2025 Marketing Research

New marketing research is in, and it highlights that buyers still want to see high quality photography, floor plans (ideally interactive floor plans like the one you see above where you can click to see the photo’s location on the floor plan) and 3D tours.  It also highlights sellers appreciate this kind of content and want to work with agents that offer it to help sell their home faster and for more money.

In fact, 81% of sellers think it is very or extremely important to include floor plans as part of the marketing of their home, and 71% state they are more likely to hire an agent that offers virtual tours/interactive floor plans. On the flip side, 77% of buyers think interactive floor plans help them understand if the property is right for them and 84% of buyers think viewing a floor plan as part of the listing search process is important.  

And yet, according to our own research for tech three cities, Austin, Seattle and Raleigh, the number of listings with a visible floor plan as part of the listing on Zillow, yet alone an interactive one, is less than 20% based on July 2025 data.   So over 80% of buyers and sellers think floor plans are important to have as part of the listing, but on the website more than 50% of people use, less than 20% of listings have them.  Since it’s likely 20% of the agents do 80% of the business, the number of agents that actually incorporate floor plans into their listing marketing is likely well under 10%.  See the Tale of 2 Cities Webinar Replay and our Analysis below.

I smell an opportunity to differentiate, how about you?

View the Webinar

Below is a recent webinar we held on this topic where we go through the research as well as actual listing data for Austin, Seattle and Raleigh to see what is happening in practice.  The results are kind of shocking – after 20 years of doing interactive floor plans, and frankly it being pretty darn easy to get a floor plan visual now days, less than 20% of listings in ALL THREE markets have a floor plan as part of the listing marketing on Zillow.  You can see our detailed summary of the research findings from both the National Association of Realtors and Zillow below, and we link to each report here as well, or just view the webinar for our summary of it, and how to leverage floor plans at the listing appointment and throughout the marketing phase.

• Zillow’s Seller Report
• Zillow’s Buyer Report
• NAR’s Buyer & Seller Report

The bottom line is this: 

Sellers were once buyers.

What content resonates with a buyer, is also going to resonate with a seller.   The below reasearch all points to the fact that sellers want floor plans and 3D tours to be part of the marketing of their home in addition to professional photography.  If you know this going into your listing presentation and show people how you will market their home, either with an existing HomeDiary Story, with our editable listing presentation slides, or even with the demo house tour we provide you, chances are you will walk away with the listing every time.  So if you have traditionally just provided photos as part of your marketing, perhaps this data will change your mind to at least present it at your next listing appointment.  What do you have to lose, besides the listing?

Plus, while the below research talks about floor plans a lot, HomeDiary is the ONLY virtual tour company out there that also has a home management platform integrated with the virtual tour platform, and it is the only platform with a complete interactive floor plan engine that also lets the buyer “Claim the Home” right from the virtual tour to get the listing photos and the 2D/3D interactive floor plans copied over into the buyer’s private HomeDiary account.  This means the content lives on, and the buyer can use the floor plan as a tool to visualize, plan and execute, whether it be for a new addition, a change in flooring or wall colors, an exterior landscape project (like artificial turf) or even to just see if a couch or grandma’s armoire will fit into a room.  They can do this on the virtual tour, and if they bought the home, they can do it within their own private HomeDiary account after they claim the home and the floor plan is automatically copied over.

Our floor plan tool is also something homeowners want – according to our own research, 67% of homeowners want a 3D floor plan for their own home.  Why?  It’s probably because a huge percentage of people watch TV shows on HGTV and they often see a 3D floor plan rendering of the home and it being magically transformed.  The HomeDiary floor plans are basically a tool similar to what you see on those TV shows, yet it is free for the homeowner to use, forever, and the barrier of getting their floor plan online is removed, because we copy it over automatically as part of the claim home process.  No one else does this, as everyone else just provides a PDF or jpeg image of the floor plan, so it’s not interactive, and all the space data is hidden, locked inside the jpeg or PDF, and not useful.

Anyway, let’s dig into the research by first looking at the various buying and selling groups to understand their age.

Next, let’s look at Sellers and their make up.  The largest selling groups are Younger Boomers, followed by Millennials.   Overall, people under 70 make up 73% of the sellers.  It’s likely this group of people are at least somehwat Internet savvy, and expect their home to be marketed online.

Finally, let’s look at Buyers and their make up.  The largest buying groups, like sellers, are Younger Boomers, followed by Gen Xers and Millennials.   Overall, people under 70 make up 80% of the buyers, with 56% being under 59 years of age.  It’s likely this group of people are also somewhat Internet savvy, and per the research, the first thing 43% of all buyers did was go online to use the Internet to search for homes, and on average, 51% of buyers found the house they bought online, with 88% of them using an agent.

Note, it looks like the Young Boomers segment are downsizing, as they represent both the largest selling and buying group.  So, if you can get the listing for these folks, 50% of the time they will use the same agent to help them buy a new home.  It’s basically double ending the transaction with your client.  That’s exactly what happened to Valerie – see her testimony below.

Now, let’s dig into the research details.

Zillow’s Seller Research is really interesting, and it highlights the value of not only the virtual tour, but the interactive floor plan components specifically, something the HomeDiary Team has been providing for over 20 years now!  According to Zillow’s Seller Research, 81% of sellers think it is very or extremely important to include a floor plan as part their home’s listing presentation, vs 4% who said it was not very/not at all important.

A screenshot from the Zillow Seller Research:

As a side note, Matterport has also done similar research and they found Sellers want 3D tours as well.

• 99% of sellers think a 3D tour makes their home more competitive
• 88% of sellers want to work with an agent that offers 3D tours
• 82% of sellers would switch to agent that offers such content

Likewise, Zillow’s Seller Research reaches similar conclusions, where sellers are more likely to hire an agent that provides high quality photography and floor plans as part of the marketing of the home. A sreenshot from Zillow’s report:

Get Free Leads.

We knew we were on to something when we first created the interactive floor plan in 2005, because we often get compliments on the amount of information we provide on our virtual tours, including our interactive floor plans.  So if you are just providing photos, you are missing out on an opportunity to differentiate yourself and get more free buyer and seller leads (via Brandkeepr and our tour) on the sites people use most.  That is how Valerie made an extra $75,000 in commission.

In Valerie’s case, she got a seller AND buyer lead (for free) because someone was looking to downsize (so presumably an older person) and that seller valued the content she saw online while searching for a home to buy.  She also saw Valerie’s info on her virtual tour, because Brandkeepr kept her branding on it when the person clicked it from one the top websites. Brandkeepr is an exclusive/patented feature of HomeDiary that works to show the branded version of the virtual tour off of the top websites like Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin and even your own company and personal website – it is all configurable under your profile.  This helps you showcase the great content you create for your listing, and it leaves a breadcrumb back to you and your brand as well on the top websites people use most.

I think the key point is you never know who is looking online – the buyer, or the seller, or both – and they are doing what we call a “silent interview” by seeing what agents are online, what listings they have, and what is their marketing strategy and listing package provided.  HomeDiary can help you win that silent interview and get more business, as this testimony from Valerie proves.  So again, if all you are doing is providing photos, you are likely not maximizing your listing potential because other agents are, and they likely will win the listing, as this research shows.

If you can be that first person they engage with, chances are, you will win that listing, as historically, most people only “interview” one agent – this past year an astounding 81%!   So win the interview before they ever pick up the phone by providing the right kind of content to market your listing, and you, online.

So what about the buyer.  The Zillow and NAR research is also pretty clear.  The vast majority of buyers want to see high quality photography, floor plans and 3D tours.  It can also help you win the sale, because according to Matterport and Zillow, listings with this content can sell homes faster and for more money:

• Listings with a Matterport 3D tour sell 20% faster and for 9% more than the market average
• Listings with an interactive floor plan generate 79% more saves, 60% more views and sold for 22% more than homes without

According to Zillow, virtual tours, floor plans and 3D tours help buyers understand the property better and it can drive buying behaviour. In fact, 86% of buyers would be more willing to see a property if it had a floor plan they linked, and 50% stated they wasted time with properties they did not like and they would have skipped it the listing had a floor plan. 

The buyer’s bottom line is this:

Buyers want full transparency and see the floor plan online before they visit a property.

It is about alleviating buyer fear, and more information helps people get over that fear!  I think gone are the days of the strategy to hold back data, photos and information in an effort to get people to come see the house in person – buyers expect and think it is extremely important to have as much information online.  If your listing does not have it, they will just skip it and move on to the next listing – the data on how interactive floor plans drive saves, views and the ultimate sales price proves this point.  This has been this way for well over 5 years, as this older 2018 Zillow study demonstrates.

NAR’s report highlights the value of website features according to buyers, and ranks them according to a “very useful” classification.  Presumably an even higher percent would rank the features as “useful,” but NAR does not publish that information. Still, over half of buyers want to see the photos, detailed information and the floor plans of the property as the top 3 “very useful” ranked features.  Note the virtual tour scored lower, at 41% overall, but there is also such a wide variety of “virtual tours” ranging from a regurgitation of the photos put into a simple slideshow with horrible music, up to the most advanced tour on the market, the HomeDiary Story, that includes all the information a buyer could possible want to help make their home purchase decision.  So it is understandable it may not rank as high for being very useful.  

Note, the HomeDiary Story can be customized to include any kind of detailed information in addition to photos, interactive floor plans and 3D tours.  We also support embedding a video hosted on YouTube or Vimeo.  Finally you can enhance any virtual tour by adding both branded and unbranded content, so if you want to create a branded detailed feature sheet, a detailed list of home improvements, or a neighborhood guide with your information on it, you can upload it as a document, a photo or even a video and add it into the tour.  Just mark it contains branded content, and it will only show on the branded version of the virtual tour.  And again, with Brandkeepr, we can show the branded version of the tour off of the top websites like Zillow, so you can be differentiated off of the top sites. 

Buyers also want to see more listings with 3D tours, as this Zillow screenshot shows, and the younger they are, the more they want to see them.

Finally, the number of buyers that interviewed more than one agent is 25%, meaning 75% interviewed just one agent…so slightly less than the seller side, but still a very high number.  Again, if you can win the silent interview online, you can increase your chances of being that one agent they select…as afterall, 50% of all buyers also used the same agent to sell.  This makes your open houses a great lead opportunity too if you can showcase the content and marketing you do on your listings…as you never know if that buyer also has a home to sell, just like Valerie experienced above.

A Tale of 2 Cities

We did an analysis of the floor plan penetration in Seattle and Austin, two tech oriented cities, to see how many listings had floor plans visible as part of the marketing of listings in July of 2025.  We used Zillow to search and filter in a larger geographic area for each, and then filtered down to listings that had a 3D tour.  While there could be listings without a 3D tour that have a floor plan, we ignored that and isolated the analysis to listings with a 3D tour to make the analysis go a bit faster with a 5% sample size.

In summary, both cities had less than 24% penetration of listings with a 3D tour of some kind, and out of those, a portion had floor plans visible as part of the marketing of the property, either in the photo gallery as a floor plan image or as part of the virtual tour.   The results are below, and show both cities had less than 20% penetration of floor plans as part of the marketing.

It was surprising Austin actually had a slightly higher penetration of floor plans than Seattle, given Matterport is pretty popular in Seattle, despite Seattle being the home of Zillow.  Two factors I see.

1. With Matterport, the agent has to order a floor plan if they order it from someone other than HomeDiary.  With our 3D Walkthrough Tour we include the floor plan as part of the package, and add extra functionality like the 2D interactive “point & click” floor plans along with our 3D space planner & designer.   In Seattle, 89% of the listings with 3D tours had Matterport as the 3D tour, and only 11% had Zillow.  Given Matterport can be embedded on the Zillow listing like the Zillow 3D Tour, but the agent is not giving Zillow that personal home data, the house’s floor plan, and they are getting more advanced floor plans with HomeDiary, perhaps that is the reason.  Nonetheless, in Seattle, 43% of the Matterport based tours did not have a floor plan visible as part of the marketing of the home. 100% of the Zillow 3D Tours had floor plans.

2. In Austin, 53% of the 3D tours were the Zillow 3D Home tour, and 42% were Matterport, with the rest being a few other providers, mainly iGuide.  Given the Zillow 3D Home generally includes the floor plan by default as long as you scan the whole house, most of them included a floor plan, all but 4 Zillow 3D Tours had floor plans, so 97% had them.  By contrast, 42% of the Matterport based tours had no floor plan visible.

A few observations.

One, why the vast difference in 3D tour type preference between Seattle and Austin?  Sure there is probably a cost difference, but there is also a huge quality difference too, with Matterport being a far superior visual experience given it is a true 3D experience vs more of a 360 viewer (with bad imagery and a bad user interface and navigation, in my opinion).  Plus, we automate the Matterport and make each one a video, so there is no clicking in the HomeDiary version of the 3D Walkthrough, so we eliminate the #1 complaint with Matterport, which is it takes too long with too many clicks. There is no way to do this in Zillow. We can even record the Matterport walkthrough as a separate video for the tour and social media (in vertical format).

The floor plan quality is also vastly different, and per our tests, the floor plan made from Matterport is going to be anywhere from 97-100% accurate, depending on the camera used.  We offer a Certified Square Footage addon for $100 that requires the use of a Matterport Pro camera, but we can then guarantee the accuracy within 99.5% of actual, including wall thickness differences, and provide the Gross Living Area (e.g. tax square footage and other living and non living spaces).  The Zillow floor plans were off 5% to 10% in our tests and there is no detailed area calculation available. 

Plus, if an agent uses the HomeDiary platform, the floor plans are all real-time editable, they are shareable and transferrable to the new owner via our Claim Home process built into the tour.  They can even be enhanced to match the flooring, wall colors and it is free to virtually stage each floor plan using our floor plan editor.   This puts an HGTV-like 3D floor plan tool in the hands of a homeowner post sale within the HomeDiary platform for them to use, for free, for the life of their ownership.  The comparable tool people see on those HGTV shows is typically Sketchup, which is a hard to use program and the Pro version which includes the 2D editor is $349/year.   Every home gets our 3D Designer for free.   With Zillow, their terms of use strictly prohibit any derivative use by anyone, including the creator of the scan content, us, or the agent.  So Zillow is accumulating floor plans for some unknown future purpose. 

Do you really want to feed Zillow more data….?  Look at what they did with your listing photos…just saying.  Free may have a hidden cost down the road.

Two, if you do not do something automatically and by default, often times it will not get done, regardless of the cost.  It is not that much more to add a floor plan or 3D walkthrough on to an existing photo shoot.  Generally $100 to $200 more for an average sized house.  If you are already doing a Matterport based tour with HomeDiary, it is included, and with other companies they typically charge something more.  We know one of our competitors that uses yet another app to get a floor plan even if they use Matterport, because it is free to them to get a basic layout, despite the fact the floor plans created are less accurate, they are less detailed, they are not real-time editable and they are not interactive – they are just an image.  That is looking at costs first, user experience and differentiation last.  

We decided long ago the best experience is to create a dynamic 2D/3D floor plan model of the home and that we should tie the floor plan to the property address permanently, which we do with HomeDiary, and we tie it to the homeowner and even the home pro that created it, generally you the listing agent.  This process lets the content live on, all of the space data is unlocked, not hidden away in a jpeg or PDF of a floor plan and it is put into the hands of the homeowner.  This is why over our 20 years of being in business we have had multiple listing agents relist the same house up to 3 times now.  It’s not that the listing agent double ended each transaction either – it’s that the buyer wanted the same content to sell their home as they got when they bought it, and they sought out the original listing agent to get the same content for their home.  Afterall, we already have the floor plan tied to the property address.   We just need new photos and maybe an updated 3D property scan to create an updated virtual tour, or Story, for the new listing.

Given the data above that 3D tours and floor plans can help agents win the listing, since 81% of Sellers think having a floor plan part of the marketing of their home is very or extremely important, I just do not see the reason why more floor plans are not incorporated into the marketing of homes.  One extra deal like Valerie got above would pay for our services for many years over.  So if the floor plan, and 3D tour, were incorporated into the listing presentation to win the listing, based on the data, it seems it would help agents win more listings.  Then, given the data, it would also help them win the sale, as this data shows homes with this kind of content sell faster and for more money than the market average as well.