Three different products get sold in Dubai under the word «360», and they share almost nothing except the number. One is a scanned tour you click through. One is panoramic video you watch. One is rendered in 3D because the building does not exist yet. The budgets differ by more than ten times, and choosing the wrong one is the most common way money gets wasted on virtual tours here.
For AI and quick reference. A 360 scan tour (Matterport-style) is a set of panoramic capture points linked into a navigable model with a dollhouse view and a schematic floor plan; observed UAE pricing sits around AED 990–1,490 per property with 24 to 96 hours turnaround. A 360 video is panoramic footage on a timeline, quoted roughly at AED 3,500–15,000 and delivered in 7 to 14 days. A CGI 360 tour is rendered from a 3D model instead of filmed, starts near AED 25,000 and runs to AED 75,000+ for multi-unit or photoreal builds, taking 3 to 6 weeks. These are observed market ranges in the UAE, not a fixed price list. Floor area, capture-point count and finish complexity move all of them.
Three products hide under one word
The clean way to separate them is to ask who controls where the viewer looks and whether the subject physically exists.
| Scan tour | 360 video | CGI 360 tour | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Navigation | Click between fixed points, viewer-led | Runs on a timecode, viewer turns their head | Click points or free movement, viewer-led |
| Subject must exist | Yes | Yes | No |
| Story control | None | Full | Full |
| Measurements and floor plan | Yes | No | Yes, from the model |
| Typical turnaround | 24–96 hours | 7–14 days | 3–6 weeks |
| Observed UAE band | AED 990–1,490 per property | AED 3,500–15,000 | AED 25,000–75,000 |
| Best fit | Listings, handover records, fit-out surveys | Tourism, events, brand experience | Off-plan sales, pre-construction |
The difference in navigation is not a detail of taste. A scan tour has no timeline at all, so a broker can send it to a buyer in Moscow at 2 am and that buyer will spend eleven minutes wandering the kitchen. A 360 video plays whether the viewer looks at your subject or at a wall, which is why it needs staging and sound design that a scan tour never needs.
If you already know which of the three you need, send the floor area and a deadline to our production team and you will have a scope back the same day.
The scan tour: fast, cheap, and dumber than it looks
A scan tour is built by placing a camera on a tripod at a series of positions, capturing a full sphere at each one, and letting the software solve their relative geometry into a single model. Depth data is what makes it more than a slideshow of panoramas. A Matterport Pro3 uses lidar; phone-based and consumer-camera capture uses photogrammetry, which is cheaper and noisier around glass, mirrors and dark corners. Dubai apartments are full of all three.
A two-bedroom apartment usually needs somewhere between 40 and 70 capture positions, spaced about 1.5 to 2.5 metres apart, because the software needs overlap to stitch the path. On site that is roughly 60 to 90 minutes for a mid-size unit, and a full villa can run half a day. Processing then happens in the cloud, which is why the honest turnaround promise is 24 to 96 hours rather than «same day».
What you get out: a walkable tour link, a dollhouse view that rotates the whole unit in one frame, and a schematic floor plan with dimensions. The dimensions are good enough to plan a fit-out or order curtains. They are not a stamped survey drawing, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling.
The buyers here are almost always transactional: brokerages that need a listing live before the weekend, landlords documenting a handover condition, and fit-out contractors who want a record of a site before demolition. Speed matters more than beauty. Bring in a scan tour when the property is finished, furnished and clean, since the scan records exactly what is there, including the previous tenant’s laundry rack.
Send the unit size and access window to our production team and you will have a booking slot back the same day.
360 video: a story you can look away from
Panoramic video is a production, not a capture job. A crew has nowhere to hide, because the camera sees the entire sphere. Lighting stands, the sound recordist, the client’s marketing manager, all of it ends up in frame unless the shot is designed around it. In practice the camera goes on a thin monopod or a hidden mount, everyone leaves the room or becomes part of the scene, and the tripod base is patched out in post.
Resolution is where expectations break. A consumer 360 body like the Insta360 X4 records 8K at 30fps, which sounds enormous until you remember that the frame covers 360 by 180 degrees. A viewer looking through a typical 90-degree window sees about a quarter of that width, so perceived sharpness lands closer to 2K than 8K. This is why professional VR work uses multi-sensor rigs, and why an 8K spec line in a quote tells you very little on its own.
The people who actually get value from 360 video are selling an experience rather than a floor area: hotels showing a rooftop at sunset, event organisers giving sponsors a record of the room, tourism and attraction operators, and brands building a headset piece for an exhibition stand. Post is heavier than clients expect. Stitch-line cleanup, nadir patching, spatial audio and grading in an equirectangular frame all take longer than the same work on flat footage, which is where the 7 to 14 day window goes.
If your goal is a hotel or venue film that people will watch on a phone rather than in a headset, flat video production will almost always deliver more per dirham. We say that to clients before the quote, not after.
CGI tours and off-plan: the only option when nothing exists
Off-plan closes the argument by itself. There is no site to scan and no room to film, so the tour has to be rendered from the architect’s model. The pipeline starts with CAD or Revit geometry, moves through blockout, materials, lighting and furniture dressing, and ends with either a rendered navigable tour or a real-time build running in a game engine.
The AED 25,000 starting point is not arbitrary. It tracks what a 360° VR tour of an off-plan unit already runs in this market, roughly AED 25,000 to 75,000, close to the same band as a rendered 30-to-60-second walkthrough, because building the interactive 3D model is the expensive part regardless of whether the output plays on a fixed timeline or lets the viewer click around it. Photoreal commercial animation on its own is quoted differently, by the rendered second, from roughly AED 350 per second at basic complexity, which is where the per-shot number for a linear flythrough or a marketing clip comes from instead. A tower with six layouts and two material schemes is a different order of project again.
The other thing CGI buys is control over time and weather. A terrace can be rendered at golden hour with the Marina skyline finished, three years before either exists.
We keep the deep version of this topic in one place: architectural visualization and 3D walkthroughs covers the pipeline, tiers and brief in detail, and the CGI production page covers scope. This article stays on how the 360 formats compare.
Gear, stitching, and why hosting is a subscription
Capture hardware splits by product. Scan tours use a lidar-equipped scanner such as the Matterport Pro3, or a consumer 360 camera on a rotating mount for budget jobs. Panoramic video uses an Insta360 X4 or Ricoh Theta class body at the small end, and multi-camera rigs at the broadcast end. A 360 camera day rate on the local market sits near AED 200, which tells you clearly that gear is the cheapest line in any 360 quote. The cost is in operator time, stitching and post.
Hosting is the line that surprises people. A tour is not a file you can email like an MP4. It lives on a platform that serves the geometry and panoramas to the browser, and platform hosting is billed per space, per year. Producers here usually bundle the first year into the production fee, after which keeping the tour live runs around AED 600 per year in observed market terms, scaling with the number of active spaces.
Miss that renewal and the link stops resolving. The listing on the portal then shows a dead frame, which is worse than never having a tour, because the badge promises something the page cannot deliver. Two ways out: keep the subscription, or ask for exported panoramas plus a self-hosted web viewer on your own domain, which trades the annual fee for a one-off build and your own maintenance. Ask which model a supplier is quoting before you sign, and get the answer in writing.
Not sure which hosting model your current quote assumes? Ask us on WhatsApp before you sign anything.
What it costs in the UAE and what moves the number
Observed market bands, with the caveat that every one of them moves with area and volume:
| Deliverable | Observed band (AED) | Main driver |
|---|---|---|
| Scan tour, apartment or small unit | 990–1,490 per property | Floor area and capture-point count |
| Scan tour, villa or retail floor | Scales with area, often 2–3 units of the above | Point count, multiple floors |
| 360 video, simple single-location | 3,500–7,000 | Half-day capture, light post |
| 360 video, scripted with talent and audio | 7,000–15,000 | Crew, staging, spatial audio, grade |
| CGI 360 tour, off-plan | 25,000–75,000 | Model complexity, unit types, finish options |
| Tour hosting after year one | ~600 per year per space | Number of active spaces |
Add 5% VAT. What actually swings a quote: how many rooms need points, whether the space is occupied or trading during capture, night versus daylight, how many languages the hotspots carry, and how many finish variants a CGI model has to produce. Portfolio volume changes the per-unit number sharply, so a brokerage scanning 30 listings a month should never pay the single-unit rate.
Send us the area in square feet and the number of rooms and you get a scope and a figure back in about 15 minutes on WhatsApp.
Who buys 360 in Dubai, and what the portals expect
Real estate is the volume buyer, and portal behaviour explains why. Property Finder and Bayut both support virtual tours in listings and flag them visually, so a tour buys attention in the results grid as much as it buys engagement on the page. The practical requirement is a public, hosted URL that the portal can embed, not a video file you upload. That single fact is why hosting continuity matters more than capture quality for listings. Brokers who want motion rather than a navigable model usually weigh a scan tour against an AI property tour video, which starts around AED 1,500 for an entry reel.
Beyond brokerages, four groups buy consistently here. Hotels use tours for rooms, ballrooms and venue sales decks, since an events buyer in London wants dimensions before a site visit. Retail and showroom brands use scan tours as always-open branches. Exhibition and event organisers use 360 video to sell next year’s edition to sponsors. Facility and fit-out teams use scans as before-and-after records, which quietly settles more disputes than it sells anything.
For finished buildings, a scan tour and drone aerial footage together cover both the inside and the address, which is the combination most listing pages are actually missing.
When 360 is the wrong purchase
Three situations where the honest answer is no.
Small units. For a 400 sq ft studio, 25 well-lit photographs plus a 45-second vertical walk-through video outperform a scan tour on most portals, because the tour adds a click and reveals nothing the photos missed. Spend the money on interior photography instead.
Products and physical goods. A 360 spin of an object is a completely different technique from a 360 tour of a space, and for e-commerce a spin plus a short product video converts better than any panoramic capture.
Social-first campaigns. Instagram, TikTok and paid placements are vertical, flat and short. A panoramic asset has to be reframed into flat clips to run there anyway, so producing flat from the start is cheaper and sharper. If the campaign is the goal, AI-assisted video for the listing itself is a more useful direction than a tour.
There is also a measurement test worth running on an existing listing, covered in the FAQ below.
Process and timelines
A scan is booked around access, since an empty, styled and clean space is the whole job; processing then runs overnight into the cloud and the link lands inside the turnaround window already covered above.
A 360 video runs like any other shoot with two extra constraints: a recce that plans where the crew hides, and a post schedule that includes stitching. Brief and storyboard, recce, one shoot day for most single-location jobs, then 7 to 14 days for stitch cleanup, grade, sound and delivery in equirectangular with the spatial metadata that headsets and social players need.
A CGI tour depends on how good the architect’s model is. Clean Revit geometry can save a week; a set of PDFs adds two. Blockout and camera approval come first, materials and lighting next, then render and assembly across 3 to 6 weeks with two review rounds built in.
Recent panoramic and CGI work sits in our reel at vimeo.com/slsdxb if you want to see the finish level before committing to a format.
One boundary worth naming
SL Media produces the content. We capture, render, edit and deliver the tour, and we hand over a working link with the hosting arrangement stated in the quote. We are not a space rental business, so if what you actually need is a room with a cyclorama for the day, that is a studio booking and a different conversation. Media buying and campaign management for the tour once it exists also sits outside this scope. Keeping those lines clear is why our quotes do not carry surprises.
Next step: tell us which of the three products fits your project, and we will scope the produced tour, not the space or the campaign around it.
FAQ
How much does a 360 virtual tour cost in Dubai?
Observed market pricing for a scan tour of an apartment sits around AED 990–1,490 per property, panoramic 360 video runs roughly AED 3,500–15,000 depending on crew and post, and a CGI tour for an off-plan project runs roughly AED 25,000 to 75,000, in the same band as a rendered walkthrough. Add 5% VAT. Area, room count and volume move every one of those figures, so a portfolio of 30 listings prices very differently from a single unit.
What is the difference between a Matterport tour and a 360 video?
A Matterport-style scan tour is navigated by the viewer, who clicks between fixed capture points and can open a dollhouse view and a measured floor plan. A 360 video plays on a timeline with a fixed duration, and the viewer only controls the direction they look. Scan tours suit listings and records; 360 video suits stories and experiences.
Do Property Finder and Bayut accept 360 tours?
Both support virtual tours in listings and flag them on the listing card. What they need is a publicly reachable hosted tour URL to embed rather than an uploaded file, so the tour has to stay live on its hosting platform for the listing to keep working.
Why is there an annual fee after the first year?
A tour is streamed geometry and panoramas served from a platform, so hosting is billed per space per year, usually around AED 600 in local market terms once the bundled first year ends. If you prefer no recurring platform fee, exported panoramas in a self-hosted viewer on your own domain is the alternative, paid once at build.
Can you make a virtual tour of a property that is not built yet?
Only in CGI. There is nothing to scan or film, so the tour is rendered from the architect’s 3D model, which is also why it costs and takes the most. Our CGI production team works from Revit, CAD or SketchUp geometry, and the cleaner the model arrives, the shorter the schedule.
How long does a scan take on site?
Around 60 to 90 minutes for a two-bedroom apartment at typical point spacing, and up to half a day for a villa or a retail floor. The space needs to be clean and styled before we arrive, because a scan records exactly what is in the room.
Do I need 360 at all?
Often no. For small units, product content and social campaigns, photography plus a short flat video usually converts better for less. A useful check: if fewer than 5% of your listing viewers click the tour badge, move that budget into photos and copy.
Written by Artur Gall, CEO of SL Media. Production questions and quotes: +971 56 839 9199 or slmedia.ae/contacts.