Matterport vs. Zillow 3D Tours: Why I Use Both for Home Listings
- Adam Garrett
- Jun 12, 2023
- 10 min read
Updated: Jul 22
There is a major difference between the quality, usability, features, and cost of various virtual tour platforms. Also, some platforms make certain tours virtually invisible. Those differences yield the best results to the seller statistically when using the best platforms. In addition, 2 different people shooting on the same platform at the same property w/ the same camera can yield vastly different results.
In my professional opinion, using both Matterport and Zillow 3D tours can yield the best results for sellers in showcasing properties in 3D. That provides the best option (Matterport) on MLS and 3 of the top 5 public platforms. Also, Zillow (the top public platform), which owns Trulia (one of the top 5), is likely to natively push their own tours above other tours, especially if Zillow Showcase is used, which requires the use of a Zillow 3D tour.
Note on if Using Adam for Listing for Showcase Option & Matterport/Zillow 3D Option
All of Adam's listings have a Zillow 3D Tour (planned for as long as Matterport is banned by Zillow).
Matterport comes:
With Adam's listings, as of 7/21/26, Matterport & Zillow 3D tours comes with:
All 3% listing commission packages come with both a Zillow 3D Tour & a Matterport virtual tour
All 2.75% packages over $500k
Zillow 3D Tour, Plus Matterport, Plus Zillow Showcase comes:
standard on all of my $300k+ 3% commission listings
As an à la carte add-on for:
$100 for properties below $300k for the 3% package
$200 for 2.75% packages over $500k
$300 for 2.75% packages under $500k
$350 for 2.5% packages over $500k
$400 for 2.5% packages under $500k
Here is the main ranking of Ben Claremont on 3D tour quality, though both Matterport & Zillow have made some improvements since that video's publication.
Due to the power of Zillow Showcase and the market share of views on Zillow vs other top platforms, I believe that Zillow Showcase should definitely be considered even if only using 1 platform, in part because, unlike all 6 in Ben's lists, it's compatible in the samples I checked with 4 of the top 5 public platforms where buyers view homes.
Next I'll go over:
Why Adam likes Matterport (& the Matterport Pro 3 camera) & used it and not Zillow 3D tours prior to Zillow banning Matterport on Trulia & Zillow
Example Matterport tour by Adam including interior & exterior
Why the Pro 3 Camera is best for Matterport
Why the Ricoh Theta Z1 Camera is best if using Zillow 3D tours
Compatibility of the 6 platforms listed above, a few more, & Zillow 3D tours
Why Adam likes Matterport
What are the Matterport virtual tours Adam uses for his listings & why does Adam use them?
Matterport is a virtual tour platform that is the top platform on the market today. Adam seeks excellence in all he does, constantly striving to do more for sellers and to go above and beyond again and again. Adam selected to use Matterport because it's the best platform for virtual tours of homes.
Statistics on Why Matterport Virtual Tours
In Adam's research of other virtual tour platforms on REIN MLS (the primary MLS of Hampton Roads where the majority of properties auto-populate from), Adam found that a significant % of virtual tours on other platforms didn't make it to be visible either on MLS &/or on at least some (& more likely the vast majority of) of the top 3 public websites where buyers go to look for properties (Zillow, Realtor.com & Redfin).
"People are shown to be 300% more engaged with a Matterport 3D virtual tour than they are with 2D imagery."
"95% of people are more likely to call about properties with 3D virtual tours."
"90% of buyers are more compelled by a listing that has a virtual tour."
"99% of sellers agree that having a virtual tour in their listing would give them a competitive edge."
“The quality of Matterport digital twins instantly builds trust with a prospective buyer. That trust factor is why 71% of our customers, now feel comfortable enough to buy a house sight-unseen when the listing includes a 3D virtual tour from Matterport.”
Daryl Fairweather, Chief Economist, Redfin
Perspectives on Why Matterport Virtual Tours
“It's a really unique experience. It gives them an opportunity to look at the house from every angle and do it from the comfort of their own home. It’s a 24-hour open house”
Bill Lawton, Mega Achievement Productivity Systems (MAPS) Coach - Keller Williams
“Since adopting Matterport, we find prospects have spent time viewing the 3D virtual tour, getting to know the property, and come to the viewing as authentic, interested parties”
James Quantrell, Director, Winkworth Guildford
Is Matterport really the best? See a comparison of 6 top platforms w/ 8 others not included because they weren't good enough.
As Ben Claremont shares in the video above, "Matterport really is considered the gold standard when it comes to 3D 360 tours, & using an alternative to Matterport requires extra education for your client & it also has slightly less credibility because it's not the most well-known name in 3D scanning... It's a credibility point. You're either using Matterport or you're not."
Among Ben Claremont's ratings, here's a spreadsheet of the top reasons why Matterport is superior to those 5 competitors from a buyer/seller standpoint that a seller should be aware of that are the most feature-rich, & more feature-rich than the "honorable mentions" below:
Here are the "honorable mentions" that weren't good enough to make the cut of the 6 platforms he compared:
Everpano: https://everpano.com/
VPix360: https://www.vpix360.com/
iGuide: https://goiguide.com/
Tourbuzz: https://www.tourbuzz.com/
Zillow 3D Home: https://www.zillow.com/z/3d-home/
InsideMaps: https://www.insidemaps.com/
Cupix: https://www.cupix.com/
Giraffe360: https://www.giraffe360.com/
Top Benefits of Matterport vs Competitors
Matterport comes with benefits for sellers like:
1. Quick processing after the initial on-site shooting
2. Floor plans that can be integrated into listing photos, a dollhouse view, & a more immersive & user-friendly experience.
4. Excellent 3D transitions
7. Prestige as the #1 platform
De-furnishing immersive views with the click of a button
Removing cameras from mirror shots that would otherwise show the camera (new in 2026)
Why doesn't everyone use Matterport (Other than Zillow/Trulia Ban)? Higher cost & higher time on site is required.
Put simply, Matterport does more than any widely used alternative, & in order to do more, the processing on devices takes longer on Matterport while the shooting is taking place & costs more since it's more advanced software/hardware.
Unlike a typical camera, when you're shooting on Matterport, there's a pause where you need to wait for the 360 image or images to be captured & other data to be put together. The amount of time it takes depends on the device(s) being used. When something takes longer and is being hired out to someone, that person is going to cost more than someone else using a faster, less advanced platform. When a real estate agent is doing virtual tours themselves like me, there's a strong incentive to use platforms that are faster because sellers typically don't know the difference between Matterport & other cheaper (or in some cases free) and faster platforms.
On 7/12/24 I was looking to refer someone to a listing agent who had just been dropped by their listing agent. Their former listing agent was relatively brand new to the business, with all their sales in the past year. Their marketing was decent, but not good. The 1st thing I looked for was whether or not any agents in the city of the seller were using Matterport. I did a search for active listings and sales in Petersburg over the course of the past year that had sold for under $200k. Out of 247 properties, not a single listing had used Matterport. In fact, out of the handful of properties that even did a virtual tour where a user can move around at their own pace through a listing, no one even used one of the 6 top options in the picture at the top of this article. When people aren't educated about the differences between virtual tours, they have no idea what they're missing often, & won't know that the method their agent is using for their virtual tour is relatively amateur level & sometimes even free.
The person shooting the virtual tours, how they shoot it, & how they input it in MLS can produce vastly different results even at the same house with the same platform.
The biggest problem with Matterport in my research in Hampton Roads is one of input. Often, agents or the admin they use input the virtual tours in the wrong places or input broken links. A minor error in input means that in some cases, most buyers won't be seeing a home. One of the reasons why is that more buyers are looking at homes on public websites than on MLS, so even if a property is visible on MLS, if it's not auto-populating to any other websites because the agent used the wrong version of a link, it's a significant loss to the seller.
The second biggest problem with many Matterport tours is that the person doing the photography doesn't spend enough time on the shoot because they're too focused on getting to their next shoot. That means fewer scans, less attention to details of what might not look good in a scan that could easily be changed, less areas for buyers to explore, higher risks for buyers from scheduling a tour in person, etc. For example, most virtual tours of homes don't include exterior space & unfinished space. In some cases, they won't open large closets. People shooting virtual tours often skip these in order to speed things up. They might not even turn on the lights in a home.
When I used to hire out virtual tours to "professionals", they never did exterior or unfinished spaces. In the worst example I can recall that happened to my own listing, a 2 bed, 2 bath house had a bedroom and a bathroom that was skipped by a "professional". Keep in mind that the company I hired had many excellent reviews online & that I had used them before. The sellers had the virtual tour done right before moving out, so when the virtual tour was ready, it was too late because they also weren't using Matterport, and stated that they would need to redo the whole virtual tour, and in doing so, lose all of those scans with furnished spaces. While I already had a Matterport subscription & my Ricoh Theta Z-1 360 camera at the time that happened, I used to hire out the virtual tour at times in order to save me time. Of course I requested that I never have that photographers shoot for me again, but that experience was one of the biggest impetus for me to later no longer have any occasions where I hired out virtual tours on my listings.
By including additional areas and preparing the home well for the virtual tour, you can achieve the best results for your sale and buyers will be more prone to spend more time looking at your property than other properties that might have the same square footage & yard size but that don't get as detailed in the virtual tour.
The impact on searches is significant in part since many websites where buyers look for homes, including the top 3 real estate websites by web traffic, have filters to weed out properties with no virtual tour.
In some cases, a buyer will start and stop with those properties that are visible with 3D tours by filtering out the properties without them. In those cases, they may never get around to expanding their search further to properties that don't have a virtual tour if they see something or a number of properties that they like and then make an offer. If no virtual tour is present, a buyer runs a higher risk of wasting their time.
Places where buyers can filter out properties in their search that don't have a virtual tour include but are not limited to the top 3 real estate websites in the US & worldwide (each of which has buyer search portals) as of the date of this publication according to website traffic rankings from Similar Web:
Redfin
Image courtesy Zillow
Images courtesy Similar Web
Sometimes when Matterport is used, it's input in MLS wrong, making it invisible in places by agents who likely have no idea & likely regularly make the same mistakes.
I've seen the following technical problems drastically damaging Matterport exposure by agents who likely have no idea that they are needlessly shooting their sellers in the foot and diminishing the positive impact of Matterport:
1. Some agents input a website into the 3d home tour other than Matterport, causing the virtual tour to not be visible on popular websites like Zillow. For instance, they might put a website that has an embedded Matterport tour in it, so while that website may be visible on MLS, it won't land on other public websites like Zillow. While you might think that careless errors like this one would be made only by low volume agents doing cheap properties, I've seen it on a high volume agent who was shooting their >$800k buyer in the foot by doing so.
2. Some agents don't include any non-branded Matterport tour, making the virtual tour invisible on MLS for any buyer who is looking on MLS independently or is getting a property feed from their buyer's agent.
Why Matterport Pro 3 on Matterport?
Chart Comparison of Matterport Pro 3
The big advantage of the Pro 3 is that it does a significantly better job on the exterior vs the Pro 2 and Ricoh Theta Z1. It doesn't have the accuracy of the Leika Blk G-1, the only camera in the mix that costs more, but the accuracy remains higher than other compatible cameras, and the image quality is significantly superior over the BLK G-1:
Matterport Example by Adam at a Listing He Sold w/ interior & exterior (including dock):
Why the Ricoh Theta Z1 Camera is best if using Zillow 3D tours
Comparison of cameras available for Zillow 3D tours (created by Adam w/ Chat GPT:
Compatibility Problem Examples with Other Platforms When Considering Ben Claremont's list of the Top 6 Home Buyer Platforms (Plus Zillow 3D Tours & a few other examples) other than MLS as of 7/21/26. Keep in mind that in some cases, the link provided by the host of the tour, if it directly mentions the local photography business, will diminish the ability for tours to populate on certain sites that it might otherwise work at and may substantially impact the results, including those below:
Zillow 3D Tours (4/5)
Where it works:
Zillow
Trulia
Redfin
Realtor.com
Where it doesn't work:
Homes.com
Asteroom (3/5) [total score per Ben 12.5]
Where it works:
Zillow
Trulia
Realtor.com
Where it doesn't work in samples I checked:
Redfin
Homes.com
Eye Spy 360 (3/5) [total score per Ben 8.5]
Where it works (when the link isn't broken - I identified many broken links under Eye Spy listings & most didn't appear to be direct links, mentioning the photography company in the URL):
Zillow
Realtor.com
Trulia
Where it doesn't work in samples I checked:
Redfin
Homes.com
Ricoh360 (3/5)
Where it works:
Zillow
Realtor.com
Trulia
Where it doesn't work:
Homes.com
Redfin
Cloudpano (3/5)
Where it works:
Zillow
Realtor.com
Trulia
Where it doesn't work:
Homes.com
Redfin
Giraffe 360 (3/5)
Where it works:
Realtor.com
Zillow
Trulia
Where it doesn't work:
Homes.com
Redfin
MetaReal (2/5) [total score per Ben 10]
Immoviewer (2/5) [total score per Ben 8]
Pivotour (1/5) [total score per Ben 9]
Where it works:
Trulia
Where it doesn't work:
Homes.com
Redfin
Zillow
Realtor.com
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