Linking Your VisualTours to Your Listings on REALTOR.com®

Note: Effective March 14th, 2006 Homestore has eliminated the fee for linking your VisualTours to your listings on Realtor.com for all Realtors who have paid REALTOR.com® for their Showcase Listing Enhancement service.

Homestore operates Realtor.com, and they have a fee-per-listing service called PicturePath which is designed to enhance the visibility of your listings by linking a virtual tour to it. This fee currently is $19.95 PER TOUR for this service. We collect the fee and pass it along to Homestore as it is their policy to charge for this service only through approved virtual tour companies, rather than directly charging the Realtor who has the listing. This service is completely optional on each of your listings.

What do you get for $19.95 on your listing? When you pay for PicturePath, your listing will appear when people choose to "Display listings with virtual tours first," and the small "spinning red house" logo (below) will appear prominently near the top of your listing indicating that your listing has a virtual tour for consumers to view. According to Homestore, listings with virtual tours receive 40% more views than listings without a virtual tour. So you're gaining advertising visibility for your seller and your listing, along with pre-qualifying more buyers.


Linking Benefits

  • Your full featured VisualTour is linked to your listing on Realtor.com. Because your full featured VisualTour will be linked to REALTOR.com® , you will gain maximum personal promotion benefits as every consumer will see your branding, photo and contact information!

  • Your contact information is now shown with your tour! This means that the person viewing your listing (and your tour) can now contact you via phone, email, pager or even be directed to your website by using the links and information displayed on your VisualTour that's linked to your listing. Make sure you have your correct contact, Email and Page Me information on your VisualTour account! This is especially important if you haven't paid to have Realtor.com include your personal contact information for all your listings in general.

  • Viewing statistics count too! Since your VisualTours will stay on the VisualTour.com servers, we can count all of the views your tours get on Realtor.com! And we include this on your Viewing Statistics page which you can view in real time and even share with your sellers. More proof for you to have for sellers of the effectiveness of your Internet marketing strategy!

  • Visibility. Your listing will appear when customers search for homes with virtual tours on REALTOR.com®, and the "spinning red house" icon will appear near the top of the listing indicating that it has a virtual tour.



  • Pay per tour. You do not have to have a REALTOR.com® Showcase Listing Enhancement service account in order to gain personal promotion benefits on REALTOR.com®. And if you just want to highlight your virtual tours on REALTOR.com® occasionally, you can use the PicturePath linking service only on those occasions.


  • Increased Distribution of your tours. Homestore's distribution network has agreements in place with many national franchise gateway sites (e.g. www.REMAX.com, www.Prudential.com), portals such as AOL.com, MSN.com, Netscape.com, Excite.com and several websites for local real estate companies, etc. This distribution network allows your tour to be automatically linked to the listing data sent to the appropriate sites on this distribution list. Click here for a complete list of distribution sites.

If you have any questions, please email Support@VisualTour.com or call our support team at 800-873-0700.