The stat gets repeated a lot: 3D tours sell homes faster. Two independent studies actually looked at it — here's what they found, and the one caveat that's worth keeping in mind before you take the numbers at face value.
Every 3D tour vendor has a stat on their homepage claiming faster sales and higher prices, which makes it hard to tell what's marketing copy and what's actually been measured. A couple of studies have tried to answer this directly by comparing matched sets of listings with and without a 3D tour. Here's what they found.
A statistical analysis of 143,575 listings across four U.S. markets (November 2016–November 2019), conducted by Kelley Anderson, a Ph.D. candidate at Texas Tech University, found that listings with a 3D tour closed at 4–9% higher sale prices depending on the market, and closed up to 31% faster in the strongest-performing market. A separate, smaller comparative analysis of 700 listings (March 2018–July 2019) by real estate technology consultant Sebastian Diessel found a similar direction of effect at a smaller scale: about 20% faster and 4.8% higher.
On the engagement side — before a showing or offer ever happens — listings with a 3D tour are reported to get meaningfully more views than photo-only listings, and site visitors spend several times longer on pages that include one. Those numbers come from vendor-published data rather than independent academic study, so we'd treat them as directionally useful rather than exact, but they're consistent with what you'd expect: a tour gives someone a reason to stay on the listing instead of clicking away.
The mechanism is straightforward even without the studies: a 3D tour lets a buyer rule a home in or out before ever scheduling a showing. That means the showings that do happen are more qualified — fewer casual walk-throughs from people who wouldn't have made an offer anyway, more visits from buyers who already know they like the layout. Fewer wasted showings and faster-arriving serious offers is exactly the kind of thing that would show up as reduced days on market in the data above.
Neither study is a controlled experiment, and that matters. Listings with a 3D tour aren't a random sample — they tend to be listings where the seller (or their agent) already chose to invest more in marketing, which often means better staging, better photos, and a more motivated listing strategy overall. Some of the faster-sale, higher-price effect is very likely the tour itself; some of it is probably just correlated with sellers who were already doing everything else right. The studies can't fully separate the two. That doesn't make the numbers meaningless, but it's worth not treating "31% faster" as a guarantee for any specific listing.
Given the caveat above, we'd point 3D tours at listings where the underlying mechanism — letting buyers rule a home in or out remotely — actually does real work: relocation and out-of-area buyers, higher price points where showings are more time-intensive to schedule, and layouts that are hard to picture from photos alone. We covered how to weigh a 3D tour against the rest of the package lineup in our package guide, and if Zillow visibility specifically is the goal, a 3D tour is also one of the two requirements for the Showcase boost — see our breakdown of that program.
Photos + 3D Tour packages start at $355 and include an interactive walkthrough buyers can explore on their own.
Check AvailabilitySources: Matterport (Anderson, Texas Tech; Diessel), PhotoUp.