Virtual Tour Hosting: What It Pays For and When a Tour Goes Offline

Every virtual tour on a listing plays from the provider's servers, at a link the provider keeps live, and a hosting fee is what pays for that: per tour for a set period, per month, or as part of a subscription. What an agent needs from that fee is a link that still works on the day the home sells.

What a Hosting Fee Pays For

A virtual tour is made of 360-degree images of each room, joined by software into a walkthrough a visitor can move through. Photos and floor plans arrive as files the agent can keep and upload anywhere, while the provider keeps the tour itself and opens it in a browser at a link, which is what goes into the listing. Hosting is the storage and the link together, so an agent who has paid for a tour holds the address of something the provider still keeps.

Providers charge for this in different ways. A 2025 virtual tour playbook in NAR's REALTOR Magazine found some charging per tour, with one platform's tours hosted for 180 days, and others charging a monthly fee, some of them for a set number of tours. The same piece notes that an agent who hires a professional leaves the camera and the monthly hosting fees to the professional, who spreads them over many clients. Billed per tour, real estate virtual tour hosting is a second payment on top of the one for making the tour. Inside a monthly plan it stops being a separate charge, but it lasts only as long as the plan does. Either way, it has to keep the tour online for as long as the listing is live.

Where the Link Lives Once the Listing Is Live

The link ends up in several places. In the US it goes into the virtual tour field of the listing in the local MLS. In the UK it is pasted into Rightmove's Additional Media and into the Video/Virtual tour URLs field on Zoopla. On the agent's own website the tour sits in an iframe, embedded the way a YouTube video is, or behind a text or image link, and the same address can go on a property website, into emails and social posts, or onto a brochure as a printed QR code. An MLS can also put the tour at the front of the listing: the Southern Arizona MLS, in its 2021 guide to adding photos and virtual tours, shows a listing's virtual tours first in the default display order, ahead of the primary photo.

Every copy of the link points at the same tour on the provider's servers. When the provider stops serving it, the MLS listing, the portals, the website and the brochure all hold a tour that no longer opens, and they all lose it on the same day. The agent can swap the link in the places they can still edit; a printed QR code stays as it was printed.

Three Ways a Tour Goes Offline Before the Sale

The first is the end of a hosting period. A tour paid for once and hosted for a set time, such as the 180 days in NAR's example, goes offline when the time is up, whether the home has sold or not. Most homes sell well inside that: in NAR's 2025 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends report, the median home had been on the market for three weeks when it sold. About one in twenty had been on it for more than 24 weeks, close to the length of a 180-day period, and those are the listings in a slow market that need every part of their marketing working for longest.

A plan can end too. Where hosting comes with a monthly subscription, the tours are hosted while the subscription runs, and what happens to them after it ends is set by the provider's terms. On some plans the public tours go offline with it, including tours on homes still for sale, and the account's downloads close at the same time.

Last, someone can take the tour down: unpublish it, archive it to tidy the account, or, on platforms that do this, leave it to be archived automatically after a period without activity. On a sold home that is housekeeping. On a live listing it removes the tour while the listing is still running, so it helps to know who in an office can do it and whether anyone is warned first.

When a tour does go offline, what the agent can keep is its parts, downloaded while the account still allows it: the panoramas, the photos, the floor plans and any video made from the tour. They can be reused, though the walkthrough itself opens only from the provider's link.

What to Ask Before a Tour Goes on a Listing

Each of these is easier to settle before the tour is linked from the MLS and printed on a brochure. They are the questions to put to a provider, or to the photographer who delivers the tour:

• How long is a tour hosted, and from which date does that time run?
• What happens to published tours when the plan ends or changes?
• Are inactive tours archived automatically, and is there a notice first?
• How long does it take to bring an archived tour back online?
• What can be downloaded, in which formats, and until when?
• Is there an unbranded link for the MLS and the portals?
• When a photographer delivers the tour, whose account hosts it, and what happens to the link if that account ends?

In that last arrangement the photographer pays the hosting, so the listing depends on an account the agent doesn't control. That works when both sides know how long the tour will stay up.

Keeping a Giraffe360 Tour Online Until the Sale

In Giraffe360, hosting is part of Content Studio, which comes with every plan to edit, stage, host and share content, so a virtual tour is hosted under the plan rather than tour by tour. Its links are in Tour links, on the virtual tour card's menu: a Regular tour link, and an LSF tour link without branding, contact information or links, for the MLS and the portals. Each link is published or unpublished on its own card, and the same dialog downloads a QR code. Unpublishing a link stops it opening wherever it was shared or embedded, so it belongs to the day a home is sold or withdrawn.

Archive, in a project's options menu, moves the project out of the active list and makes its active links unavailable, the tour on the MLS included, and its confirmation warns that they will be hidden. Projects without activity can also be scheduled for automatic archiving. The project's menu then shows Archive status with the scheduled date, and Keep Active cancels that archive, though not for good: a project kept active can return to the queue later. Where Review Auto-Archive is available, it lists the projects waiting so that an office can keep its live listings out of it.

Billing, which Organisation Admins and Organisation Managers can open, shows the plan's renewal date, and after a cancellation the date it is scheduled to end; past that date the account's public tours and property websites go offline and its downloads close. Before then, Download all on a project's content saves the photos at the chosen quality, the floor plans as PNG or JPG (SVG and DXF where available) and the tour video in landscape or portrait, and the panoramas behind the tour can be downloaded from the virtual tour's menu, as the Help Centre's guide to accessing and sharing content shows.