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.
Below is our detailed summary of the research findings from both the National Association of Realtors and Zillow, with links to each 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.
As I can attest, the HomeDiary Platform by FloorPlanOnline can help you get more business.
I received a call from a potential buyer who saw one of my listings online. While the home sold quickly and she was too late, she was so impressed with my marketing presentation, powered by HomeDiary, she not only hired me to sell her high-end home, but I helped her buy her new one, too. That one listing was responsible for an additional $2.5M in sales.
I would not have gotten the new client by providing just photos. This buyer specifically called me based on my HomeDiary virtual tour presentation. That’s why the HomeDiary platform is my go-to team for creating amazing content for my sellers, as well as a tool for new buyers through its HomeDiary Claim Home integration, which can be a channel of new business too.
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.
