Virtual Tours are a funny thing in the real estate industry. Some agents will tell you that a “real” tour must have panoramic photos. Others will swear that you must have music, or professional photography or links to the county courthouse records that show that cousin Mable married Jimmy so and so. You get the point. Everyone has a different opinion on what constitutes a virtual tour. No matter how you look at it though photography and pictures are a cornerstone of Real Estate Virtual Tours. Below are some tips on how to get the most out your virtual tour.
Picture Quality – Cloudy, fuzzy, and out focus pictures are obvious to avoid. The not so obvious are the pictures that have have toilet seats up, photographer in the mirror, or other structural type (holes in the roof, etc…) issues. Put up photos that are going to draw prospective buyers in not give them a reason to rule out the listing.
Picture Quantity – We’ve literally seen agents post tours with 1 photo and others with 120+ photos. We don’t recommend either of these strategies. We recommend somewhere between 12 and 24 photos. Our rule of thumb is to put up enough photos to make a prospective buyer want to come see the property while not giving them a reason to rule out the property.
Picture Size – This kind of goes along with the Picture Quality item above, but picture size will greatly impact the presentation of your virtual tour. If your pictures are too small and you have a full screen virtual tour then your pictures will become stretched and pixelated. If your pictures are too large then your virtual tour will take a long time to load and be sluggish. Generally speaking the optimum size photo for our system is 1920×1440. This is large enough to cover most screen resolutions at full screen and allow us to downsize for smaller virtual tours. Our virtual tour system auto sizes pictures to fit the virtual tour so it is better to upload large images and have our system downsize them.
