How Do You Move Your Virtual Tours Off TourBuzz?

TourBuzz has been a familiar name to real estate photographers for over a decade, but it has changed hands. Urbanimmersive acquired it, and on October 1, 2023 TourBuzz clients were moved onto the Urbanimmersive platform. Add the hosting model — a tour is hosted for 12 months and then archived unless you pay to keep it live — and a lot of photographers hit a recurring question: pay to renew, or move. This guide is the practical "how to move" answer, not a sales pitch.

Why would you move off TourBuzz?

The two reasons photographers give are the platform change and the renewal clock. The move to Urbanimmersive changed the product some people had used for years. Separately, TourBuzz hosts a tour for the first 12 months, after which it's archived unless you pay to keep it online; TourBuzz doesn't publish that price, so ask them for current rates. If most of your listings sell inside a year, 12 months is plenty and there is no decision to make. The friction shows up when you have a backlog of tours you are paying to keep alive and want to stop. Our guide to what virtual tour hosting costs by listing volume puts those renewal numbers next to other hosts so you can decide whether a move actually saves money.

What can you actually move — and what breaks?

This is the part photographers get wrong: there is no "export tour, import tour" button between hosts. A hosted tour is a web page on TourBuzz's servers at a TourBuzz URL, and that page stays there. What travels with you is the source material you already own — your edited listing photos — which you re-upload to a new host to rebuild the tour. Here is what survives a move and what dies:

• Survives: your original edited photos (you download them), and any floor plans or video masters you still have the source files for
• Dies: the TourBuzz tour page itself, and every link that points at it — the MLS virtual-tour field, flyer QR codes, and website embeds all stop working when the tour is deactivated or hosting lapses
• Does not transfer: view statistics and the tour's existing URL — the new host gives the listing a new address

Because the old links break, moving is really two jobs: rebuild the tour, then re-point the links. The same mechanics apply whenever a host is left behind for any reason, and our guide to what happens to your tours if your host shuts down covers the link-breakage and redirect details in depth.

How do you export your photos from TourBuzz?

Do this before you cancel anything — deactivating a tour takes it offline, and a closed account can take the stored media with it. As of October 2026 the process is:

• Open the tour in the Client Panel
• Click the download icon
• Choose the image sizes you want (grab the full-resolution set for your archive)
• Click "Save as Zip File"

Repeat for every listing you want to keep. If you ordered an immersive 3D tour and want an offline copy, TourBuzz's export requires the tour to be active, so you reactivate it, purchase the export, then deactivate it again. Confirm the current steps and any data-deletion timeline with TourBuzz support before you rely on them, since the interface changes.

Which listings are worth re-hosting?

Not all of them. Triage by whether a live link still matters:

• Re-host: active, on-market listings whose MLS virtual-tour link is live right now. A dead link on an active listing is a problem for your agent, so these come first.
• Usually skip: sold, expired, or withdrawn listings. The tour gets almost no traffic once the home is off the market, so download the photos for your archive and let it lapse.

For most photographers that cuts the "migration" down to a handful of current listings, each a few minutes of work, rather than years of back catalog.

How do you re-host a listing without breaking its link?

Rebuilding the tour is the easy half: on a new host you create the listing, upload the photos you exported, and fill in the address and details. The link work is what needs care, because an agent may have pasted the old TourBuzz URL in several places. For each active listing, update the branded link on the agent's website and marketing, and update the unbranded link in the MLS virtual-tour field. If you are not sure which link goes where, our guide to branded vs. unbranded tour links explains what the MLS requires. An old TourBuzz link only keeps working after the move if the new host happens to serve the exact same path or you can set up a redirect, and most hosts offer neither — so plan to swap the links rather than hoping they carry over. If you want the price-and-hosting-term differences between the two platforms side by side, the PFRE Tour vs. TourBuzz page lays them out.

How do you keep from doing this again?

Host moves break links because the tour lives at an address the old host controls. Hosting future tours on your own domain, an address like tours.yourstudio.com, puts that address in your hands: you decide where it points. It doesn't make a move painless on its own. Each tour's path after the domain still comes from the host, so an old link keeps working after a move only if the new host can serve the same paths or you set up redirects from the old ones. What changes is that those options are yours to arrange, instead of depending on a domain you gave up. Our guide to white-label tours on your own domain explains the CNAME record that points it. Pair it with a simple habit — keep the full-resolution originals of every shoot in your own storage — and you can always rebuild a tour, whatever happens to a host.

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