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Are Virtual Tours Here to Stay, or Were They a Covid-19 Quick Fix?
Jānis Beinerts (avaneb uuel vahekaardil)/ VP of Product
Yes, virtual tours have stayed, at about the level buyers gave them before Covid-19: around four in ten US buyers who searched online called them very useful in NAR's survey of 2018 and 2019 buyers, and around four in ten still do. The lockdown peak passed, the virtual open house shrank to something one buyer in ten finds very useful, and the share of agents who market a home with a tour has stayed small throughout.
What Buyers Kept
In 2020, when buyers couldn't go and see homes in person, a tour let them look round a listing from home, and the question was whether they would keep using tours once they could visit again. In each edition of its Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends report, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) asks recent US buyers which website features they found very useful in their search. For virtual tours, the share answering "very useful" ran like this:
- 2020 edition, homes bought July 2018 to June 2019: 42%
- 2021 edition, July 2019 to June 2020: 58%
- 2022 edition, July 2020 to June 2021: 43%
- 2023 edition, July 2021 to June 2022: 39%
- 2025 edition, July 2023 to June 2024: 41%
Apart from the one high year, the figure has moved within a few points of where it started. Each year only photos, detailed property information, floor plans and the agent's contact details scored higher, and in 2022 the contact details only drew level with tours. NAR reads its own data the same way: the 2024 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers says many buyers used virtual tours and virtual listings in their search, "a transformation that happened during the pandemic and has continued."
A tour still has a use once buyers can visit. In one, a buyer goes round the home at their own pace, deciding how long to stay in each room and where to look, with no one waiting for them to finish.
NAR warns in every edition that not all results are directly comparable, since the questionnaire and the sample change from year to year. The list also skips the 2024 edition, which covers homes bought from July 2022 to June 2023, and every edition counts only people in the US who bought a home to live in.
What Faded With the Lockdowns
The high year is the 2021 edition, from a survey mailed in July 2020 to people who bought between July 2019 and June 2020, a year whose last few months fell under the first lockdowns. Those buyers rated every feature higher than the year before, tours included: videos rose from 24% to 47% and floor plans from 52% to 67%. NAR's Real Estate in a Digital Age report of 2021, built on the same buyers, put it down to social distancing, which gave technology "an even larger role in the buying and selling of homes." A year later most features, tours among them, were back near their 2019 level.
The quick fix shows most in two features NAR first asked about in the 2021 edition: virtual open houses and virtual listing appointments, which 38% and 35% of buyers called very useful. In the 2022 edition the figures were 12% and 10%, and in the 2025 edition 11% and 10%. Once buyers could visit again, about one in ten still found them very useful.
The move online had begun before the pandemic. Looking online at homes for sale was the first step for 44% of buyers in the 2020 edition, before Covid-19, and for 43% in the 2025 edition, with every year between in the forties.
What Agents Never Caught Up With
The same reports ask sellers how their agent marketed the home, and here tours stay rare. Virtual tours were not among the methods listed in the 2020 edition. In the 2021 edition 17% of sellers who used an agent said a tour was used, then 21% in the 2022 edition, 17% in the 2023 edition and 16% in the 2025 edition. Agents took tours up a little while buyers couldn't visit and then went back, though around four in ten buyers kept finding them very useful.
For an agent, the gap means few competing listings have a tour, though a tour doesn't carry a listing by itself. In the 2025 edition buyers put photos (83%) and floor plans (57%) ahead of tours (41%), so a tour belongs beside good photos and a floor plan. With a Giraffe360 camera the virtual tour comes from the same capture as the listing's photos and floor plan, so adding one doesn't mean booking a second visit. A version without branding, contact details or links is made for the virtual tour field in an MLS or portal listing.
Frequently asked questions
For a while. A study of 75,178 homes sold in greater Los Angeles between March 2019 and March 2021, written up by Harvard Business School in 2023, found that tours seemed to shorten the time on the market while buyers couldn't visit in person, and that the effect faded once restrictions lifted. On their own, tours didn't raise the price either. Even so, Isamar Troncoso, one of the authors, said the tours seem to be most used by buyers and sellers and appear to be here to stay.
See where a tour fits in your listings
In a demo you see a Giraffe360 virtual tour next to the photos and floor plan taken on that visit, and the unbranded version made for listing sites.
