What a 3D virtual tour is actually worth

A 3D virtual tour is usually sold as a way to make a listing stand out. That is the least interesting thing it does. The tour earns its money in the appointments it removes from your diary, and again eighteen months later when somebody asks what the property looked like before the tenant moved in.

The viewings you stop attending

Consider what a Saturday of viewings actually costs. Travel across London, keys collected and returned, an hour of somebody's time per appointment, and a proportion of attendees who were never going to take it and knew that within ninety seconds of walking in.

A tour lets that ninety seconds happen at eleven o'clock at night, from another city, without anybody driving anywhere. The people who then ask to view are the people who have already decided they like it and want to check something specific. The appointment stops being a filter and becomes a closing conversation.

For a landlord the same arithmetic shows up as void days. A property that can be assessed properly at midnight gets let by people who make decisions at midnight, which is most people.

The record nobody thinks about until they need it

Here is the part agents rarely consider. A scan is a dated, dimensionally accurate record of a property in a known condition. That is very close to what a schedule of condition is, and it is produced automatically as a by-product of marketing the place.

It does not replace an inventory. A tour cannot tell you whether a mark is a scuff or an impact, it cannot photograph the inside of an oven, and it carries no written description that an adjudicator can test. What it does give you is context: the whole property, in three dimensions, on a date, showing where everything was and what state the space was broadly in.

Scanned at check-in alongside the written report, it answers the questions a photograph cannot. Where exactly was that sofa. Was the alcove always that colour. How big is the room the tenant says the wardrobe never fitted.

What one scan actually produces

• The walkthrough, which is the part everybody pictures.
• The dollhouse view, a doll's house cut of the whole property, which is what makes a flat legible to somebody who has never seen it.
• A measured floor plan, drawn from the scan rather than sketched, so the dimensions come from the building rather than from a tape measure and an estimate.
• Measurement inside the tour, so a tenant can check whether their furniture fits without asking you.

All of it from one visit. If the inventory is done on the same appointment, the tenant or the outgoing occupier is disturbed once instead of twice.

Where a 3D virtual tour is not the answer

It is the wrong purchase for a property that will let in three days regardless, and it is the wrong purchase if the plan is to scan the property empty and never scan it again. It is also not a substitute for photography: portals still lead with a still image, and a bad photograph with a good tour behind it still gets scrolled past.

The honest position is that it does two jobs well, marketing and record keeping, and that the second job is the one that quietly pays for it.

The tour is worth what it saves you, not what it looks like. Count the viewings you did not attend and the arguments you did not have.

You can walk through a real scan on the tours page, including the dollhouse view and the measuring tool, before deciding whether any of this is worth your money.

Sources: this article describes the standard output of a Matterport class scan and is based on how those tours function. It contains no performance claims, because the published figures on viewing reduction come from vendors rather than independent research.