The people buying your apartments are not in the country

I am about to spend more money than I ever have on a flat I have never stood in. The only way anyone can answer my questions is to put me on a plane.

Agencies and developers selling to buyers who live abroad

Your buyer lives in Milan. They are about to spend more money than they have ever spent, on a flat they have never stood in. The listing gives them a handful of photographs somebody else chose. It does not show which way the flat faces, what the stairwell is like, or how the rooms join up. So the only real answer to their questions is a plane ticket. A tour answers them from home. Your buyer opens a link, walks the whole flat as often as they like, and sends it to whoever else in the family has to agree.

A walkthrough of the actual flat, opened from another country. Your buyer walks it on their own phone, as many times as they like, and nobody is waiting on the other end of a call. They can forward the link to anyone else in the family who has to agree. Live guided sessions, where you drive the tour while they watch, are quoted per job.

• Albania: about 25%¹ of the homes sold went to buyers who do not live in the country. About 50% of those buyers are EU citizens. 6 months earlier the share was 15%.
• A listing on a big agency site¹⁹, when we checked: €561,000 asked for a flat the listing calls 152 m² gross and 123 m² inside. 6 photographs. No floor plan. No tour and no 360 anywhere on the page.
• What you are competing with is a flight. An agency selling Vlorë and Sarandë to buyers abroad²⁰ advertises free viewing trips and its own staff in your country.

It does not replace the visit before signing. It will not cut the number of viewings either. The only dataset that measured demand for viewings² found the opposite. Listings with tours got more requests to visit in person. Live guided sessions are quoted per job, because we publish no rate for them. And in a diaspora market the real rival is free. A cousin walks the flat on a video call. A tour beats that on being repeatable, not on cost.

6 of these apartments are identical. Which am I actually being offered? And does it matter?

Developers and sales directors with several units of one type

You are selling 6 flats built to the same design. In the listing they are 1 flat. The buyer is offered a door number and shown pictures of a different unit, so nobody can tell them which floor, which balcony or which view they are actually buying. Shot separately, each flat is its own tour under its own door number, and the buyer walks the one they are being offered.

We photograph each flat that is actually sold and file it under its own door number. No show flat stands in for the rest. Work across several units is quoted rather than listed, and the rate card says so.

• A flat fitted out differently gets its own tour. A neighbour's tour is never reused for it.
• No competitor page we opened prices or scopes a separate capture for each unit when the units are near-identical.

It does not tell you how many square metres anything is. An example flat is enough only until the real flats exist. Once a buyer is offered a door number, a tour of a different flat is wrong. The 2 strongest studies disagree here. The price gain⁵ is biggest where the flats are all much the same. The time finding² is smallest there. So a one-off property with an unusual layout is where the evidence is weakest. And the room has to exist. We build no rooms on a computer.

Every agency in this country sends the same 8 photographs. The only thing a seller can compare us on is the fee.

Agency owners and listing agents; 2-person agencies

Every agency in this country sends the same 8 photographs. A seller cannot tell you apart on them, so the only thing left to compare is your fee. More photographs will not fix that. They are already free here and already on nearly every listing.

A tour is the step above that. It is the one thing at a valuation the other agents cannot put in front of the seller. Here it is not a portal feature at all, so it stays what you send and what you show.

We build the tour of the flat you are listing, and your buyer walks it room by room on their own phone. The arrows that let them walk it are in every price. What you get is a link you can send to a buyer or open in front of a seller.

• The big agency site we checked¹⁹: 2 or 3 photographs a listing, no floor plan, no tour, and the words “tur virtual” nowhere on it, across offices in 8 towns.
• The big portal we checked²¹ carries photographs only, no tour filter and no badge. Its published fees are 3% of the agreed price from the seller and 1% from the buyer, and adding photographs to a listing is among its free services.
• The classifieds site²², when we counted: 4,166 of 7,207 Vlorë apartments for sale are company listings. Across all Vlorë property, 4.96% of company listings carry no photograph, against 21.9% of private ones.
• The 2 Albanian sites we could read²¹²² have no field for a virtual tour at all. 2 more we opened²³ return nothing readable, so nothing here is claimed about them.

It does not prove the seller picks you. Nobody publishes how often a valuation turns into a signed client. In the strongest study² the best group gained 0.6%. That is the best group in a single study. It is not the ceiling of the range. And the advantage⁵ fades as competing properties get tours too. We also read 2 sites on a single day. That is not a fact about the market. A third site²³ will not load. A fourth blocks us.

The asset I paid for is rented. If the billing stops or the term expires, the thing my listing links to goes dark. My photographs carry on working.

Agency owners paying a monthly platform fee; anyone buying through a middleman

You paid for the tour, but you are renting it, and what you can take with you is decided by somebody else. One company's marketing site says “No hidden costs” and “free hosting”²⁴, shows no price, and says nothing about what happens if you cancel. Its own contract²⁵ does: 3 days to download your content after you leave, with virtual tours excluded from what you are allowed to download. Another company's real-estate page²⁶ sets out what happens when a tour is switched off. You cannot view it, edit it, share it or move it until you switch it back on. Its plan chooser carries a 24-month commitment.

Your photographs do not work like that. A British portal's new-homes feed²⁷ downloads and resizes the photographs you send it, but will only take a tour as a link to content hosted somewhere else. A second British portal²⁸ works the same way. So the portal keeps a copy of your pictures and never keeps a copy of your tour. The day the hosting stops, the listing still looks fine and the tour is dead everywhere at once.

Buy it once and none of that reaches you. The tour is a folder of files you hold, so nothing switches off and nothing expires.

What we hand over is a folder of files that runs on its own. No count of live tours. No fee to switch one back on. No credits. No minimum term. Put it on your own domain and there is nothing further to pay. Leave it on ours and hosting is €5 per GB of storage per month. The files are yours either way, and the tour itself carries no subscription.

• That company's terms²⁵ give you 3 days to download your content after you leave, and exclude virtual tours from what you can take. Its marketing page says “No hidden costs”²⁴. We read both.
• The other company's FAQ, item 6: “What hosting plan do I need to keep tours live throughout a listing?”²⁶
• A new-homes feed spec²⁷: a tour can be supplied only as a link to content hosted somewhere else. Its separate real-time feed spec runs to 32 pages and never uses the words “virtual”, “tour” or “floorplan”.

We are not first and do not claim to be. A competitor's headline reads “Own your data, floor plans and virtual tour”²⁹. Another³⁰ lets you host the files yourself. Our claim is the disclosure. What is in the handover, what is not, and for how long. A file you own still needs somewhere to live. Hosting it yourself only moves that problem. A folder pushes to no portal. A seller can use 2 agencies at once. You keep the files. Lose the property and the tour works for somebody else.

Nobody will show me the layout. Every plan says “contact us”.

Remote buyers; the agent putting the listing together

A buyer wants to know how the flat is laid out, and the listing tells them to ring. We opened one on a big agency site¹⁹ with 10 photographs and no plan at all. It ends with this line: “For a property visit or more information about the active floor plans, please contact us!” The plan is held back on purpose, so a question the listing could answer in a second turns into a phone call.

Put the plan on the listing and the question is answered where it is asked. The buyer sees the shape of the flat, how the rooms join and which way it faces. In the tour they also see the spot on the plan where they are standing.

We draw the plan from the same visit as the photographs. Each 360 photo is then pinned to its place on it, so the tour shows where you are standing. Both are priced on the rate card, and we hand the plans over as files. That matters on a portal²⁷: a plan sent as an image can be zoomed, and a plan sent as a link cannot.

• Among American buyers who searched online, floor plans rate “very useful” above virtual tours¹⁸. 5,390 people answered.
• The same order 4 years earlier³¹, on a different group of people. Both American, and we use only the order, never the percentages.
• 4 searches on a big British portal³², in a single afternoon: 100 listing cards, 78 with a floor plan, 20 with a tour. British, and a snapshot rather than a rate.

A tour has no scale in it, and a drawn plan shows layout rather than dimension. We measure on request and hand over what we recorded, with no tolerance stated. This is something we can do, not something we have done often: 11 of our 12 published projects record “Floor plan: Not included”. And the buyer figures are American. Only the order is safe to use, because every score in that chart fell between the 2 reports.

Every buyer asks the same thing before anything else. How big is the living room, and does the sofa fit? The listing has a number for the whole flat and nothing for the room I am standing in.

Agencies and developers whose buyers ask for dimensions before they ask for a viewing

Every buyer asks the same thing first: how big the living room is, and whether the sofa will fit. The listing has 1 number for the whole flat and nothing for the room they are standing in. A 360° photograph does not settle it either: a wide interior lens makes a room look bigger than it is.

Name the rooms that matter and the figures come back with the tour, from the same visit. The answer sits on the listing before a buyer has to ask for it.

Tell us before the visit which rooms matter and we measure them on the day, alongside the 360s. What comes back is the tour, the figures we recorded, and the drawn plan if you want one, all in the same handover. So the room dimension a buyer asks for is answered on the listing instead of by an email 3 days later.

• It is the same visit. The measuring is booked with the capture, so there is no second appointment and no second call-out.
• The figures come back in the same folder as the tour, with no subscription and no login.
• A drawn floor plan is priced per square metre on the rate card, so what it costs is published before you ask.

No tolerance is stated on any of it. We hand over what we recorded and publish no margin of error, because a stated accuracy is a professional claim we cannot back. Where a figure has to be certified — a valuation, a specification, a contract — it needs somebody licensed to stand behind it, and that is not us. And this is done on request, not something the archive shows us doing often.

I drove 2 hours and it was nothing like the pictures. The wide lens made that bedroom look 2 times bigger. They never showed the wall behind the camera.

Buyers and tenants; the agent whose credibility carries to the next listing

A buyer drives 2 hours on the strength of your photographs, and the bedroom is half the size the wide lens made it look. The wall behind the camera was never shown at all. That argument happens on the doorstep, and it is what they remember about the agency that sent them. A tour gives them less to argue about, because nothing in the room was chosen out of the picture.

It is not a perfect picture of the room, and we do not claim it is. A 360 photo has to be flattened out to be stored, and flattening stretches it and bends straight lines. It does not tell a buyer how big anything is either. That goes to a drawn plan, or to the measurements we take on the capture visit when you ask for them.

A 360° photograph records everything around it, including the wall the photographer would have turned away from. Nothing is left out of frame. There is no frame to leave it out of. The capture is dated, so a buyer is looking at the building on a stated day. Any 360 photo that has been tidied up or virtually furnished carries a label saying so, inside the tour where they will see it.

• Official British guidance for business³³, citing an Act that makes some breaches a criminal offence. Its words: “Do not doctor photos or use extreme lenses that affect the perspective of the image.”

That licenses a single sentence and nothing more. A 360° station cannot crop anything out of frame. It does not mean the picture shows the room exactly as it is. Size comes from the measurements, not the photograph. Light depends on the day. So our only claim about light is this. A space was shot in the light available on a stated day. Not that it looks its best. Not that it will look the same in February. The guidance is British. It is a standard we hold ourselves to, not a law we put on you.

I drove 20 minutes each way to show a flat. The buyer worked out in 90 seconds that it was on the wrong floor.

Listing agents and the staff who drive buyers to viewings

You drive 20 minutes each way to show a flat, and the buyer works out in 90 seconds that it is on the wrong floor. That journey answered a question they could have answered at home. Put the flat where anyone can walk it first and the people it does not suit see that for themselves.

We put no percentage on it, because there is nothing honest to put one on. The trade paper³⁶ that printed one of the figures in circulation set out its own doubts beside it. It called the 1-hour viewing assumption “highly unlikely”, from a source that “clearly has a vested interest”.

We build the walkthrough and say plainly what it does. Somebody who has walked it arrives knowing the floor, the layout and which way the windows face. The people it does not suit cross it off first, before anybody drives anywhere. We attach no percentage to that.

• None, and that is the finding. No body in any market publishes viewings per sale, wasted viewings, viewing length or what a viewing costs.
• Both estimates in circulation come from companies that sell the cure³⁴³⁵. They differ by 40% on the count and 114% on the length.

It does not reduce the number of viewings. The only dataset that measured demand for viewings² found it went up. Listings with tours drew more requests to visit in person. At the same time, more buyers crossed other properties off their list. So all we will claim is that a tour changes which journeys get made. Never whether a journey gets made at all. Any “x% fewer wasted viewings” figure is refused here, including the ones that would flatter us.

The seller rings every Friday to ask why nobody has viewed. All I can tell them is that nobody has viewed.

Listing agents; the agency owner who loses sellers in that conversation

On a Friday the seller rings to ask why nobody has viewed, and all you can tell them today is that nobody has viewed. With reporting wired in you have a real answer: how many people opened the tour this week, which rooms they went back to, and where they stopped. That is something to bring to a conversation that otherwise has nothing in it.

What you get is a count, not a verdict. It does not come from a portal either. Portal feeds record that a tour exists and nothing about how big it is²⁷²⁸, so a single 360 shot on a phone earns the same badge as a whole building walked room by room. We will not sell you the badge.

Your own analytics is wired into the tour when we build it. The account is yours and the numbers come straight to you, rather than through a dashboard of ours. The arrows that let people walk the tour stay free. What is charged is wiring the tour into your account, counted per link between rooms rather than per arrow, and the unit prices are on the rate card.

• Charged per link between 2 rooms, not per arrow: 2 arrows in 1 room going to the same place count once.
• For context, and British: 2.2 viewings per available property per month, across 44 properties per branch³⁸. That is not viewings per sale and cannot be turned into it.
• The market numbers a seller reads are national and about price: demand down 10% on the year, 74% of sales made with no price cut³⁷. British, and none of it is about their flat. A count of who opened the tour is.

It measures the tour, not the market. It will not tell you whether the price is wrong. The checked evidence on why properties sit³⁷ points at price rather than presentation. All of that evidence is British. No portal says that any kind of media moves you up its search results. So nothing here does either. And we have not built this for anyone yet. There is no example of it in the 12 published projects. You would be the first.

I accepted the keys and 3 months later the problem nobody noticed is my problem. There is no record of what the building looked like the day I took it.

Developers taking handover from the builder

You accept the keys, and 3 months later the problem nobody noticed is your problem. Albanian law on building contracts³⁹ starts several deadlines on the same day. Take the work over without objecting and the law counts it as accepted. You then have 60 days to give notice of a defect, 2 years to bring a claim, and 10 years for collapse or serious defect. We print no article numbers here until a lawyer has confirmed the scope. These rules cover a developer taking delivery from a builder. They reach a flat buyer only if that buyer's own contract is a building contract too.

Without a record of the day, both sides argue from memory for years. A complete 360° capture on handover day, dated and in your hands, means that 3 months or 2 years on you are producing what the building looked like instead of describing it.

We shoot a complete 360° capture on handover day and the date is on it. You get the files and you keep them, so you can produce them later. 3 to 5 working days from capture to the files landing, never less than 3. Here a delivery date sits next to a legal deadline, so we agree it in writing before the capture.

• The chapter of Albanian law on building contracts³⁹, read in the original in 2 separate editions. No article number is published here until a lawyer signs off the scope.
• A foreign supplier publishes “Note our minimum price is $10,000”⁴⁰, set as a percentage of project costs. Another sells the same kind of record on demo request, with no published price anywhere⁴¹. Neither is priced for a single Albanian scheme.

Nothing in our archive shows this yet. The 12 published projects contain no progress capture, no handover record and no engagement reporting. So this is something we can do, not something we have done. It proves condition, finish and layout on a date. It does not prove area. It is not a professional building inspection. It is not a list of faults to fix. England has a record rule for higher-risk buildings⁴². It wants written documents, not photographs. Albania has no such rule.

A 360° camera records everything in my house. The post on the table. My medication. My children's photographs on the wall.

The person living in the property while it is on the market

A 360° camera records everything in the house. The post on the table. The medication. The children's photographs on the wall. This is the objection that stops the capture happening, and the worry is documented rather than imagined.

What gets photographed, what does not, and what happens to the files is agreed before anyone turns up with a camera. Whoever lives there says what is off limits. And if the tour has to come down later, it comes down.

We will not sell against the idea that burglars pick houses from published tours. No police force, national crime agency or study checked by other researchers establishes it, either way. We will not use a fear we cannot prove.

5 commitments. None of them costs anything. All of them happen before the first photograph. A checklist sent to whoever lives there. A walk round with them before we start. The camera positions agreed in the brief, including which windows and balconies look out. A line written into the job saying how long we keep things and how to have them taken down. And a label on any 360 photo that has been tidied up or virtually furnished.

• 44 published property tours, 1 from each of 44 US states, read in a security paper checked by other researchers⁴³. They found labelled medication, passwords, card details and a letter showing a legal violation.
• Taking a tour down is deleting a folder. A British portal⁴⁴ removes a sold-price image only if the homeowner asks, sends the ownership papers and a passport, and waits 7 days. The image can return if the property is marketed again.

This is a promise about how we work, not a thing our software can do. We do not promise to remove anything from a finished 360 photo. There is no blurring or removal step on our rate card today. What we promise is to agree what gets shot before it is shot. The 44-tour study⁴³ shows how bad it can get. It shows nothing about how often it happens. And the takedown comparison is British. What an Albanian portal does with an image it has already published is not something we have examined.