TourFactory Shut Down: What Should Real Estate Photographers Do Now?

When a tour host you have used for years goes away, the first feeling is usually confusion, not panic — the links were working last week. This guide is the practical version of what to do: what actually happened to TourFactory, what you can still get back, which listings are worth your time, and how to set things up so the next shutdown costs you an afternoon instead of a client relationship.

What happened to TourFactory?

TourFactory (its copyright line runs from 1996) spent nearly three decades as a network connecting real estate agents with local media providers and hosting the property sites those shoots produced. Its own notice said the TourFactory.com website would become inactive on December 1, 2025. When we checked on November 4, 2026, tourfactory.com showed that notice and a search for local providers. The notice pointed PowerHouse listings and memberships to a separate site (hometours.pro), said the media providers who worked through TourFactory are independently owned businesses, many of which keep operating, and said property sites and media would still be available through each provider's own website or platform.

For a photographer, that last point is the one that matters. TourFactory was the network layer; the photography was done by independent providers. Whether a given tour still works depends on where it was actually hosted, so the job now is to find out, listing by listing, rather than assume.

Do your old TourFactory links still work?

Treat every link on the tourfactory.com site itself as at risk. When a site goes inactive, the URLs it served can stop resolving, and those URLs are scattered across more places than photographers remember. Before you assume anything, map out where a dead link does damage:

• The MLS virtual-tour field on every active listing you hosted there
• Printed flyers and yard-sign QR codes that point at the tour
• Agent and brokerage websites that embedded or linked the tour
• Email signatures and past marketing you or the agent already sent out
• Your own portfolio, if you linked finished tours as samples of your work

Links on a provider's own website or platform may still load, since that is where TourFactory said property sites would stay. Do not guess — open each one. Any link that is dead needs to be replaced wherever it lives, and the MLS field is the one that matters most while a listing is still active. This is the same failure mode behind every acquisition and sunset in this business; our guide to what happens when a virtual tour host shuts down walks through why the links die but the photos survive.

How do you get your photos back?

As the photographer you normally own the copyright unless a contract said otherwise; hosting a tour doesn't transfer it. But a site that has gone dark is the worst place to rely on for retrieval, so work from the most reliable source outward. Start with your own archives: the full-resolution files you shot and delivered. If you keep them, you do not need anything from TourFactory at all. If a local photographer or media company produced the tour, ask them — TourFactory's notice said property sites and media stay available through the provider's own website or platform. Only if neither of those works should you try to pull files from TourFactory itself, and you should do it quickly rather than wait. This is the cleanest argument for keeping a full-resolution archive of every shoot going forward: when a host disappears, your originals turn re-hosting into a few minutes of work instead of a lost listing.

Which listings are worth re-hosting?

Do not try to rebuild everything. Sort by whether the listing is still live. An active listing with a dead tour link is the urgent case — the MLS virtual-tour field is broken right now, and that is worth fixing today. A listing that has already closed almost never needs a working tour; the sale is done and nobody is shopping it. Somewhere in between sit a photographer's portfolio pieces and an agent's favorite past listings they still show off — re-host those only if they earn their keep. For most photographers the real work is a handful of active listings, not an archive of hundreds.

How do you move a listing to a new host?

Re-hosting from your originals is quick. Pick a host, create the tour from the full-resolution photos you already have, and then do the part people forget: swap the links everywhere the old one lived. Update the MLS virtual-tour field first, then the flyer, the agent's website, and any syndication. If your new host gives you both a branded and an unbranded link, put the unbranded one in the MLS field so the listing stays compliant — our guide to branded vs. unbranded tour links explains which goes where. The mechanics are the same whichever host you came from; the step-by-step in our move off TourBuzz and move off Aryeo guides is the same link-swap you will do here.

How do you protect yourself from the next shutdown?

You cannot make a host immortal — TourFactory ran for nearly thirty years and still went dark — but you can shrink what a shutdown is able to take from you. Three habits do most of the work:

• Keep your own archive. Full-resolution files for every shoot, stored somewhere you control, so a host is only ever holding a copy
• Host on your own domain. When the tour lives at a URL you own, you can point it at a new host later; a link on the host's own domain dies with the host
• Know the hosting term. Favor a host that states how long a tour stays live, so an expiry or a sunset is not a surprise

A tour on your own custom domain is the single biggest protection, because the link an agent posted to the MLS keeps working across a move as long as the new host serves the same path or you redirect it. Our guide to white-label tours on your own domain covers the one-CNAME setup and what it costs.

What does re-hosting cost?

If you are starting over, start on something that will not do this to you again. PFRE Tour is pay-per-tour — $10 for a single tour, $8 each in 20-packs — with two years of hosting stated up front and no subscription, and every tour generates a branded and an unbranded MLS link automatically. White-label tours on your own domain run $10–14 each. It is not the cheapest host at every volume, but it is independent and photographer-owned, and the links are yours to move.

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