Pricing for property virtual tours is annoyingly opaque. Most studios won’t quote without a brief, and the studios that publish prices tend to publish a starting point that has very little to do with what you’ll actually pay. This is an attempt at a cleaner picture.

We capture splats for a living, so this isn’t an unbiased survey. But the figures below come from public price lists, our own quoting history and a fair amount of cross-checking with peers in the trade. Where we’re guessing, we say so.

Stitched 360 photo tours

The cheapest option, and the one most agencies started with five years ago.

Typical UK pricing in 2026 is between £150 and £350 per property for a residential listing, with the lower end coming from photographers running it as an add-on to the main photoset. Larger properties or commercial spaces push the price into the £400 to £700 range.

What you get for that money is a series of panoramic photos stitched into a clickable navigation map. Buyers move from room to room, but each “room” is a single fixed viewpoint. The format is mature, the tooling is widespread (Cupix, Kuula, EyeSpy360 all play in this space), and most agencies can find a local photographer to deliver one within a week.

The trade-off is that buyers don’t actually walk anywhere. They teleport between viewpoints. After about ninety seconds the novelty wears off and they bail.

Matterport

The market leader and the format most agencies think of when someone says “3D tour”.

Pricing varies wildly because Matterport bundles the capture cost with platform fees. A typical residential capture in the UK costs £250 to £500 from a local Matterport-certified photographer, plus a hosting fee that runs from free (limited) to roughly £400 a year per active tour for the larger packages.

What you get is a “dollhouse” mesh model of the property with auto-generated floor plans. The buyer walks from circle to circle on the floor, with the camera snapping to fixed positions. Decent for navigation, weaker for atmosphere.

Watch for the per-active-tour costs. An agency with thirty tours live at any time can quietly burn through £4-6k a year just on hosting. Some studios bundle the hosting in, some pass the platform invoice through.

Video walkthroughs

Often pitched as “3D tours” but really cinematic video. A photographer or videographer walks through the property with a gimbal, edits the footage into a two-to-three minute reel.

Pricing is £200 to £600 for residential, £600 to £1,500 for premium properties or developments. Add another £400 to £900 for drone footage of the exterior.

These are great for hero marketing — Instagram, vendor presentations, premium listings — but they’re not interactive. The viewer watches what the videographer chose to show. That works fine for selling the lifestyle and badly for actual property assessment.

Gaussian splat tours

This is what we do, so caveat away. Public pricing for splat capture in the UK in 2026 is roughly £400 to £750 per residential property from independent studios, dropping to around £300 to £450 per property on volume contracts with larger agencies.

The format is photorealistic and lets buyers walk freely through the space, not jump between viewpoints. Hosting is typically included for 12 months. Source files often included. No per-view costs.

For comparison: our single capture rate is £495 for a property up to 1,800 sq ft, dropping to £345 from the fourth listing per month per branch.

The thing splats are bad at, currently, is automatic floor plan generation in the way Matterport produces them. Some studios re-render a vector floor plan from the splat as an add-on, which is what we do at £75 a plan. If your agency relies on dimensions stamped on a floor plan as the primary marketing asset, that’s worth knowing.

Drone exteriors

Universally a separate line item, regardless of the format above. Typical UK pricing is £150 to £350 for a fifteen-minute drone capture of exterior, garden and surrounding plot. Heritage and rural properties add £100 to £200 for the extra time and CAA notification work.

The legal requirement for a CAA-registered operator with appropriate insurance is the price floor. Anyone quoting drone work below £100 either isn’t insured or is treating it as a loss leader.

What agencies typically end up paying per listing

Most independent agencies we work with end up at one of two price points.

The first is around £500 to £700 per active listing, all-in, with media spread across photos, a stitched 360, drone exteriors and a marketing video. Old-school but effective.

The second is around £600 to £900 per listing, with photos, a splat tour, drone splat exterior and the floor plan. This crowds out the video and the stitched 360, replacing both with the single splat capture that does the job of both.

Where you land depends on what your competition is offering and what your average sale price is. Above £750k, the second bundle nearly always justifies its cost on saved viewing time alone. Below £500k, the first bundle is usually fine.

Hidden costs to watch for

Three things we see catch agencies out:

Hosting renewals. Tours from three years ago that quietly auto-renew at £80-120 a year per tour, billed annually as a lump.
Per-view fees. Less common than they used to be, but a few platforms still charge for traffic above a threshold. Read the small print.
Branding fees. Some studios charge separately to put your logo on the viewer. We don’t, but it’s worth checking when comparing quotes.

A useful sanity check

If you’re paying more than £900 for a residential capture, you should be getting either an unusual property type, a same-day turnaround, or a bundle of formats. If you’re paying less than £200, you’re probably looking at a stripped-back stitched 360 or an inexperienced operator. The bulk of professional capture work in the UK lands between those two markers.

We’re happy to send a quote against any specific brief. Address, square footage and a deadline gets you a number inside one working day at /contact.

What virtual property tours actually cost in the UK in 2026