Zillow 3D Tours vs. Matterport in 2026: Why the Ground Shifted
If you paid for a Matterport tour on a listing in 2025, you might have logged into Zillow one October morning to find it simply gone. You were not imagining it, and it was not a glitch. The ground under real estate virtual tours shifted in late 2025, and it changes how you should think about 3D media in 2026. Here is the plain-English version.
What changed in October 2025 The backstory: in early 2025, CoStar Group (the company behind Homes.com and one of Zillow's biggest portal rivals) closed a roughly $1.6 billion acquisition of Matterport. That put a popular tour tool in the hands of a direct competitor.
Then, on October 20, 2025, Zillow removed all Matterport 3D tours from Zillow and StreetEasy listings. Zillow said CoStar declined to renew Matterport's data agreement with Zillow and updated Matterport's terms of service to restrict its content from appearing on competing platforms. CoStar disputed Zillow's account, arguing its licensing terms had not changed and that Zillow was mischaracterizing them. Whoever you believe, the practical result is the same: agents who had paid for Matterport scans woke up to find those tours no longer embedded on the largest real estate portal in the country.
What it means in practice Matterport tours still work. You can share them by direct link, and they remain excellent. What changed is that they no longer embed inside Zillow's listing pages. For a tool whose whole value is being where buyers already are, that is a meaningful loss, because Zillow is where an enormous share of Siouxland buyers start looking. The two platforms are no longer interchangeable, and choosing well now means understanding what each one is for.
Zillow 3D Home: where it wins now Zillow 3D Home is a free tour tool captured with a 360 camera or a phone. Its advantage is not that it is the most advanced technology. It is that it embeds natively on Zillow, right where the buyers are. For a standard residential listing that lives and dies on Zillow, a Zillow 3D tour puts an interactive walkthrough exactly where it gets seen. That is why we adopted it as our standard 3D product.
Matterport: still premium, with a caveat Matterport is still the gold standard for a true "digital twin": LiDAR-accurate models, the dollhouse view, measurement tools, and a polished, immersive feel. For luxury listings, for builders showing new construction, and for uses that live off the portal entirely (insurance documentation, re-leasing, estate planning), it earns its premium. The only new asterisk is that it will not show up inside Zillow.
Our take for Siouxland listings Here is our honest position, and it is a position, not a hedge: for a typical listing that needs to perform on Zillow, a Zillow 3D tour now embeds where Matterport can't, and that placement matters more than the incremental polish for most homes. For a high-end or new-construction property where the immersive digital-twin experience is part of the pitch, and where the tour will be marketed through your own channels, Matterport still makes sense. Choose the tool to fit the property and where its buyers will actually look, not out of habit.
Reporting on the October 2025 changes is drawn from real estate trade coverage (RISMedia, HousingWire, Inman, The Real Deal). Link out to those sources when you publish.
