Zillow 3D Home Tours
The Zillow 3D Home tour iPhone app is now available for everyone to use across the United States. If you are a Real Estate agent, this can be a nice way to showcase some or all of the spaces of a house you're listing at no extra cost. As a Real Estate photography company we can also create these while we're at the shoot for a small fee. They're nowhere near the quality of our high resolution tours that we create for upscale homes and builders, but for your average sized homes it's a nice little addition to just standard photos on Zillow.
Today I took the time to create one using my
iPhone and their separate "Zillow 3D Home" app which you can download from the App Store. Unfortunately this platform is only available to iPhone users but will be eventually released on Android phones. You can also choose to use a third party 360 camera which will then also let you use an iPad instead. Just using the phone I found the results were suitable as a quick and low-cost 360 panoramic tour.
I don't really like that they call it a "3D Tour", as there are no 3D elements like you'd see in a Matterport Tour. These virtual tours are simply 360 degree panoramas that allow you to look left and right in a full circle, but not up or down. They are captured just like you'd capture a panorama photo on your phone, with an easy to follow guide.
The app is super easy for anyone to use and it walks you through your first tour. You can have it find the address you're standing at, or you can type it in. You can pick a list of suggestions of room types, or call it what you want. When you're finished with the rooms you want on that floor, you can just switch to a new floor. You can even move rooms to different floors if you forget to switch floors.
The larger the rooms the better they appear on the tour. Smaller rooms like powder rooms and closets won't be very nice to show as you'll just be too close to the walls. Exteriors looks really nice and can just be placed in the First Floor.
You can save the tours to review later, or you can choose to upload and publish them to the Zillow listing right away. It may take up to 24 hours for approval, however mine was published within just a few hours. Once it shows up on the listing, you'll notice on Zillow a little icon at the bottom left that says "Explore 3D Home"
Just like Zillow walk-through videos, there may be some advantages to attaching these to your Zillow listings. You can have both a Walk-Through Video and a 3D Home Tour along with all of your photos.
By allowing people to see in all directions of a room, you leave no guesswork as to how much space a room really has and how it connects to other rooms. I was very impressed with how the tour kept track of where rooms were in relation to each other, and by clicking on arrows you could navigate from one space to the next.
By default, you won't be able to upload the tour unless you're on Wi-Fi. However you can go to settings and allow them to upload using your phone's data instead.
These tours are in no way going to replace Matterport Tours or the beautiful high resolution interactive tours we create, but for it being completely free, what's there to complain about?
If you'd like to try out the partial tour I did as an example CLICK HERE. You can also learn more by visiting this page on Zillow.
If you're in South-Central PA or Northern MD and you'd like to know more about our Real Estate photography services visit us online at www.Open.Tours.
We are also FAA licensed to capture professional aerial photos, we create digital floor plans, beautiful immersive virtual tours, videos and more!
