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As visualization tech becomes ubiquitous, the agents who thrive will be those who understand what buyers think, not just where they click, Molly McKinley writes.

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Something significant is happening in how buyers discover properties. Google is experimenting with intent-based home search. Meta just made photorealistic room scanning available to anyone with a $500 headset. Visualization technology that once required professional equipment is becoming democratized and readily available.

This is good news for marketing. It also creates a problem no one is talking about.

The more buyers can see, the less agents know about what they’re thinking.

The silent buyer problem

Consider what happens when a prospect views a property listing today. They scroll through photos. Maybe they walk through a 3D tour. Perhaps they spend 12 minutes exploring every room, mentally placing their furniture.

Then they leave. And the agent has almost nothing.

Traditional analytics might show a “tour view” or “time on page.” More sophisticated platforms offer heatmaps indicating where eyes lingered. None of this reveals what the buyer was actually evaluating.

Someone who spends three minutes examining kitchen layouts and then asks about HOA fees is fundamentally different from someone who clicks through the same listing in 90 seconds. Both register as engagement. Only one is ready for a conversation.

This is the silent buyer problem, the gap between what buyers see and what agents understand about their intent.

What buyers actually ask

The questions buyers pose during virtual tours reveal where they are in their decision process, yet most tour platforms never capture this intelligence.

People rarely ask about square footage because that information appears in the listing. They ask about HOA fees. They ask whether cabinets and floors can be changed. They ask about distance to coffee shops and public transit. They ask about school district boundaries.

These are decision-stage questions. Someone calculating real costs is serious. Someone asking about modifications is mentally moving in. Someone mapping their daily commute is projecting their actual life into the space.

This is buyer intent. And no tour completion metric captures it.

Spatial intelligence, the emerging category layering behavioral analytics and conversational AI onto virtual tour infrastructure, changes this equation.

Companies like Charlotte-based PATH Intelligence are demonstrating what becomes possible when tours become interactive. Their AI agent handles property questions around the clock in over 22 languages while capturing which features prospects explore, which questions they ask and how long they engage with different spaces.

Understanding that a prospect asked three questions about outdoor entertaining, spent significant time in the backyard and wanted to know about landscaping maintenance shapes an entirely different follow-up conversation than one with someone who focused on bedroom dimensions.

Proof of work for skeptical sellers

For agents navigating commission pressure and seller skepticism, behavioral intelligence offers something previously unavailable: evidence.

Imagine replacing “we had 47 virtual tour views this week” with “we had 47 views, 12 engaged substantively, three focused on outdoor spaces and asked about landscaping maintenance, and five compared bedroom dimensions against competing properties.”

When a seller questions why their home hasn’t sold, an agent with behavioral data can identify patterns. Most prospects are abandoning tours at the kitchen, suggesting a staging or pricing issue. International buyers are engaging heavily but asking about school districts, indicating a messaging opportunity.

This transforms defensive conversations about activity into collaborative strategy sessions. The agent becomes a data-informed consultant.

Smarter marketing, better targeting

The intelligence layer also reshapes how properties get marketed. If behavioral data reveals that 80 percent of engaged prospects are coming from out of state, that signals where to focus advertising dollars. When questions cluster around commute times or renovation potential, that provides insight about which features to emphasize.

This is the market intelligence e-commerce has leveraged for two decades. Real estate is finally catching up.

Data as the foundation

Every conversation about AI in real estate eventually returns to data. The promise of artificial intelligence depends entirely on the quality of information feeding those systems. Agents and brokers exploring AI tools would benefit from starting with a fundamental question: where is the data coming from, and what does it actually reveal about buyer behavior?

Virtual tours represent one of the largest untapped data opportunities in real estate. Every tour is a moment when a buyer reveals preferences, priorities and purchase readiness through their actions and questions.

Treating that moment as passive marketing wastes the intelligence it could generate. Treating it as active data collection transforms how agents communicate with sellers, prioritize follow-up and refine marketing strategy.

The future of real estate belongs to those who recognize that great visuals attract attention, and great data converts it into results.

Molly McKinley is a professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at Meredith College and Founder of Redtail Creative, a firm that builds authority and trust for PropTech companies through strategic thought leadership.

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