Do virtual tours actually sell houses faster, or just look good in pitches?

Every photographer’s pitch deck has a chart that says virtual tours sell properties faster. The numbers are usually the same: 30 percent quicker to offer, 40 percent more enquiries, 80 percent of buyers prefer them. None of those statistics tell you what you actually want to know, which is whether they’ll work for your patch and your stock.

Here’s what we see when we look closely.

The honest version of the time-to-sale claim

Most “sells 30 percent faster” stats trace back to NAR research from 2022, where listings with a virtual tour spent fewer median days on market than those without. The number is real but it’s also flattering, because the listings that get a virtual tour tend to be the ones the agency cares about most. They’re priced sharper, marketed harder, photographed properly. The tour gets credit for work that started before anyone scheduled a capture.

What we observe inside our own client base, mostly Hertfordshire and north London, is more measured. A splat tour seems to bring forward viewings, but it doesn’t change the fundamental ceiling on a property. A poorly priced four-bed in Watford still goes nowhere. A correctly priced one with a good tour gets viewed sooner and qualified faster, and that compresses the calendar between listing and offer by maybe a fortnight on average.

That’s a real number, but it’s not 30 percent.

Viewing quality is the bigger lift

The metric most directors care about, once we’ve talked it through, isn’t time-to-sale. It’s the quality of the people walking through the door. A standard listing pulls in three categories of viewer:

• People who already know they want a house like this and are ready to make decisions
• People who want to see what £900k buys this week
• People who have already ruled the property out but feel obliged to go through with the appointment

A good virtual tour eats into category three. By the time someone books a viewing, they’ve walked the property in their browser and know whether the kitchen is laid out the way they wanted. The conversations on site shift from “where’s the loo” to “how’s the boiler”. That changes how viewings feel for the lister and what they’re worth as data points for the vendor.

We had a Berkhamsted office tell us they ran fewer total viewings on splat-equipped listings, but a higher fraction of those viewings ended in a second-visit booking. That’s not a faster sale per se, but it’s a much more efficient sales process. Less wasted Saturday morning for the lister, more meaningful feedback for the vendor.

What changes when the tour is a splat rather than a 360

Stitched 360 photos still work. They give buyers a sense of the rooms. But they’re fundamentally a slideshow, and after about thirty seconds most buyers stop using the navigation and just hit the back button.

A splat tour is a single space the buyer can walk through freely. The behaviour we see in our viewer analytics is different in kind, not just degree. Time-on-tour for a splat is two to three times higher than for the same property captured as a 360. Buyers double back through rooms they’ve already seen. They pause in front of windows. The tour stops behaving like a property listing and starts behaving like a viewing.

That changes what a tour is doing in your sales funnel. It’s no longer a marketing asset that pads out the listing page. It’s the first viewing.

Where it doesn’t help

Splats don’t help on listings that should never have been taken on at the price. They don’t help on listings where the photographs were good enough that buyers were happy to commit to a viewing without more. They probably don’t help much on flats under £400k where the buyer pool moves fast and acts on photographs alone.

Where they earn their keep is the £600k-and-up bracket, especially anything with a layout that doesn’t read clearly from photos: barn conversions, period homes with awkward extensions, anything with a basement or split-level living space. Those properties confuse buyers from a photoset, and confused buyers don’t book viewings. A splat sorts that out in ninety seconds.

What to do with this if you’re an agent

Three suggestions if you’re weighing up whether to add splat tours to your standard media bundle.

First, don’t promise vendors that a tour will sell their house faster. Promise them better viewings. The first claim is hard to evidence, the second one shows up in the conversations they have with their lister.

Second, run the test on your own stock for a quarter. Pick five listings that are giving you grief, splat them, watch what changes in the viewing pipeline. Compare to the previous five comparable listings without one. The numbers won’t be enormous but they’ll be directional.

Third, watch what your competition is doing. Inside the M25, splats are still rare enough to be a real point of differentiation in pitches. That window is closing quickly. Most of our enquiries this year have been from agencies who lost an instruction to a rival who pitched with a splat tour mocked up.

We capture across Hertfordshire, north London and the Chilterns, and we’ll do a free first capture for any agency that wants to test the format on a real listing. Brief us at /contact and we’ll line up a slot.