Do 3D tours help a property sell or lease faster?

What do tour providers’ own figures say?

They report faster sales and more attention for listings with tours, measured in their own markets. Each comes from a company with a stake in 3D tours.

• Zillow, which runs its own 3D Home tours, said in a March 2021 press release that listings with a 3D Home tour sold 10% faster on average than listings without one, on data from December 2019 to May 2020. The same release said, on July to December 2020 data, that they were saved 32% more often and viewed 29% more.
• Matterport, a 3D tour company, published a summary in February 2020 of a preliminary analysis of 143,575 listings in four US markets between November 2016 and November 2019, 3,935 of them with 3D tours. It reported sale prices 4–9% higher depending on the market, and sales up to 31% faster in the Southern market. A second comparison of 700 listings in one Southern city reported sales 20% faster.
• REA Group, which runs realestate.com.au and holds 61.5% of iGUIDE’s maker, cited its own April 2025 survey, in which a third of buyers said video or 3D tours made them more inclined to inspect a property. That is a stated intention, not a measured sale.

What does independent research say?

Academic studies find a much smaller effect, and sometimes none, once other differences between listings are taken into account.

Isamar Troncoso of Harvard Business School and Mengxia Zhang of Western University’s Ivey Business School used Redfin data on 75,178 homes sold in greater Los Angeles from March 2019 to March 2021; about 22% had virtual tours. Harvard’s December 2023 summary reports three findings.

• Without controls, homes with tours sold for about 1.1% more. After accounting for better photos and descriptions, the effect on price was not significant. Earlier studies had found 2–3%.
• Sellers who used tours tended to start at a higher price and lower it before the sale, so those listings could stay on the market longer.
• Tours seemed to help a little more in areas served by smaller agencies and in less sought-after neighbourhoods.

A peer-reviewed 2022 study in the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics looked at 34,359 US single-family sales in 2019, counting both pre-recorded videos and self-guided 3D tours. Tours were linked to the sale prices of occupied homes, though the direction and size varied with price segment and with whether owners or tenants lived there. They made no difference to the prices of vacant homes, and the authors read this as tours helping with homes that are hard to show.

Why do the numbers disagree?

Because they come from different publishers, markets and methods, and most cannot separate the tour from everything else that comes with it.

• Who publishes. Zillow, Matterport and REA each have a tour product or a stake in one. That does not make their numbers wrong, but a company chooses which results to publish, and a press release rarely carries the full method.
• Correlation, not cause. Agents choose which listings get a tour, and those listings differ in other ways. The Harvard researchers found that tour listings also tended to have more high-quality photos and longer descriptions; once those were counted, the price benefit was no longer significant.
• Different measures. Faster can mean fewer days on market or a larger share sold within a set period. Views and saves measure attention, not a sale, and a survey records what buyers say they will do.
• Different times and places. The Harvard data spans the pandemic, when inspections were restricted, and Troncoso suggested any time-on-market help from tours then looked short-lived once restrictions lifted. Every sales figure here comes from the United States, not Australia.

What does Veylet claim?

Nothing about sale or lease outcomes: Veylet has no client-accepted walkthrough yet, so it has no results of its own to report.

Our captures are still under quality review, and the Veylet Capture app is in testing on TestFlight, not the App Store. We do not borrow Zillow’s, Matterport’s or anyone else’s figures for our walkthroughs. What a walkthrough includes is on the offer page, and how one is captured and reviewed is in getting started.

What can you reasonably expect from a good 3D tour?

A clearer picture of the space for people who cannot visit yet, rather than a guaranteed faster sale, higher price or quicker lease.

• Fewer wasted inspections. A buyer or tenant can check the layout before booking a visit, and rule a place out without the trip. The Harvard summary suggests agents keep clients’ hopes realistic and point to practical gains instead, such as fewer inspections by people who were never going to buy.
• Help where visiting is hard. The peer-reviewed study found price effects for occupied homes and none for vacant ones. The same logic applies to a buyer who is interstate or overseas.
• Photos and words still come first. If time is short, the Harvard summary’s advice is to put it into high-quality photos and a clear description before a tour.
• Context, not measurement. A walkthrough shows the space; it is not a measured floor plan, building report or guarantee of condition.
• Sharing that works. Test the link and the embed on a phone before the campaign starts, as the website guide shows, and revoke the handoff when the listing ends.