Virtual Tours for Offices, Workspaces and Showrooms: Letting, Recruiting and Selling the Space

Offices are toured by three different audiences with three different questions. Prospective tenants want to know whether the space fits their headcount. Candidates want to know what it is like to work there. Customers want to see the showroom or experience centre without a flight. One capture can serve all three. Here is how office landlords, occupiers and workspace operators use virtual tours, with examples from our own work.

Letting and agency

For a landlord or agent, a Matterport tour of a vacant floor lets an occupier's space planner measure it and test layouts before a viewing, and lets an overseas decision-maker walk it at all. Floor plans and measurements come from the scan; a dollhouse view shows the floor plate at a glance. Viewings that follow a tour are better qualified, and the listing on the portals and the agent's site carries a "walk through" button that plain photography cannot match. Zillow's research on 3D tours in residential property (72% of buyers find them more useful than photos) translates directly.

Flexible workspace and serviced offices

Coworking and serviced office operators sell online and by the desk. A tour of the lounge, meeting rooms, private offices and the kitchen, embedded on the booking page and on the Google Business Profile, answers the "what is it actually like?" question that decides whether someone books a trial day. Fourfront Group used a Google Street View tour for its London office; Impact Factory used a bespoke tour for its training spaces.

Recruitment and employer brand

Candidates increasingly research an employer's workplace before applying. A tour linked from careers pages and job adverts shows the office, the breakout areas and the neighbourhood, and hotspots can carry a welcome from the team and the hybrid working policy. It costs nothing to add to every advert once made.

Showrooms and customer experience centres

A showroom exists to be visited, yet most prospects never will. Loomis and Schneider Electric's Innovation Hub put their customer experience centres online as bespoke tours with product specifications in the hotspots, so sales teams can walk a prospect through from a laptop. Eurostar's Paris business lounge did the same for a premium customer experience.

Fit-out, moves and facilities

A Matterport scan before a fit-out gives designers and contractors a measurable model to plan from without repeat site visits, and a scan before a move gives the whole organisation a look at the new building before day one. Facilities teams keep a dated record of the space with BIM files extracted from the scan.

Practicalities

Offices are best captured early, before desks fill, or at the weekend; screens are turned off or blurred, confidential paperwork cleared, and sensitive areas left out. A typical floor takes a morning to scan and the Matterport tour is live within 48 hours. Prices start from £350, with no travel charges anywhere in mainland UK. Tell us about the building for a clear price, or compare formats in our guide.