Thirty minutes of preparation before a Matterport scan produces a noticeably better tour. The scanner captures everything in the frame at each position. Clutter, dead bulbs, whiteboards with last week's pipeline on them, a ceiling fan left running. All of it ends up in the published tour. None of it is editable after the fact.
This is what to sort before we arrive.
Clear the space
Remove anything that does not belong in a letting photograph. Boxes near the door, trolleys, cleaning equipment, personal items left on desks, coats on chairs. The standard to aim for is how the space would look if a viewer was walking through it in person for the first time.
In occupied offices, this means briefing whoever manages the floor. Staff will not naturally tidy to the standard needed for a scan, and asking on the morning rarely gives enough time. A day's notice is usually sufficient.
Sort the lighting
Turn on every light in the building, including feature lighting, desk lamps, and any strip or recess lighting that is on a separate switch. The Matterport camera handles mixed lighting well, but dark patches in a corner or a dead bulb over the reception desk will be visible in every scan position that faces that direction.
Replace any blown bulbs before the scan. Open all blinds fully. Consistent, even lighting across the floor plate makes the space look larger and more usable.
Turn off anything that moves
The scanner takes multiple exposures at each position and combines them. Anything moving during that process creates visible errors in the finished model. Ceiling fans are the most common cause. Turn them off before we start.
The same applies to oscillating desk fans, automated blinds cycling, and any display screens with moving content. HVAC systems are fine as long as they are not causing visible airflow through plants or lightweight partitions.
People during the scan
Matterport automatically blurs faces and number plates in the finished tour, so having people present during a scan is not a privacy problem. It is a user experience one. A viewer exploring the tour will see staff walking around, sitting at desks, or moving through doorways, which makes the space feel occupied and harder to read as an empty letting. Where possible, clear the floor being scanned as we move through it.
For occupied buildings where clearing staff is disruptive, early morning or weekend scans are the cleaner option.
Whiteboards and screens
Most things in the tour can be blurred on request, including whiteboards, screens, and printed documents. That said, best practice is to clear and close everything before the scan. Blurring is a fix, not a standard, and a tour full of blurred-out content is a worse viewing experience than one where the space is simply tidy. Wipe whiteboards, turn screens off or switch them to something neutral, and put away anything sensitive on desks.
A Matterport tour is indexed by search engines, shareable by link, and often embedded on commercial listing platforms. It has a much longer shelf life than a showing, so treat anything visible in it as public.
Decide which rooms to include
Open every door you want scanned. Close every door you do not. Plant rooms, back-of-house storage, and toilet blocks are usually excluded unless they are directly relevant to the letting. Server rooms should almost always stay closed.
We will scan everything we can access, so the easiest way to control what ends up in the tour is to control what we can walk into.
For an idea of how long we will be on site, see how long a Matterport scan takes. Once the tour is published, how to navigate a Matterport virtual tour covers what viewers can do inside it.