Real estate virtual tours: 10 listings for $20 a month

A real estate virtual tour that actually helps sell a home isn’t a row of 360 photos. It’s a walkthrough that follows the real showing (entry, living room, kitchen, bedrooms, baths, backyard), with a floor plan so buyers know where they are, short captions where they matter (square footage, exposure, recent updates), and a clean link in the MLS listing and on your website. With a mid-range 360 camera you can shoot a home in twenty minutes and build the tour in half an hour, and the software costs anywhere from nothing to a few dollars a month. This guide covers how to do it well, what it costs per listing, and when Matterport is worth the money. Full disclosure: Andarama is ours.

10 live listings for $20 a month, swap them as they sell. Start your free 14-day trial, no credit card.

What it’s good for, in practice

• Screening showings: a buyer who has walked through the home in 360 and still asks for a showing is serious. Fewer wasted showings for you and the seller.
• Out-of-town buyers: relocations, second homes, buyers moving across the country. The tour replaces the first visit.
• Rentals and new construction with a model unit: show it once, lease or sell it many times.
• Winning listings: a seller who sees that their home will get a virtual tour is more likely to sign with you.

What to shoot and how

One 360 photo per room, two in large or L-shaped rooms, and one at the entry. A three-bedroom home is eight to ten photos. A few habits that save reshoots:

• Camera at about 5 feet on a thin monopod. That’s eye level, and it’s what makes the viewer feel like they’re standing in the room.
• Lights on, blinds open. The camera’s HDR handles bright windows.
• Get out of the shot. Trigger the camera from your phone and step behind a door.
• Declutter and remove personal items. A 360 photo shows everything, including what’s behind you.
• Shoot from the middle of the room, not a corner, so the viewer turns and sees all four walls at a similar distance.
• The nadir: a thin monopod mostly disappears in the stitching. If the base still shows, a nadir patch with your brokerage’s logo covers it.

For which camera to buy and the settings we use, see our guide to the best 360 camera for real estate.

Building the tour in half an hour

1. Import: upload the whole batch. The importer sorts files by name, lets you rename by pattern (“Living room”, “Kitchen”) and creates all the scenes at once, optionally linked in sequence.
2. Floor plan: if you have the plan (the one from the listing works), add it and place each scene with a click. Buyers see a minimap with where they are and which way they’re facing. In real estate that matters more than any visual effect.
3. Navigation: in the graph, every arrow is a doorway. With “follow the path”, buyers enter each room facing forward, like walking through. Two minutes per home.
4. Starting view for each scene: the one that shows the room at its best (the living room window, not the door).
5. Captions: one short text hotspot per room with square footage, exposure and what matters (“renovated 2024”, “walk-in closet”). A link hotspot to your phone or email on the first scene, and a contact form if you want leads straight from the tour.
6. Link preview: in the tour settings, set the title, description and image that show up when the link is pasted into a text message or email. It’s the first thing the buyer sees.
7. Publish: link, QR code (for the yard sign or the window) and embed code. Unlisted if the seller doesn’t want it indexed, with a password or an expiry date if needed.

It’s all in the publishing docs.

Publishing on the MLS, portals and your website

Most MLS systems have a virtual tour URL field, and listing portals accept a tour link: paste the address of the published tour and you’re done. Many MLSs require that link to be unbranded (no agent name, phone number or logo), so keep a clean version for that field and check your MLS rules. On your own website, the embed code or web component drops the tour into the listing page; on WordPress, our plugin does it with a block or a shortcode. On the Excursión plan and above, the tour is also served without the Andarama badge and on your own domain (tours.yourbrokerage.com), which is what a brokerage with its own brand expects.

What it costs

Item	Doing it yourself	Hiring out
360 camera	A few hundred dollars, once (mid-range, 8K)	Included in the photographer’s fee
Time per home	20 minutes shooting, 30 building	The photographer’s per-shoot fee
Software	$0 self-hosted; hosted, $2/month for 1 tour, $20/month or $200/year for 10, $500/year for 500 with no badge and your own domain	Provided by the photographer or the brokerage
Publishing	Included (link, QR, embed)	Included

For an agent with ten active listings, the software is $20 a month, and when a home sells you export its tour to your archive and delete the project, so those ten slots rotate with your inventory. A brokerage with dozens of listings pays $500 a year for 500 tours under its own brand, or nothing if an office computer runs the self-hosted version and the exported tours go on the website’s hosting. The real cost is the agent’s time, and with the importer and the floor plan it stays at about half an hour per home. See every plan on the real estate page.

When Matterport is worth it

To be fair to the industry standard: Matterport gives you a measurable 3D model and the dollhouse view, and it plugs into portal workflows that already expect it. It makes sense for:

• Luxury and new construction, where the wow factor matters and the budget allows it.
• Remote buyers who want to measure (will the sectional fit?) without visiting.
• High-volume teams that rotate spaces and for whom the per-space pricing doesn’t sting.

For an ordinary condo, a starter home or a storefront, a 360 tour does the job for a fraction of the cost. Matterport’s prices, checked on its website on 27 September 2026, are broken down in Matterport pricing 2026, and seven other tools are compared in Matterport alternatives.

Mistakes we see every day

• Camera on the floor or on a table. The home looks like it was shot by a toddler or a giant.
• No floor plan. Buyers are lost by the second room.
• Long captions. Nobody reads three paragraphs in a tour. Square footage and exposure, that’s it.
• The same starting view in every scene. Every room has a good side.
• Tours published under the vendor’s brand and domain. Buyers remember the vendor, not you.
• Tours that vanish when you switch providers. With Andarama you can export them as a package and the software is open source: your archive of tours belongs to you.

Start this week

Take the office camera (or borrow one) to the next listing that comes in: ten photos, import, floor plan, publish. The getting started guide walks you through it in fifteen minutes.

Try it on your next listing. 14 days free, no credit card, one complete tour. Then $20 a month for 10 live listings. Create your account.