Virtual Tours for Rental Properties: Worth the Investment?

In 2019, fewer than 20% of rental listings offered any form of virtual or video tour. By 2024, that number had climbed above 60% for single-family rentals listed on major platforms, according to data aggregated by the National Association of Realtors and corroborated by Zillow's annual rental market reports. The pandemic didn't just accelerate remote work—it permanently rewired how renters shop for homes. Today, prospective tenants routinely scroll through 3D walkthroughs before they ever consider booking an in-person visit, and in many urban markets, applicants are signing leases on properties they've never physically set foot inside. For independent landlords managing 1 to 20 units, this shift raises an obvious and pressing question: Is investing in virtual tours actually worth it, or is it an expensive trend built for large property management companies with deep marketing budgets?

The honest answer is nuanced—and highly dependent on your market, your unit type, and your current vacancy rate. But the data is pointing strongly in one direction. This article breaks down exactly what the research shows, what virtual tours actually cost, which formats deliver the best ROI for small-scale landlords, and how to integrate virtual tour marketing into a leaner, smarter overall rental strategy.

What the Data Actually Says About Virtual Tours and Vacancy

Let's start with the numbers that matter most to any landlord: vacancy duration and lead quality. A 2023 study by Apartments.com found that listings featuring an interactive virtual tour received 87% more views than those with photos alone. More importantly, those listings generated 49% more lease inquiries—not just window shoppers, but renters who had already self-qualified by touring the unit virtually and decided they were genuinely interested. That's a meaningful funnel improvement, because every unqualified showing you host costs you time, disrupts your current tenants, and statistically extends your vacancy window.

Zillow's 2024 Consumer Housing Trends Report found that 71% of renters said they would be more likely to apply for a rental without an in-person tour if a high-quality virtual tour was available. Among renters aged 25–40—the dominant renting demographic in most U.S. markets—that number climbed to 79%. For landlords in competitive metro areas or college towns where relocation renters are common, this isn't a marginal benefit. It's a material competitive advantage that directly affects how fast your unit fills and at what price.

RentCafe's 2023 Renter Preferences Survey reinforced these findings, reporting that 67% of renters ranked virtual tours as either 'important' or 'very important' when evaluating rental listings—ranking it above neighborhood walkability scores and laundry facilities, and just below in-unit amenities. This signals a fundamental shift: virtual tours are no longer a differentiator. In many markets, the absence of one is a red flag.

The Four Main Virtual Tour Formats—and What They Cost

Not all virtual tours are created equal, and the pricing spread is enormous. Understanding your options helps you make an investment decision calibrated to your actual market and property type, not to what a large apartment company would do.

1. Smartphone Video Walkthroughs

The most accessible entry point. A well-lit, steady walkthrough filmed on a modern iPhone or Android device, uploaded to YouTube or Vimeo, and embedded in your listing can be produced for virtually zero cost if you already own the hardware. The tradeoff is quality—shaky footage, poor audio, and unflattering lighting can actually hurt your listing if the execution is poor. If you go this route, invest $30–$50 in a basic smartphone gimbal stabilizer and film during the sunniest part of the day. Turn on every light in every room. These small steps separate a professional-feeling self-produced tour from an amateur clip that makes renters wonder what you're hiding.

2. Professional Video Tours

Hiring a local real estate photographer or videographer to produce a polished video tour typically runs $150–$400 depending on your market and unit size. For a single-family home or a larger apartment, this cost is almost always recouped in reduced vacancy time. These tours typically include edited footage, branded intro and outro screens, and sometimes drone exterior footage. They post well on YouTube, social media, and listing platforms, and they telegraph professionalism to prospective tenants in a way that amateur video simply cannot.

3. 360-Degree Interactive Tours (Matterport-Style)

This is the gold standard—the kind of tour where the renter clicks through a space, looks up and down, moves from room to room, and gets a genuine spatial sense of the property. Matterport is the dominant platform, though competitors like iGUIDE and Cupix offer similar functionality at varying price points. A Matterport scan for a typical 2-bedroom apartment runs $200–$500 for a one-time professional scan, plus optional hosting fees of $19–$69/month if you want to maintain the interactive 3D model online. For high-end properties or units in competitive markets, this format consistently outperforms simpler video in generating serious applicants.

4. AI-Generated and Rendered Virtual Tours

Emerging in 2024–2025, AI-powered tour platforms can now generate walkthrough experiences from floor plans and photographs, or enhance existing video footage with stabilization and virtual staging. Services like Rooomy, BoxBrownie, and several others offer virtual staging starting at $20–$30 per image—essentially furnishing an empty room digitally so renters can visualize the space. This category is evolving rapidly and is likely to dramatically reduce the cost barrier for high-quality virtual tour production over the next two to three years.

Who Benefits Most From Virtual Tours?

Virtual tours are not a one-size-fits-all solution, and being honest about where they deliver outsized ROI versus marginal returns is important for landlords watching their expenses carefully.

• Landlords in high-competition markets where listings receive dozens of inquiries and renters are making fast decisions—virtual tours help serious applicants self-select faster, reducing your screening load.
• Landlords with units targeting relocation renters, remote workers, or out-of-state applicants who cannot easily visit in person before committing to a lease.
• Landlords with higher-end units priced at or above market rate, where the visual presentation of the property is a key part of justifying the rent premium.
• Landlords with multiple vacancies simultaneously, where the time savings from reducing in-person showings has an amplified impact across the portfolio.
• Landlords in college towns or seasonal rental markets where lease cycles are fast and renters need to make decisions quickly, often from a distance.
• Landlords whose properties photograph poorly due to small rooms or unusual layouts—a 360-degree tour can communicate spatial flow better than static photos ever could.

Conversely, virtual tours may deliver lower incremental value if you're managing a highly affordable unit in a supply-constrained market where your vacancy rate is already near zero, or if your tenant base is predominantly older renters who prefer traditional in-person showings and don't engage with digital tours. Know your renter demographic before investing.

The Hidden ROI: Lead Quality, Not Just Lead Volume

One of the most underappreciated benefits of virtual tours is not that they generate more leads—it's that they generate better leads. When a prospective tenant has already toured your property virtually, walked through every room, and chosen to reach out anyway, they are demonstrably more interested and more likely to convert into an applicant than someone responding to a photo-only listing. This matters for time-strapped self-managing landlords because every in-person showing you host represents real time out of your day: scheduling coordination, travel or access arrangements, the showing itself, and follow-up communication.

Industry data from ShowMojo, a showing automation platform, found that landlords using virtual tours as a mandatory pre-screening step before scheduling in-person showings reduced their total number of showings per signed lease by an average of 34%, while simultaneously improving their application-to-showing ratio by 28%. In plain terms: you show the property fewer times, to more serious people, and you fill it faster. For a landlord with two or three units turning over in the same month, that efficiency gain is significant.

How to Produce a High-Quality Virtual Tour on a Landlord Budget

You don't need a production company or a $10,000 camera to produce a virtual tour that impresses modern renters. What you need is a systematic approach, good lighting, and a clean property. Here's a practical framework for small-scale landlords:

1. 1Prepare the property first. Virtual tours amplify everything—including clutter, dirty grout, and scuffed baseboards. Deep clean the unit, patch and paint any visible wall damage, replace burnt-out bulbs, and stage each room with minimal, tasteful furniture or props if the unit is vacant. A virtual tour of a poorly maintained unit is marketing poison.
2. 2Choose your format based on price point. For units under $1,500/month, a high-quality smartphone video walkthrough is usually sufficient. For units above $1,800/month or in competitive urban markets, budget for a professional video or Matterport scan—the ROI math almost always works out.
3. 3Film or scan every significant space. Include all bedrooms, bathrooms, the kitchen, living areas, storage spaces, laundry, and parking. Don't skip the bathroom or closets—renters who feel you're hiding something will not apply. Transparency builds confidence.
4. 4Shoot during peak natural light hours. Mid-morning to early afternoon is typically ideal for most units. Open every curtain and blind. Turn on every overhead light and lamp. Dark rooms photograph and film poorly and make spaces feel smaller and less inviting.
5. 5Add a voiceover or caption callouts for video tours. Narrate or annotate key features: 'This is the custom tile shower added in 2023,' or 'The kitchen was fully updated with new appliances in 2024.' These details help renters remember your property among the dozens they're evaluating.
6. 6Host the tour in multiple places. Embed it in your listing on Zillow, Apartments.com, and Facebook Marketplace. Upload the video to YouTube with a descriptive title containing your city, neighborhood, and unit type for SEO value. Link to the tour in every inquiry response email.
7. 7Update the tour annually or between major renovations. A virtual tour from three years ago featuring outdated appliances or old paint colors can actually undermine trust if the current unit looks different. Refresh your tour content when significant changes occur.

Virtual Tours and the Tenant Screening Funnel

Here's where the marketing investment in virtual tours connects directly to your operations as a landlord: attracting more—and better-qualified—applicants only delivers full value when your tenant screening process is fast, rigorous, and legally sound. A virtual tour can double your applicant volume. What protects you is what happens after the application comes in.

VerticalRent's AI risk scoring analyzes incoming rental applications and flags patterns that manual review often misses—income-to-rent ratio outliers, inconsistent employment history, and other risk indicators that surface in the data before they surface in your life as an eviction proceeding. Combined with VerticalRent's TransUnion-powered tenant screening, which delivers full credit reports, criminal background checks, and eviction history, you get a complete picture of each applicant in minutes rather than days. When your virtual tour is working and applications are flowing in, having a screening system that keeps pace is essential.

Common Mistakes Landlords Make With Virtual Tours

Producing a virtual tour and producing an effective virtual tour are not the same thing. These are the most common errors independent landlords make when attempting to leverage this marketing format:

• Filming in poor lighting conditions. Dark, shadowy footage makes even a beautiful unit look dreary and uninviting. This is the single most common and most damaging production mistake.
• Including too much of the exterior at the expense of interior detail. Renters care primarily about the space they'll be living in. Lead with the interior and limit exterior footage to establishing shots.
• Failing to disclose obvious defects. If the tour shows a perfect kitchen but the bathroom has visible water damage you're planning to fix before move-in, say so in the listing or the tour narration. Renters who discover discrepancies at an in-person showing will not trust you—and may decline to apply even if they otherwise liked the unit.
• Using outdated tour content. A 2021 Matterport scan of a unit that has since been repainted, recarpeted, and updated with new appliances is actively misleading. Update your content.
• Not including the tour link in email responses. Many landlords pay for a tour and then forget to include it in their inquiry response template. Every person who messages you about the property should receive the tour link before you invest any further time in them.
• Skipping the tour for 'less expensive' units. Renters at every price point increasingly expect visual transparency. A $950/month apartment in a college market still benefits from a professional-quality video tour—potentially more so, because that applicant pool is likely comparing many options simultaneously.
• Ignoring accessibility in tour platforms. If your virtual tour requires a software download or only works on desktop, you're losing mobile users—who represent more than 70% of rental search traffic on major platforms.

Pairing Virtual Tours With AI-Generated Listing Descriptions

A virtual tour is only as effective as the listing surrounding it. If your written listing description is generic, poorly organized, or fails to highlight the features the tour showcases, you're leaving conversion on the table. This is an area where AI tools are genuinely transforming what's possible for independent landlords who don't have a marketing team.

VerticalRent's AI listing description writer generates SEO-optimized, compelling rental listing copy in minutes based on the property details you input. It highlights the features most likely to appeal to your target renter demographic—walkability, storage, natural light, updated appliances, pet-friendliness—and formats the listing for maximum readability on mobile devices. Paired with a strong virtual tour, a well-crafted AI-generated listing description creates a marketing package that consistently outperforms the average self-managed landlord listing in both views and application conversion rates.

The ROI Calculation: Does a Virtual Tour Pay For Itself?

Let's run the numbers with a straightforward example. Assume you're renting a 2-bedroom unit at $1,800 per month. Your average vacancy between tenants has historically been three weeks, costing you approximately $1,385 in lost rent per turnover. You invest $300 in a professional Matterport scan and professional video tour for the listing.

If that virtual tour reduces your average vacancy period by even five days—from 21 days to 16 days—you've recovered $300 in preserved rent revenue. That's breakeven on a single vacancy cycle. If the tour accelerates your leasing by 10 days, you've netted $600 in preserved rent against a $300 investment—a 2x return on a single use. And unlike many marketing expenses, your Matterport tour can be reused for every subsequent vacancy at the same property (with periodic refreshes), meaning the cost is effectively amortized across multiple lease cycles.

The math becomes even more compelling when you factor in lead quality improvement. If virtual tours reduce your required showings per lease from 8 to 5—saving you approximately 6 hours of scheduling and showing time per vacancy cycle—that's a meaningful return on your most scarce resource as a self-managing landlord: your own time.

What Renters Are Saying in 2025

Renter expectations have evolved faster than most landlords realize. TransUnion's 2024 Renter Insights Report found that 58% of renters under 35 said they had applied for a rental without visiting in person, up from 31% in 2020. Among renters who had relocated across state lines for work, that number was 74%. These are not edge cases. These are mainstream behaviors that reflect a permanent change in how people research and commit to rental housing.

Renters also report using virtual tours as a trust signal. In focus group research conducted by Apartments.com in 2023, renters consistently described landlords who offered virtual tours as 'more professional,' 'more transparent,' and 'more trustworthy' than those who didn't—even when the underlying properties were comparable. In an era where rental scams are prevalent and renters are rightfully cautious about wiring deposits on properties they haven't verified, a high-quality virtual tour signals legitimacy. It tells applicants: this is a real property, managed by someone who takes their responsibilities seriously.

Integrating Virtual Tours Into Your Full Leasing Workflow

The most effective independent landlords treat virtual tours not as a standalone marketing tactic but as the first step in an integrated leasing workflow. Here's how that workflow looks when it's optimized:

1. 1List the property with AI-generated description and embedded virtual tour link across all major platforms 30 days before vacancy.
2. 2Send every inquiry response with a link to the virtual tour and a brief paragraph prompting the prospect to complete the tour before requesting a showing.
3. 3Use VerticalRent's automated screening workflow to send application links to prospects who request in-person showings after completing the virtual tour.
4. 4Review AI risk scoring results for all applicants before scheduling showings, prioritizing those who meet income and credit criteria.
5. 5Host in-person showings only for pre-screened, pre-qualified applicants who have already completed the virtual tour.
6. 6Generate a state-compliant lease through VerticalRent's AI lease generation tool within minutes of selecting your tenant, reducing the administrative gap between approval and signing.
7. 7Collect first month's rent and security deposit via VerticalRent's automated ACH rent collection before the move-in date.

This workflow compresses your average time-to-lease, reduces your exposure to unqualified applicants, and creates a professional renter experience that attracts and retains higher-quality tenants over time. The virtual tour isn't just a marketing tool in this framework—it's the entry point to a fully modernized leasing operation.

The Bottom Line on Virtual Tours

The question isn't whether virtual tours work. The data is clear: they increase listing views, improve lead quality, reduce vacancy duration, and signal professionalism to prospective tenants in a way that static photography alone cannot replicate. The real question is whether you're deploying them strategically—at the right production level for your market and property type, integrated into a leasing workflow that capitalizes on the improved applicant pool they generate.

For independent landlords managing 1 to 20 units, virtual tours represent one of the highest-ROI marketing investments available in 2025. Even a smartphone walkthrough video, produced carefully and embedded consistently across your listings, will outperform the static-photo-only listing that the majority of small landlords are still relying on. And as production costs continue to fall—particularly as AI-powered tour generation matures—the barrier to entry for truly professional virtual tour content will drop to near zero within the next few years.

Start where you are. Use what you have. Film the tour. Post it everywhere. And build the rest of your leasing operation around the better applicants it brings you.