Estate Agent Virtual Tours: Seven Reasons Residential Agents Offer Them

Residential agents offer virtual tours because a tour does part of the work that would otherwise take a visit. In sales it helps win instructions and keeps viewings for applicants who already like the home, and in lettings it reaches renters who can't come to see a flat and records its condition when a tenancy starts.

On the Sales Side

Researchers at Harvard Business School and Western University's Ivey Business School studied 75,178 homes sold in greater Los Angeles between March 2019 and March 2021, and HBS wrote up their findings in 2023. Once the researchers allowed for a listing's photos and description, its tour had no significant effect on the price, so an agency's reasons for offering one lie in who asks to view and in how the agency looks to vendors and applicants.

1. Win More Instructions

Getting new properties to market is the first job in residential agency, and an agent pitching to a vendor or a landlord needs something that sets them apart from the other agents invited round. Reputation weighs most. In NAR's 2025 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends report, which covers sellers in the US, 35% chose their agent mainly for their reputation and 21% because the agent was honest and trustworthy, while 2% chose one who seemed accessible through technology. Asked what they most wanted from the agent, though, the largest group, 22%, said help marketing the home to buyers.

A tour lets the vendor see that marketing before they sign. Opening a past listing's tour during the listing presentation shows how their own home would look to applicants online. The promise should stay within what a tour does, and the Harvard researchers advise agents to keep sellers' expectations about the price modest and to point instead to benefits such as fewer showings with unlikely buyers.

2. Second Viewings Without Another Trip

After a viewing the applicant leaves with a brochure and whatever they remember of the rooms. One of our clients in Dublin makes a tour of every listing so that she has something to send with the brochure afterwards. She compares it to buying shoes: if you like a pair but they are expensive, you go back to the shop and look at pictures of them again, and a house is much harder to go back to.

The link also reaches the people who weren't there. A purchase rarely has one decision maker, and the partner, parents or friends whose approval the buyer wants often miss the viewing. With the tour they see the same rooms without a viewing each, so when the buyer asks for a second viewing, it is with the people who will decide.

3. Fewer Wasted Viewings

Fewer wasted viewings has long been the main selling point for tours. Isamar Troncoso, one of the two researchers behind the Harvard study, describes the effect from the buyer's side: a tour may not make someone fall for a house, "but it's going to help you to be like, 'Oh, I don't like this one, so I won't bother to go and see it.'" An applicant who rules a home out that way is an accompanied viewing the negotiator never drives to, and the enquiries that still come in are from people who have already looked round.

Measuring whether a tour pays its way is harder, because the number of viewings bears on other parts of the business too. Our clients describe a pattern without putting a number on it: applicants look at more homes online and visit the ones they are really interested in.

4. Applicants Who Decide in Their Own Time

Pushing an applicant costs the agent their trust, and people buying a home want to feel in control of the decision. A tour lets them look round at their own pace, from home and as often as they like, while the agent steps back and lets the property make its case. When they are ready to go further, the agent guides them through the next stage with someone who already knows the home.

5. Content That Carries the Agency's Name

Booking a restaurant for an important dinner, most people would choose the one whose website has wide-angle photos, a tour, a plan of the room and the menu over one that shows a few phone snaps. Applicants and vendors browsing an agency's listings make the same comparison, and a tour on every listing, on the agency's own website and social channels as well as the portals, tells them how that agency markets a home.

Tours are still uncommon. Among sellers in the US who used an agent, 16% said a virtual tour was used to market their home, in NAR's 2025 Generational Trends report. The Harvard researchers also found that tours made more difference where fewer listings had them, perhaps because those listings drew more eyes.

On the Lettings Side

Many renters move for study or work, some of them from abroad, and a tenancy starts with a deposit whose return can end in a dispute.

6. Renters Who Can't Come to a Viewing

Finding somewhere to live for a year or two is hard from another country. In the year to June 2026 the UK granted 383,455 sponsored study visas, and Chinese nationals were the largest group of main applicants, with 86,368, according to Home Office statistics. A student who needs a flat before arriving can't come to a viewing, but with a tour they can walk through it and agree the let online. The same holds for people relocating for work, and on the sales side for overseas buyers and investors.

7. A Record of the Home at Check-In

In England and Wales, a deposit taken on an assured shorthold tenancy has to be protected in one of three government-backed deposit schemes, and each scheme settles disputes about its return for free. Those disputes turn on the record of the home at the start of the tenancy and at the end, which puts the weight on the check-in inventory. A tour captured at check-in adds a walk-through of every room to that record, which can help when the landlord and the tenant disagree about what has changed. It adds to the signed inventory and never replaces it.

A Tour on Every Instruction, Sales or Lettings

Offering a tour on every instruction only works if it doesn't cost the agency another visit to the property. With a Giraffe360 camera, the virtual tour comes out of the same capture as the listing's photos and floor plans, so a flat to let gets one as readily as a house for sale.

After a viewing, the negotiator sends the regular tour link, which can carry the agency's logo as a watermark, so the applicant and everyone they forward it to can see whose listing it is. A tour meant for applicants abroad can be set to another language, which translates its controls and supported room names. The unbranded version of the link is the one that goes on the portals.