As 3D virtual tours turn house and apartment hunting into a more immersive, click-through experience, buyers are growing more comfortable evaluating, and even bidding on homes entirely online.
According to a Realtor.com 2025 study, half of buyers say they would consider purchasing a home without seeing it in person, up from 44% in 2023. Among first-time buyers, that figure climbs to more than 50%.
Buyers’ increasing coziness with a digital-first — and sometimes digital-only — homebuying experience is driven in part from the practical convenience of virtual viewings, which exploded in popularity during the pandemic.
Digital walkthroughs are quickly becoming a standard first step in home buying, but experts warn they’re most useful when buyers understand their limits. Here’s what you need to know to make virtual tours work for you.
“Buying a home is one of the biggest decisions you’ll make,” said Janice James Hunter, a real estate salesperson with Coldwell Banker Reliable Real Estate who sells across Long Island and Brooklyn. “I think it’s a nice additional feature, but nothing is going to beat being in the home in real life.”
Virtual tours were already gaining traction before 2020. An analysis of nearly 20,000 Orange County home sales by business professor Gautam Pant found that properties with virtual tours sold for more than similar homes without them, even after accounting for size, location, and features.
Before the pandemic, 3D tours were mostly a luxury perk, offered on high-end listings to signal professionalism to the affluent buyer. Over the past decade, however, they’ve become something closer to a “must-have” on most listing sites. Platforms like Redfin now support them by default, companies like Matterport specialize in creating them, and DIY apps let agents and sellers build tours at a fraction of the original cost.
Is it a virtual fit for me?
Today, virtual tours are viewed less as a status signal and more as a practical filtering tool.
“They’re a way to decrease the information overload,” Pant said. “If they help get the right buyers matched to the right home more easily, that’s really the purpose.”
Buyers often sift through dozens — sometimes hundreds — of listings, a process that can tax one’s patience even for the most disciplined of buyers. In theory, immersive tours help narrow the field earlier. Easing decision fatigue frees up buyers to focus their time and energy on serious candidates.
Another promising upside for homebuyers is speed. Early evidence suggests virtual tours can help homes sell faster, with one industry analysis finding that listings with 3D tours spent significantly less time on the market — sometimes nearly cutting the wait in half, from about 34 days to just 19.
But Pant cautions that what looks good on screen isn’t always the full picture. “Filtering based on something like this makes sense,” he said, “but buyers have to be careful not to rely on it entirely.”
Even highly realistic virtual tours, Pant added, can be manipulated to make a home appear better than it really is and may gloss over problems that only become visible once you’ve set foot inside.
Professional photographers and carefully staged lighting make homes look their best, but a gorgeous listing can hide potential deal breakers like mold, water damage, lingering smoke, or pet odors that aren’t visible in photos or virtual tours. Other factors like walkability, nightlife, local amenities, and overall vibe can only be experienced in person.
In other words, virtual tours may help buyers bypass some of the usual frustrations of house hunting by letting them sample homes faster, but they work best when used as a complement, not a replacement, for in-person visits.
That tracks with Tom A.’s experience hunting for San Francisco apartments in 2020. Now in his mid-30s, he said 3D virtual tours helped him decide which apartments to put on his shortlist, but the tool could be “a little deceptive.”
Room size and proportions often felt off once he saw the spaces in person. “Virtual tours helped me make the first ‘yes,’ but I still needed to make the extra step of either doing a video walkthrough or an in-person visit because sometimes I’d walk in and think, ‘Oh, this is a lot smaller,’” than the 3D tour suggested, he said.
Make it work for you
Realtors note that some homebuyers use virtual tours when doing so make sense for their needs, but don’t see them as indispensable to every search. Hunter, a veteran realtor, says for out-of-town clients or buyers on tight deadlines, she often relies on the combination of 3D tours, photos, FaceTime, and her guidance to move forward on a property.
“It’s super easy for my clients to get a sense of the space, especially when we combine it with FaceTime and me viewing the space for them,” she said. “It makes it easier for them to understand the layout and setup. That has happened.”
Other clients, she acknowledged, are “weirded out” by the technology, and most buyers, when given the choice, ultimately prefer to see homes in the flesh before they sign off on anything.
That said, tech-savvy buyers, including many Gen Z and Millennials, are increasingly embracing virtual tours, and the technology’s potential continues to grow, especially with advances in virtual reality and AI. Startups like roOomy are creating tools that let you stage and customize spaces in real time within 3D tours, noted Dan Weisman, Director of Innovation Strategy at the National Association of Realtors.
“Say you’re looking at a bedroom but want it as an office,” Weisman explained. “You could type ‘turn this room into an office,’ and within seconds, it would show a desk, a computer, or whatever setup you want. That’s the next evolution.”
Even today, sellers can personalize descriptions of items around the house and highlight nifty features in 3D tours, giving buyers a richer sense of the home before they step inside. With startups racing to push the boundaries of virtual tour technology, the digital homebuying experience is poised to become even more immersive and interactive in the years to come.
And yet Weisman still encourages a balanced approach. Buyers ought to embrace the convenience and insight of these more interactive “media stacks”, before “driving around in their car for eight weeks straight trying to find a place.” But even when wading into the wild world of homebuying, buyers should never lose sight of the inherent value of seeing their future home off the Internet.