Do Virtual Tours Help Sell Houses? What the Evidence Means for Agents

Virtual tours help buyers decide which houses are worth a visit, but on their own they don't raise the price a house sells for. Whether one is worth paying for depends on how much that screening saves the agent and the buyer on a given listing.

What the Study Found

• A study of 75,178 homes sold in greater Los Angeles between March 2019 and March 2021, by Isamar Troncoso of Harvard Business School and Mengxia Zhang of Western University's Ivey Business School, written up by HBS in 2023. About 22 percent of the listings had a 3D virtual tour.
• At face value, homes with a tour sold for about 1.1 percent more. Once the researchers allowed for the listing's photos and description, the tour's effect on the price was insignificant.
• Tours seemed to shorten the time on the market only while buyers couldn't visit in person, and that faded once restrictions lifted.
• Listings in less sought-after neighbourhoods and in areas served by smaller firms gained more from a tour.

Do Virtual Tours Raise the Price or Speed Up the Sale?

Not on their own, by this study's results. Sellers who used tours also tended to have more high-quality photos and longer descriptions, which is where the higher prices came from. Once those are factored in, tours benefit sellers less than earlier studies, which found a rise of 2 to 3 percent, had indicated.

Nor do they make homes sell faster once buyers can visit. The speed a tour seemed to add during the lockdowns was a short-term benefit, and agents who used tours tended to list higher and cut the price later, which kept some homes on the market longer. Buyers kept using tours after the lockdowns, though: NAR's 2024 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers found that many used virtual tours and virtual listings in their search, a habit that began during the pandemic and has continued.

The exception is a listing in a less sought-after neighbourhood or with a smaller firm, where fewer listings had a tour. There, a tour was likely to come with a better listing overall, it may have drawn more eyes, and the researchers suggest it can ease buyers' uncertainty about what a home is worth.

Who Gains Most From a Tour?

The buyer who would otherwise book a viewing they don't need, and the agent who would have shown them round. Troncoso's reading of the results is that a tour may not make a buyer fall for a house, but it does help them see that they don't like one, so they never book the visit. For the agent that means fewer showings with buyers who were never going to make an offer, and less time driving from one viewing to the next.

Buyers who can't easily come to a viewing get a fuller look too. Someone moving from another city or another country can see the whole property at their own pace, rather than the rooms and angles a photographer picked, and come back to it at any stage of the purchase. The partner or family member who missed the viewing can walk through it as well, so the people who share the decision see the same house.

The tour matters to buyers, though less than photos or a floor plan. In NAR's 2025 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends report, covering people who bought between July 2023 and June 2024, 41 percent of buyers who searched online rated virtual tours very useful. Photos came first at 83 percent and floor plans second at 57 percent, with videos at 29 percent. Yet only 16 percent of sellers who used an agent said a virtual tour was used to market their home. A tour belongs alongside good photos and a floor plan, and it is still rare in agents' marketing.

What Does a Virtual Tour Cost?

A professional 360 tour typically costs $200 to $500, according to NAR's 2025 virtual tour playbook, often bundled with the listing photos and floor plan, and takes one to two hours to scan and process depending on the size of the property. The price depends on which of the three ways to make one an agent picks. Doing it yourself means a 360 camera (the playbook's examples cost about $500 and $1,000), a tripod at around $100 and hosting, charged per tour or per month.

Against that cost, the gain is the screening, so a tour pays off most where screening saves the most: buyers who can't easily visit, viewings that cost the agent a long drive, and neighbourhoods where few listings have a tour. When time is short, the HBS researchers advise putting high-quality photos and a full description first and adding the tour after.

How Do You Know a Tour Paid Off?

By counting what it did on each listing. Views, where they came from and the enquiries the tour brought in, set against the viewings booked, show whether it is cutting out wasted trips. Each enquiry comes from someone who has already looked around, which makes it worth a prompt follow-up. The researchers advise agents to keep sellers' expectations about the price modest and to point to benefits like fewer showings with unlikely buyers, which these figures can show.

Knowing Which Tours Pay Their Way

Giraffe360 helps with the last two questions, what a tour costs and whether it paid off. On cost, a tour made with a Giraffe360 camera doesn't need its own visit. One capture can produce the virtual tour alongside the listing's HDR photos, floor plans and videos, so the agent isn't choosing between a tour and good photos.

To turn screening into enquiries, the Contact form setting under Info in the tour editor adds a Get in touch form to the tour. Where names matter more than reach, the tour link can ask for details first. A gated tour shows only its opening view until the visitor gives their name, email address and phone number. A protected tour lets them look around up to three panoramas, chosen under Highlighted panoramas, before the form appears, and you can send a full access link that lasts 72 hours. Either way only the buyers willing to leave their details see the whole home, so it suits listings where every named lead counts for more than the number of people browsing.

Enquiries from tours, gated tours, protected tours and property websites land in Leads, where you can filter them by project, source and date, open each one's contact details and message, and download the filtered list as a .csv file.

Analytics shows the views of each published tour for the dates you pick, as total or unique views, broken down by device, traffic source and country, as long as the tour link collects cookies. Compared with the viewings booked and the enquiries in Leads, it shows which listings' tours are doing the screening, and its PDF export gives the seller the figures.