How to Make a Virtual Tour for Real Estate: Three Ways and the Steps They Share

A virtual tour is a set of 360-degree panoramas taken around a property and joined, so a buyer can move from room to room and look around each one from a single link. You can hire a photographer to make it, make it yourself with a 360 camera and tour software, or use a camera that builds the tour for you, and the capture follows the same rules whichever you choose.

What a Virtual Tour Is Made Of

A tour is closer to a small website than to a video or a photo. Each panorama is a scene, the scenes link to one another where one room leads into the next, and the whole tour lives online at an address, so it can be shared like any other link.

Making one takes two jobs. Someone captures the panoramas at the property, standing the camera in the right places, and someone builds the tour from them, joining the scenes and getting it ready for buyers. The three ways differ in who does each job.

Three Ways to Make One

The first way is to hire a virtual tour photographer, who visits the property, captures it and sends you the finished tour. You stay out of the process entirely, though it costs money and time: every tour is a booking, and the result comes back days after the visit.

The second way is to do both jobs yourself, with a camera that captures 360-degree panoramas and software that joins them into a tour. A pocket 360 camera is the easy start but limited in quality, while a high-end camera on a rig gives sharper panoramas and takes real skill and time to use well. Most of the effort goes into the build, where you upload the images and stitch them together scene by scene, in steps that depend on the software. In return, the tour can be shaped almost any way you like.

The third way is a camera made for tours, with its software built in. You place it in a room and press a button, and it captures the panoramas and processes them into a tour with no file transfers in between, so anyone at the agency can do the capture. For an agency that makes tours regularly, it is the most efficient of the three.

Capturing the Property

The capture starts with a walk through the property. In a two-storey house with a garden, that walk decides which spaces the tour includes: every room a buyer will care about, and perhaps not the garage or a walk-in cupboard. As you go, find where the camera will stand in each room, usually near the centre, where it can see the room's main features.

Then stage the house as you would for listing photos. Clear anything that blocks the view or makes a room look smaller or messier than it is, open the curtains and switch on the main lights. Decide which doors stay open and which stay closed before you start, and leave them that way, with nothing moving in the house while you capture.

In most rooms, one or two panoramas from near the centre are enough. An L-shaped room needs more than one spot, so that every part of it is seen. Keep each position in sight of the one before, with short, direct moves between them, and never stand the camera in a doorway. On the stairs, take a panorama at the top and another at the bottom. Finish the ground floor before going upstairs, and leave the garden for last.

Building and Sharing the Tour

Once the panoramas are joined, a few choices remain before buyers see the tour. Choose the scene and the direction it opens on, so the first thing a buyer sees is the feature you most want them to notice. Give each scene a clear room name, and hide any scene you don't want shown. An information hotspot attaches a few lines of text to a point in a panorama, explaining a feature right where the buyer is looking at it.

Then publish the tour and share its link. It can go into the listing on the portals, onto social media or into an email to a buyer. On your own website, the tour sits on the property page the way a YouTube video does, in an iframe, or behind a text or image link where the page has little room, as on a phone.

When the Camera Builds the Tour

The Giraffe360 camera takes the third way, and the capture rules above apply to it as they stand. After every scan, Scan View shows whether the scan has lined up with the ones before, so a gap or a misaligned scan is fixed before you leave the house. Mirrors, very small or empty rooms and large open spaces like the garden can throw the alignment off, so those scans deserve a careful look. The capture guidelines cover the rest. If you'd rather not hold the camera yourself, a photographer who works with Giraffe360 can capture the project for you.

The virtual tour comes back built from HDR panoramas, with privacy blur applied and the camera removed from the shot. It connects to the property's floor plans, so a buyer can see where each room sits in the house.

The choices from the last section are made in Content Studio, whose tour editor sets the start view, the room names, the information hotspots and the hidden scenes. Tour links publishes the tour and copies its link, and offers a QR code to download. From there the tour can be embedded on your own website or sent to the listing portals Giraffe360 connects with.