We tend to think of a floor plan as just a picture showing… a floor plan. What could possibly be added to it? What kind of interactivity are we even talking about?
It’s actually quite simple. An Interactive Floor Plan also shows the exact positions where the camera was placed during the MLS photo shoot. Each position is clickable, opening the corresponding listing photo:
When you order an Interactive Floor Plan, you’ll receive not only a shareable link you can add to your listing or use in marketing materials — the Interactive Floor Plan is fully mobile-friendly — but also a good old-fashioned floor plan with measurements as a standard image file.
In fact, the Interactive Floor Plan is less of a floor plan and more of an original way to browse a photo gallery. More precisely, it’s a combination of these two forms of real estate media which gives a potential buyer a clear understanding of the space — and creates an experience somewhat reminiscent of a 3D Virtual Tour.
When the viewer is simply browsing photos or watching a video, it’s hard for them to visualize the “full picture”. With this, they get complete visual clarity.
What’s more, an Interactive Floor Plan feels like a fun, engaging game, where you connect the plan with the photos to form a mental image. See for yourself by checking out this example.
A budget-friendly alternative to a 3D virtual tour? Absolutely.
We could say that the Interactive Floor Plan is “almost” a 3D Virtual Tour — in the same sense that our Rhythmic Photo Tour (video made of still images) is “almost” a video. Of course, that’s said with a wink — but every joke has a grain of truth. In fact, the Interactive Floor Plan even has some advantages:
- In a 3D Visual Tour, it’s still hard for the viewer to grasp the “full picture” (although it’s easier than when viewing a photo gallery or video). Jumping from place to place and rotating the view with a mouse are cool, but at any given moment you still see only a very limited portion of the overall space, just like when looking at a regular photo. With an Interactive Floor Plan, however, you always have a “map” in front of you that shows where you are inside the house and which direction you’re looking.
- The MLS photos used in the Interactive Floor Plan are taken by a professional photographer from carefully chosen angles, deliberately composed to make the best possible impression on a potential buyer. A 3D Visual Tour’s 360° camera, on the other hand, is placed in the middle of the room and simply captures everything around it — with no artistic vision, no compositional intent, and no use of the laws of perspective.
- 360° cameras use “fish eye” lenses that curve the image, resulting in extreme barrel distortion. At the same time, in MLS photos, verticals and horizontals are always perfectly straight. In a 3D Visual Tour, barrel distortion is taken for granted, but in reality, it’s an unavoidable drawback of this type of photography.
- The image quality is incomparably higher in the Interactive Floor Plan. Most budget 3D Virtual Tours use photos straight from a 360° camera with primitive lenses (typically video bloggers use these cameras with an “invisible stick” outdoors, but shooting indoors is far more challenging). But the biggest problem is that photos of a 3D Virtual Tour don’t go through the high-end editing process applied to MLS photos.
I’m not saying that the Interactive Floor Plan is just as good as a 3D Virtual Tour if a 3D Virtual Tour is specifically what you’re after. But we clearly see that in many aspects, a 3D Virtual Tour is “almost” an Interactive Floor Plan. These are simply different products, each with its own pros and cons. Neither one is inherently better or worse in general. But there’s an interesting financial angle worth considering.
As I said, Interactive Floor Plan always comes bundled with a regular Floor Plan. If you were planning to order a regular Floor Plan anyway, the upgrade to Interactive is just a few bucks more. The chances that a true 3D Virtual Tour would lead to a deal when an Interactive Floor Plan wouldn’t are vanishingly small — and the savings are always obvious.