactive floor plan needs a 360 camera.

The video walkthrough route is a phone and a visit. In Zillow's free Premier Agent app you find the listing and take the video, and Zillow says listings with video get preferred placement in search results. On Zillow Showcase listings the video is capped at 120 seconds, one video shows per listing, and it has to come from the photographer who shot the rest of the media. Zillow's own guide notes that listing videos are not interactive.

The third route is a virtual tour from listing photos. Upload up to 20 photos to Echo and each one becomes a 4, 6 or 8 second clip with camera motion generated by an AI video model. Standard clips are ready to review in about a minute. Add narration in a voice from the library, lay music under it, export an MP4 in widescreen or vertical, and publish a property page that carries the tour. An 8-photo tour comes to about 450 credits, shown before you generate.

MLS systems take a virtual tour as a link in a virtual-tour field, and most require that link to be unbranded. A Zillow 3D Home tour comes with an unbranded link for this. Every Echo property page has an unbranded copy with no contact details and no branding, made for the same field. The branded page is the one you share everywhere else.

On Zillow, a 3D Home tour publishes to the listing from the app, and a video walkthrough goes up through the Premier Agent app. For a video made elsewhere, the steps for Zillow and the MLS are in the guide on adding a video to a listing.

Rules on virtual tours and AI-generated media are set by your MLS, your state and your brokerage, and they differ. Read yours before you post. Fair housing covers the narration too. Describe the home, never who should live there.

A 360 scan and a filmed walkthrough record the house as it was on the day. A tour generated from photos shows the room in the photo with a camera move through it, with the light and the finishes that were in the picture. You watch every clip before it goes into the tour, and any clip can be regenerated on its own. The narration says what you tell it, so check the square footage and the year built before the file goes out. Echo makes video tours and property pages from photos; it does not make 360 or 3D scans. For photo-to-video tools compared by name, see the roundup.