Screen Grab: Inman Connect Now

Hi All,

Here is an (lightly) abridged transcript of the Inman Connect Online session Wednesday (3 June 2020) – (Looking Ahead: What’s Next for Tech) – that included Matterport CMO Robin Daniels.

Panelists

✓ Wendy Forsythe, Chief Brand Officer, Fathom Realty (moderator)
✓ Robin Daniels, CMO, Matterport
✓ Gaylin Ziegler, COO Keller Offers
✓ John Mazur, CEO, Homesnap

Wendy Forsythe, Chief Brand Officer, Fathom Realty
... Why don't we start with some introductions. Robin, you are first up on my screen, so let's start with you.

Robin Daniels, CMO, Matterport
All right. Well, I'm glad to be here. Good to see you again, Wendy. I'm Robin Daniels. I am the Chief Marketing Officer over at Matterport. I joined the company back in March during a global pandemic, so that has been a wild experience to say the least. Having never met anybody in the company in person.

Robin Daniels
But for those of you who don't know Matterport, we're the leader in 3D capture with customers and partners such as Redfin, VRBO, WeWork, REALTOR.com, Sotheby's and many, many more around the world.

Wendy Forsythe
Awesome. Okay. And Matterport has certainly been a great tool for all of us over the last 90 days. We'll dig into some of the interesting stuff you can share on that perspective.

Robin Daniels
Sure.
...

John Mazur, CEO, Homesnap
Recovery to me is starting to happen as their competence continues to go up. The other thing I'll add that was really interesting in the data is that we saw the first bifurcation was during COVID was that highly productive agents, more than five sides per year or three X, more optimistic than agents that were doing five or less sides per year. So there was a real bleak outlook with lower productive agents and what we've been trying to do in our reach out through that to them and our trainings through them is this is a massive opportunity for them because there's a real reset in the market now for everyone. And especially if you're a newer agent embrace all this incredible new technology, I was just playing with Matterport. By the way, today I sent Robin an email, his iPhone [inaudible 00:00:00:49], the ability to capture that. I thought that was great, but this is a level playing field again now. And so use this as an opportunity to embrace what the new normal is. And I think you'll be really surprised how successful you can be.

...

Wendy Forsythe
... Robin, you mentioned in your intro welcome to real estate, like day one COVID so that's always fun. Matterport had been an active participant in Inman for years. So we've had your colleagues in the past, tell us that we'd using, tours and introducing the cameras. And one of the things I've observed is many companies have been so quick to innovate during this window of 90 days. And Matterport is no exception to that. So share with us some of the things that you've been innovating on through the COVID crisis.

Robin Daniels
Thank you. Yeah, it was certainly an introduction to real estate. So, it's been interesting. We have been growing for the last nine years and at a pretty steady clip and we've done a lot of research into the popularity of virtual tours and it was becoming more and more necessary to really sell your home and sell it well. And we actually did a big survey back in January [2020] that show that listings for 3D tours sell 20% faster and also at 9% higher listing price, which is great. So we started having some data that was all pre pandemic, of course, independent like it.

Robin Daniels
And we don't really have any new data, but what's been interesting is we just get... We have the data in terms of how many people are coming to us saying, now we need 3D tours more than ever. It's not a... it's a now at this point. It's an absolute essential if you can't really conduct business, unless you do a 3D tour of the home that you're listing. And so we had the best April ever. And then based on that, April, just be having a flood of demand for our technology. We decided to pull in a release of Matterport [?] when it was actually supposed to come out later in the year, but we said, well-

Wendy Forsythe
Yay.

Robin Daniels
If we could make sure that ... Well, we thought, well, what can we do? We're not a big company can't donate billions to bail out companies, but if we can help companies maintain, not just maintain your operations or maybe even elevate themselves and escalate that during this pandemic time, let's do whatever we can. We pull them to release of Matterport five phone, early May. And so we released the idea we... Instead of having to go and buy a 3D camera that we've been selling for the last couple of years, what if you could just use your [iPhone]?

Wendy Forsythe[/b
on it now that we'll never use again.

[b]Robin Daniels
No, that's not there. But the camera fidelity is in a whole different class, really professionally, but if you have a small space or small room and you want to be able to share that with the world, why not be able to use your phone or your iPad. And so certainly it's the real estate industry. We've seen that, just an explosion of people not using Matterport [?], but we've also seen galleries, shops, museums, and so on all using this technology because it's, again a way of letting the world into your space.

Robin Daniels
And of course not what we're seeing in terms of just the real estate is a market is just a huge uptick in and the desire for, okay, what else can we do with this technology? So it's an early release it, because we pulled it in so many months and there's so many requests coming in for enhancements. We want to add music to it, we want to add virtual furniture, we want to be able to change the color of walls and all kinds of interesting things. And so there's no lack of interesting idea and desire to make this even better. So that's-

Wendy Forsythe
I mean that adoption is... It shows you, there is a definite need there. So, Tim Olson, one of our [online conference] viewers, asked if you could repeat the stats that you shared on the 3D force?

Robin Daniels
Sure. So listings for 3D tour sells 20% faster and at 9% higher listing price and this is data from January. So who knows what it is today? We just heard from some previous speakers, demand is picking up, we have a lack of inventory, so I wouldn't display stats hold, or even maybe increase.

...

Gaylin Ziegler, COO Keller Offers
I think the great thing that we saw with agents is that they do embrace video more now, I can see why Matterport numbers are crazy because they will use that when they're giving the tools to their clients to do it. Right, so they don't have to go with the home right now. I think as things open up though, they'll begin to do that more as well. And they'll use these video conferencing tools to do listing appointments, to do all kinds of things. When you move to a much more electronic experience for the consumer, which is great because it's very efficient.

Wendy Forsythe
Right. And John [Mazur, CEO, Homesnap], and you had such a large punch of cool studies across the country with so many different experiences. Is there any recommendations based on what we're seeing that agents should be thinking about as they think about kind of innovating as we move forward and what really focused on?

John Mazur, CEO, Homesnap
Yeah. I just want to echo, I really agree with Galen and Robin are saying, I think all these trends are converging. My biggest recommendation would be... Everyone always talks about the onslaught of the internet, having an online presence, but you need to have a virtual presence now too. And the really cool thing is we're all getting used to. I was just thinking, dealing with talking my 76 year old mother is now using Instacart to order groceries. They'd be scared to go to the grocery store. And it's hilarious. But she wakes up at 4:00 in the morning to put an order in at 7:00 it's... She's still got some optimization to go there, but she's doing it that never would've happened, if we quoted. And so, I think all of these technologies that Keller and Matterport [?] and so many other, this is time for agents to just go all in embracing and stuff.

John Mazur
You can get overwhelmed, right? You can't use too much, but pick the ones that are best for you. And I think all of us as providers of technology to agents and consumers really have to listen. I love the story that Robin said that how they're providing a equipment agnostic version. So agents, can actually take Matterport, 3D views themselves. What we see on our end, it's been exciting is we've had features that have been in our platform for a while that suddenly just exploded. We have a feature called Homesnap stories because we work with [?].

John Mazur
And so an agent can actually shoot an Instagram, like story independent they're listing for free within Facebook. That's a whole almost 200% in the last two months increase, just been incredible. We just launched the ability to be able to search by virtual open house. So you can see all the virtual open houses that are taking place. And I think I'm just excited. I think there's just more and more, really effective tools coming to market to help agents and consumers. But the number one thing I would say is you just engage in, embrace it, have your virtual presence, just as wonderful, provide wild customer service through your computer and your phone like you do when you are...

...

Wendy Forsythe
...Okay. But... Robin, I've got a question for you and it's a combination of maybe a question and some extra requests. Michael Green would like to know "When will Matterport is considering giving access inside of the tour so that you can have viewers or conference call or have a live engagement within a virtual tour, who's not one sided with your [?]?"

Robin Daniels
It's such a great question. And so we actually had somebody posted on YouTube at [?] soon and Matterport together with somebody on Zoom with a client walking through a Matterport tour, which was super interesting. It's not in our immediate roadmap to do that. I'll just say, but I'll give you just a sneak peek of what we're working on is if there's so many great ideas like this, this is one of those ideas that I would love to do it, but people are asking what about putting in virtual reality characters in a Matterport? What about putting in sound or music? What about being able to change colors and virtual staging kinds of interesting things? What about outside views and so on? There's no lack of ideas, but the better option for us is to open up the platform and that our partners all handle integration.

Robin Daniels
And because again, we're a small company, we can't do everything. And so we already have a lot of other companies working with us on integration through our SDK, but the goal really later this year is to make it much simpler for any company out there who want to integrate with us again, whether or not you want to do assume integration or whatever Google hangout could be. It could be FaceTime, maybe whatever you want to do to integrate with our platform. Absolutely go for it because that's how you get really that innovative step change that I'm really excited to see. I'm already seeing some just crazy thing. Somebody also integrated with unity. I don't think any of you know the Unity virtual reality engine, they started putting in characters into a Matterport space. For some time we predict the [?], well space is beautiful, but there's no life to it.

Robin Daniels
Well, what if you added characters to a space and shared how to really it, if you're sitting around a dinner table or you're having a conversation here and sitting in the lounge and watching TV together, what would that feel like? Because you're going to buy something without ever setting foot in that space, the big purchase you want to know what the feel is not just the look of it is. I actually had a friend who had texted me about three weeks ago. He lives in New York City. I worked with him at WeWork, and he says, I just bought a house in Montana without ever seeing it. The real estate agent had a Matterport tour. And I just thought to myself, it's mind boggling how far we've come 20 years ago, I was nervous about buying a shirt online. What if it didn't fit? And I have to send it back. Now, people are buying houses online, the biggest purchase of your life, without ever setting foot on it. Right. I think about the next couple of years what's going to happen. It's going to be really interesting.

Wendy Forsythe
... never enough time for these conversations, but I love the enthusiasm and the energy. And seeing that we're not just talking about innovation, we're seeing it come to market so quickly in such real ways. And that just is an exciting time in the real estate industry. And you guys all play with companies and yourself play such a big part in that. So keep doing what you're doing. It's super exciting to see it all happen. And thank you so much for joining us.

Robin Daniels
Thank you [Wendy 00:14:19].

Gaylin Ziegler
Thank you [Wendy 00:14:20]. [crosstalk 00:14:24].

Wendy Forsythe
And I am going to invite my co-moderator for the afternoon, [Carlton English 00:00:14:31], to join me back on screen. And we're just going to give you all a collective, thanks so much for signing in and joining us. It's been an interesting event to kind of do this live and we're glad that you all came along and gave it a try and with that. So-

Robin Daniels:
For all the great things that lie ahead for us as we continue to navigate into recovery. And that one thing about our business, we survive and we thrive and that's what we'll continue to do.

Carleton English, Reporter, Barron's, New York, NY
Absolutely. Thank you everyone.

Wendy Forsythe
Thank you everyone.