You have undoubtedly come across the terms Virtual Tour, 360 Virtual Tour, Zillow 3D Home Tour, or 3D Virtual Tour and wondered which one was the best option for your customer. These are all referring to the same thing: capturing a three dimesnional space and displaying it in a 2D environment like a computer screen. All these options can be viewed on a flat screen, but some can also be viewed with a VR headset, allowing the wearer to “look around” a space. So, is there an answer to the question - is there a King in the 3D tour space?

Matterport versus Zillow with both brands logos

If you are involved in real estate in Northeast Florida, you’re likely familiar with the Matterport 3D virtual tour. You can recognize these by the small “doll house” that the tour creates. Matterport is the industry standard when it comes to the aesthetics of virtual tours. The tours are buttery smooth and have some of the best image quality around. However, there are some major drawbacks with Matterport tours, and that is why I recommend a Zillow 3D virtual tour for most real estate listings. In fact, I don’t think Matterport has any business in the residential real estate space for a few very important reasons.

As a real estate photographer, one has to weigh what works for them and what they want to feature to their clients. You may be aware of the perks of Matterport, but you may not be aware of the drawbacks of the medium. Those drawbacks include monthly hosting fees, significantly higher cost to hire a provider, much longer shoot times, severe complications capturing outdoor spaces, and lack of mass visibility to your clients.

When Zillow launched their 3D home tours a couple years ago, it made every other virtual tour platform obsolete in one very fundamental way: viewership. Whether we like it or not, Zillow is currently the king for most home shoppers. When a for-sale property has a Zillow 3D tour, the ranking of that listing jumps above any other listing that doesn’t have one. When a 3D tour is created by any other provider, such as Matterport, it’s not featured in any way on Zillow. It’s also not easy to find, you can only find it as a link under the listing description. When one invests in a Zillow 3D tour to supplement their primary real estate photography, they receive the following perks: significantly lower costs, boosts in home views, and far fewer in-person showings which is an advantage in today's marker.

The cost of a Zillow 3D tour is lower for a few reasons. Firstly, the photographer doesn't need to purchase an extremely expensive piece of equipment. Though image quality may not be on-par with the high-end Matterport cameras, they can be more than adequate for real estate if shot with a camera such as a Ricoh Z1. The other reason it’s cheaper is that it doesn’t cost the photographer any money to host the tour. Every other 3D virtual tour service charges hosting fees which photographers roll into their price to you. Zillow is the only free tour on the market. The last reason it costs less is that far fewer images are needed to build the tour. With Matterport, a 360 degree scan is needed every five feet! This quadruples the shoot and editing time for most listings! With a Zillow tour the images required are far fewer, and you’ll find most providers will use this as an advantage and roll those savings over to their clients.

In the next blog post, we’ll go over the third, final and biggest reason why Matterport virtual tours aren’t ideal for residential real estate.