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The real estate market has undergone so many visual marketing changes over the past few years. Gone are the old days’ poor quality photos, which used to be the industry standard. Today, successful real estate marketing requires professional photography.

However, homebuyers now want to see so much more. They seek to incorporate virtual reality, floor plans, and interactive experiences bundled with professional photography.

Interactive Virtual Tours has introduced a feature that lets users virtually and accurately tour properties via their floor plans. It provides a better alternative to real-estate agents’ prerecorded video tours, and awkward looking and low-quality 360° images tours by companies such as Zillow.

In the past, anybody who wanted to look at the photos and the floor plan at the same time had to open two web-pages and jump back and forth to view them. The images were posted in a sequence that didn’t indicate the vantage point—a drawback for users seeking a sense of space.

Previous versions of interactive floor plans were also not designed very well. They either required the user to use Adobe’s Flash, which is now no longer distributed by Adobe because of security concerns and had a very low level of interactivity. Viewers want more than a dot in the middle of a room. They now want more depth of information.

“We’re now breaking down the barriers between these different types of listing media,” said Julius Caten, the software engineer for the company’s interactive floor plans. “Homebuyers want a true sense of interactivity when viewing a home. They want an experience that they control. They want to see where each high-quality photo was taken so that they can gain a better perspective on the flow of the home.”

Rightmove PLC, a British property website, said its best-performing listings include a minimum of five photos and a floor plan and Redfin said views of listings with walk-through features have increased nearly sevenfold since February 2020.

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) Home Buyer and Seller Generational Trends Report 2021 also shows that online floor plan presence is vitally important. Buyers think floor plans are very important, right behind photos and detailed property information. Below is a list of the top 3 visual media items ranked by homebuyers as “Very Useful” (the highest choice possible).

Now, Zillow’s 2021 market survey, now shows that 85% of millennials (the largest segment of current homebuyers) clearly want to see an interactive floor plan. This was more important than 3D tours.

There can be little doubt that national statistics clearly show that an accurate and in-depth interactive floor plan meets today’s needs.