A 3D tour is a navigable photographic walkthrough of a property that a buyer moves through at their own pace, rather than watching a video someone else edited. Two platforms dominate residential listings: Matterport and Zillow 3D Home.
Choosing between them used to be a question of quality and budget. Since October 2025 it has also been a question of where the tour will actually appear.
What Happened Between Zillow and Matterport?
On 20 October 2025, Zillow removed Matterport 3D tours from Zillow.com and StreetEasy.
Zillow attributed the removal to CoStar, which closed its $1.6 billion acquisition of Matterport in March 2025. Zillow said Matterport's terms of service, updated at the end of September, restricted display of those tours on third-party listing portals, and characterised it as walling off content that real estate professionals had paid for.
CoStar disputes this directly. Its position is that neither Matterport's nor CoStar's media licensing terms changed, and that Zillow removed the tours unilaterally.
Both accounts cannot be correct. What matters for a listing agent is narrower: the dispute is unresolved as of August 2026, and the tours are still not displaying on Zillow.
Which Tour Shows Up Where?
| Feature | Matterport | Zillow 3D Home |
|---|---|---|
| Displays on Zillow | No, removed October 2025 | Yes, native |
| Displays on your own site | Yes, embed | Yes, embed |
| Displays in most MLS systems | Yes, via virtual tour link | Yes, via virtual tour link |
| Schematic floor plan output | Yes, measured | Basic |
| Measurements and dimensions | Yes | Limited |
| Typical capture quality | Higher, dedicated camera | Good, phone or camera capture |
| Cost to produce | Higher | Lower, often free to the agent |
Which One Should a Central Florida Listing Use?
Start with where the buyer is arriving from.
If Zillow traffic is the priority, use Zillow 3D Home. For a mid-market residential listing where most inbound interest comes through the portal, a tour nobody can see is worth nothing no matter how good it is. This is the clearest case of the three.
If the tour has a job beyond the portal, use Matterport. Relocation buyers touring remotely, listings with their own marketing page, vacation rental owners sending a walkthrough to a booking guest, and anyone who needs an accurate floor plan or measurements. Matterport's schematic floor plan output is meaningfully better, and for a property being evaluated sight-unseen from another state that accuracy earns its cost.
If the property is a vacation rental, the portal question mostly disappears. Airbnb and Vrbo do not display either format inline, so the tour lives on the owner's direct booking site or goes out by link. Quality wins there, because distribution is not the constraint.
Nothing stops you from producing both where the stakes justify it. On most properties the second tour does not pay for itself.
Does a 3D Tour Still Earn Its Cost?
That depends on the buyer, not the price band.
A 3D tour does its real work for someone who cannot easily walk the property. Out-of-state relocation is a large share of Central Florida demand, and those buyers build a shortlist from a screen before booking travel. A tour lets them eliminate a property without a trip, which sounds like a loss and is not. Eliminating the wrong buyers early is what leaves showing slots for the right ones.
For a local buyer who will drive over on Saturday regardless, a tour adds less. Photography and video still carry that listing.
| Listing situation | Tour value |
|---|---|
| Out-of-state or relocation buyers | High |
| Unusual or hard-to-read floor plan | High |
| Vacation rental taking direct bookings | High |
| Tenant-occupied, showings are difficult | High |
| Entry-level local listing with easy access | Moderate |
How We Handle It
We shoot both formats. 3D tour packages start at $499 and include the photo set, so the tour is not a separate trip to the property.
Before booking we ask one question: where does this tour need to appear? If the answer is Zillow, that settles it. If the answer is a relocation buyer in Ohio, or a floor plan for a renovation estimate, it settles differently.
What to Watch
The Zillow and CoStar dispute is a commercial disagreement between two large companies, and commercial disagreements tend to get settled. If display access is restored, the calculation changes and Matterport becomes the default again for listings wanting both quality and portal reach. Until then, plan around the platform your buyer actually uses.
Not sure which format fits your listing? Call (321) 800-5294 and we will talk it through before you book.