More and more buyers are shopping online housing listings before actually considering buying a house. If your house is listed online (and it really should be), you also need to be sure to include a virtual tour of your house.

Don’t be swayed by the techie-sounding task – it’s easier than you think, and more importantly will boost the likelihood that your home will sell sooner. Read on to find out how to create a virtual tour for your house.

What exactly is a virtual tour?

A virtual tour is a way to view the inside of a house through an online link. When you click on such a link, most virtual tours will give you a 360-degree view of the inside of each room in the house.

Some virtual tours are interactive, meaning you can take your computer mouse and direct the view to go up to the ceiling or down to the floor. This gives you great flexibility in terms of viewing every inch of a prospective home.

Other virtual tours are made up of flat-screen pictures that are linked together to provide a moving image. As the viewer, you can watch the image move but you can’t control or direct it.

3 Ways to get a virtual tour

To get the perfect virtual tour of your home, you can select from three different options:

• Take your own pictures of the house. Then hire a professional to assemble your pictures into a moving image and to upload that image to the Internet for you.
• Let a professional handle the whole task. Alternately, you can hire a professional photographer to take pictures of your house and to assemble and upload them.
• Do it all yourself. Like most do-it-yourself projects, this option is the most tedious but also the most affordable. If you opt to manage the entire process yourself, you’ll need to buy your own software. You’ll then have the freedom to take your house pictures yourself and to both assemble and upload them.

How to actually shoot a virtual tour

Any virtual tour you get for a house should include at least two spins. This gives prospects a better feel for an area and makes them more likely to picture themselves living in your home. Even tiny homes can benefit from two different virtual spins. Take shots of the most commonly used rooms, such as the kitchen and the bedroom.

If you have a larger home, you may want to add a few extra spin views. Any house bigger than 2,000 square feet (but priced at under a million) will benefit from having between four and eight virtual spins.

Bigger houses, priced at a million dollars or more, need eight to twelve spins in order to accurately convey the breadth and design of a home.

The cost of virtual tours

Most people are surprised by the low price of virtual tours. If you go for the two-spin minimum, your total cost will probably be less than $100. A virtual tour with four to eight spins will probably fall in the $200 range. Anything that includes additional spins could shoot up to as much as $300. If you hire a professional to handle the whole thing, costs may run you about $3,500.

Stage the tour before you start

When you take a virtual tour, you need to clean up your rooms just as you would if you were showing prospective buyers your house. Take the time to come up with a point of focus and use different viewpoints.

Begin your tour by focusing on the most interesting object in the room and be sure to end with that same object. This is the first thing a viewer will see upon starting the virtual tour of your home so make sure it’s not something bland like a doorway.

Clear clutter and extra furniture from the room before you begin. When a space appears larger to a consumer, he or she is much more likely to look at a house favorably.

Put in extra touches on your virtual tour

Many virtual tours offer enough space for written marketing comments. If you choose this route, be sure to write concisely and try to use adjectives in moderation.

You can also choose to tell a story about your virtual tour. Do this by utilizing the scrolling text feature that comes with most programs. You can describe the moving video through the text as it rolls across the screen.

Higher end virtual videos allow you to add a voiceover. If you choose to supply audio, be sure that you speak clearly and enthusiastically. If your voiceover will also include an inset of you talking, be sure to look professional and to smile as often as possible.