Real Estate Tours: Which Kind to Offer on a Listing

Buyers don’t all tour a house the same way, and your listing doesn’t have to pick one. Some want to stand in the kitchen. Others want to screen ten homes from the couch and drive to two. If you know which formats exist and who each one suits, you can decide what to offer on a given listing instead of defaulting to “photos and a showing.”

In-person showings

Still the one that closes. A buyer feels the light, the flow and the street noise, and you can steer the visit toward what they care about. Everything else in this post exists to get the right buyers to this step and to waste fewer of the wrong ones.

Your prep job is the usual one: lights on, clutter gone, cars out of the driveway. If you have photos from a shoot, the house should look like them. A gap between the gallery and the front door costs you the showing.

Open houses

Good for neighborhood foot traffic and for buyers who aren’t ready to book a private showing. Print the floor plan and leave a stack on the kitchen island. Have the video playing or the tour link on a QR code at the door, so people who walk through can send the link to a spouse who couldn’t come.

Virtual and 3D tours

A 3D tour lets a buyer walk the house on their own schedule, as many times as they like. It answers layout questions that photos can’t, and it works best for out-of-town and relocating buyers who can’t just swing by. We lay out the case in why 3D tours win listings in South Carolina and Virginia.

A floor plan helps a buyer make sense of a 3D tour, and it’s useful on its own. Here’s when to add a floor plan.

Walkthrough video

A video is a guided tour with a point of view: someone chose the order and the pace. It’s shorter and more emotional than a 3D tour, and it travels better on social. If you’re weighing the two, we wrote up what video actually does for a listing.

Live video showings

A live video call, with the agent walking the buyer through, is the answer to “can you show me the garage?” It’s free and fast. Use it as a supplement to a recorded tour, not a replacement. Ask the buyer what they want to see first, and point the camera at the things nobody photographs: the electrical panel, the attic access, the crawlspace door, the water heater.

Self-guided tours

Some markets and brokerages allow self-guided visits, where the buyer lets themselves in with a code or smart lock. It can open up showing times that the agent can’t staff. It also raises security and liability questions, so check what your broker and the seller are comfortable with before offering it. Never assume it’s allowed.

Historic and specialty tours

Older homes sometimes deserve a guided tour of their own, because the interest is in the details: original floors, millwork, odd little rooms that made sense a century ago. If you’re listing one, photograph those details and say what’s original in the description. For help with that, see our approach to photographing older homes in Richmond.

Which tours to offer

Match the format to the listing and the buyer.

• A starter home in a busy subdivision: photos, a floor plan and strong showings.
• A larger home or one with an unusual layout: add a 3D tour or a walkthrough video.
• Any listing where out-of-town buyers are likely: a 3D tour and a floor plan, plus a live video option.
• A home with land or a view: video and aerials.

What buyers will check on any tour

Buyers get sharper at touring after the first few houses. It helps to know what they’re looking for so you can get ahead of it.

• They watch the ceilings and corners, not the furniture, because that’s where water stains show up.
• They check the floor plan against a room they know. “Spacious primary” means nothing to them. Eleven by twelve does.
• They notice what isn’t photographed. A listing with no laundry room photo gets a question.
• They look out the windows in every frame, to see what’s next door.

What a tour can’t tell a buyer

A tour, virtual or in person, is a controlled presentation. It doesn’t tell a buyer what the street sounds like on a weekday evening or how long the drive to work takes at rush hour. Relocating buyers often get surprised by the commute, so give them the context in the listing remarks or on a call. They’ll trust you more for it.

Use tours to narrow the field, not to make the final call. Plenty of virtual tours turning into a few serious showings means the tours are doing their job.

To see how tours, video and floor plans fit into a listing order, see the packages page. Beyond All Media shoots photos, video, drone and 3D tours across Upstate SC, Columbia and Richmond. South Carolina (864) 714-0724, Richmond (804) 913-3013.