• By WalkThru Media
  • 06 Aug, 2026

Adding a virtual tour to a Bayut listing is done through Profolio, the listing management system agencies use to publish to the portal. The tour is attached to the property record rather than uploaded, and the sequence matters, because part of the process depends on a permit number that is issued partway through.

The order of operations

The step that surprises people is that the listing is generally prepared first and permitted second. You build the property record, add the media, generate the advertisement, and the permit number comes out of that process. Only then is the listing fully publishable.

This matters for tours because the permit number needs to appear inside the tour interface, and the number does not exist until the listing has been created. In practice that means the tour is produced, the listing is prepared, the permit is issued, and the number is then added to the tour before the listing goes live. Planning for that avoids a scramble on the day.

What goes into the virtual tour field

Profolio expects a URL to a hosted tour. Not a file, not an HTML embed snippet, and not a link to a page on your own website that happens to contain the tour.

Use the plain share link from the tour provider. If the tour platform offers both a share link and an embed code, the embed code is the one with an iframe tag in it and it belongs on your own website, not in a portal field. If the link carries camera position parameters, that is usually fine and lets the tour open at a chosen viewpoint rather than wherever the capture started.

The link must open without a login. This is the single most common failure. A tour that opens instantly for you because your browser is still authenticated with the tour platform will not open for a buyer, and the listing will publish with a dead tour on it.

Photographs still do the heavy lifting

A tour is a supporting asset on a portal listing, not a replacement for the photographs. The cover image is what a buyer sees in search results, and it decides whether the listing gets opened at all. A listing with an excellent tour and a weak cover photograph gets less traffic than a listing with strong photographs and no tour.

So the sensible order is a complete photography set first, and the tour as the thing that keeps a buyer on the listing once they have arrived. The two are usually captured in the same visit.

Checking the listing after it publishes

Open the live listing rather than the Profolio preview. The preview shows you what you entered; the live page shows what a buyer gets, and they are not always the same. Open it on a phone, on mobile data, and click into the tour from the listing.

Watch how long the tour takes to become interactive. On a phone on a normal connection, a tour that sits on a loading state for ten or fifteen seconds will lose most of the people who tap it. That is a production problem rather than a portal problem, and it is worth solving before the listing is live rather than after.

If the tour does not appear

Check the link in a private browsing window. Check that it uses https. Check whether the tour provider permits its tours to be embedded on other sites, since some block framing entirely and will show as an empty panel. And confirm the URL has not changed, which happens whenever a tour is re-exported or re-uploaded.

Floor plans and the media set around the tour

A tour answers how the space connects. A floor plan answers how it is arranged and how big it is, and the two work together rather than substituting for each other. Listings that carry both give a buyer enough to shortlist without a viewing, which is the point.

If you are commissioning media, it is worth capturing the floor plan in the same visit as the photographs and the tour, because all three come from the same walkthrough of the property. Measuring later means a second visit and a second access arrangement.

File standards and what slows a listing down

Portals compress and resize images, but they do it to whatever you upload. Very large files slow the upload and can time out on an office connection, while images that are too small are upscaled and look soft in the listing gallery.

Photographs should be delivered at a size intended for web use rather than straight off the camera. This is something to ask your photographer for explicitly, because the default export from a professional edit is often a print-resolution file many times larger than a portal needs.

Relisting and reuse

When a unit comes back to market, the listing is usually duplicated rather than rebuilt, and the media carries over. Check that the tour link still resolves, that the permit details on the new listing are the new ones, and that any compliance text inside the tour has been updated rather than inherited from the previous campaign.

For portfolios of similar units in one building, keep a clear record of which tour belongs to which apartment. Tours of near-identical layouts are easy to attach to the wrong listing, and that becomes obvious at the viewing.

Every 360 virtual tour we produce is delivered as a stable hosted link plus a separate embed code, so there is no ambiguity about which one goes where, and the tour is built to load quickly on a phone. We shoot listings across Dubai and Abu Dhabi, including Jumeirah Village Circle and Business Bay.