Nodalview Video: How Virtual Tour Experiences are Shaping the Future of Real Estate[/url] | Video courtesy of Nodalview SA/NV YouTube Channel | 23 March 2022

Speakers

1. Matterport Partnerships Director Martin Bromfield
2. Nodalview Co-Founder and CEO Thomas Lepelaars (@ThomasNodalview)

Dan

Transcript

[00:00:02]
Thomas Lepelaars: Hello, and good morning to everyone. It's my pleasure to be today with Martin from Matterport. We are welcoming you guys to a Nodalview co-hosted webinar with Matterport. Maybe to make sure that everyone connected to this call today is here and hears us correctly, if you can just drop us a small message in the chat saying who you are, where you come from, if you hear us okay.

Just to make sure that everything is technically okay and that you guys are here and can hear us correctly. We have a really great program for you guys today, so it's really my honor to be presenting this with Matterport, whom we've recently partnered with, and to be able to bring today to you guys how we see the virtual experiences and how they're shaping the future of real estate.

Most of you know Matterport, of course, industry leader. Martin and I today, we'll be talking for the next 30-40 minutes on how we see the online experience shifting and especially how this has an impact on you as a real estate agent or a real estate professional, maybe a photographer, and how this has just a macro impact on everyone looking to basically find a new place to call home.

Without further ado, it's my immense pleasure to introduce you to Martin. Martin, you are Partnerships Director at Matterport. Maybe you can briefly introduce yourself to the crowd today.

[00:01:33]
Martin Bromfield: Yes, of course. Thanks for the introduction, Thomas. Nice to meet everyone. I'm Martin Bromfield, I'm the Partnerships Director for EMEA at Matterport. Partnerships obviously is quite a broad term, so my core focus is on the new technology partners that we are signing up who are creating cool new applications on top of Matterport's 3D models.

Thomas and Nodalview are, of course, a great example of that, and we'll be running today in part through Nodalview's new application that's been added on top of Matterport's models, so really looking forward to that.

[00:02:17]
Thomas Lepelaars: Awesome. Thanks a lot, Martin. Of course, myself, for those of you who don't know me, I'm Thomas. I'm the Co-Founder and CEO of Nodalview. Today with Martin, we'll be hosting the topic today on How the Future of Real Estate Looks Like with Modern Visual Experiences. Martin, maybe you can take it away by explaining it.

If anyone wouldn't know who Matterport is and what Matterport does, maybe this is a great moment for you to explain who Matterport is and what you guys do.

[00:02:46]
Martin Bromfield: Yes, thank you, Thomas. I'm sure that we'd love for everybody to know Matterport. We are the world's leading spatial data company. By that, we mean we transform spaces into data. In fact we IPOed on NASDAQ, some of you might know, last July. We're really on a quest, I guess you could say.

We're on a quest to digitize and index the built world to become, if you like, the Google Maps of the built world. Because when you digitize a building, you turn it into data, and when you have data you can unlock some incredibly valuable insights on those buildings. We make it really simple to capture a space. You can use a variety of devices.

You could use our Matterport camera, but we're also compatible with some of the leading RICOH and Insta360 cameras and more recently with Apple and Android smartphones. In fact, we've just launched a new motorized mount called Access to make smartphone capture a lot quicker, but also a lot more precise and accurate. Companies are really using these virtual tours.

We'll come onto this in a bit more detail later, but they're really using them to better design, build, promote, and also understand physical spaces like houses, offices, stores, factories, and so on. Now you can do some post production yourselves to the Matterport 3D models in your Matterport accounts, so things like automatic measurements of rooms or objects in rooms can be done.

Auto face blurring for privacy, unlimited high res photographs. There's quite a few things that you can do. But we've actually now taken this to the next level by enabling technology partners to create and commercialize these cool new experiences that I mentioned earlier on top of our Matterport models, and soon you'll be able to discover these partners inside your Matterport accounts.

When we launch our upmarket place. Of course, a great example of one of these partners is Nodalview, who have created an easy to use agent-guided virtual viewing experience, including registration forms for capturing leads, which we'll go into in more detail shortly. Of course, we have other partner applications as well which are very relevant to real estate.

The main one that jumps to mind is the photo realistic virtual staging of furniture, which is terrific for marketing empty homes and offices, and there are many more. But at the high level anyway, that's magical.

[00:05:46]
Thomas Lepelaars: Yeah, I think it's really interesting, especially you guys recently announced a couple of groundbreaking integrations with Sketchfab, which I think is one of the largest libraries of 3D assets. I think what's really interesting today, Martin, is to explain how this digital twin, I think the official word is for Matterport, and how you can use this at different moments of the lifecycle of the building.

Of course today, we're focused on the transact part, as you said, because our audience is mostly geared towards real estate. But I think the very exciting thing we see down the road with Matterport is indeed that there are multiple occasions for homeowners, real estate agents, home sellers, to interact with a digital copy of their house, and I think there's a lot of exciting things to come ahead.

I'm really happy too that we have people today from Dubai, South Africa, Belgium, Greece, so hello to everyone in the chat who is reaching out to us. We're really happy to be able to present this to you guys today, and we hope you'll learn a lot. Maybe a bit more about Nodalview. Our mission is really to define a new standard in the way people find a place to call home.

Our mission is really to empower real estate agents to basically leverage any visual assets to re-invent the way that people interact with real estate today, and to build this very strong and modern online experience. The estate worth that we have seen is that the real estate transaction itself has been evolving quite a lot over the past couple of years, but there's a specific segment that really hasn't changed.

I think we've seen this especially highlighted during in recent periods of the pandemic of COVID. But of course, everyone starts now searching for property online. I think over 95 percent of real estate project started online with people browsing through these incredible platforms like Seloger, Idealista, Immoweb, Rightmove every country has this very dominant couple of platforms which aggregate most of the offers of the market.

Obviously you select properties on there, and then you come into the physical world where you go and visit, and then you go and physically interact with properties. That experience hasn't really changed. If you look over the past couple of years, those portals have been evolving, they've been going online, and then you've got post transaction, a lot of things with digital notary.

But the visiting of properties itself, the experience hasn't really changed, and it's becoming more and more complicated as we speak. The reality of the real estate industry today is that there's actually multiple customers through a real estate agent and we'll speak about this a bit later with Martin. But a real estate agent today has two customers.

You have on one hand, the buyers who are buying or renting real estate, and then you have on the other hand sellers or homeowners who are renting out their space. Both of these customers have to be served by the real estate agents. Both of these customers have changed. Buyers, probably younger generation conditioned to experiences like Netflix, Amazon, Airbnb, we want everything.

Everything has to be fast and transparent. Then on the other hand, you have sellers and sellers are also evolving this kind of this digital era where everyone thinks you are a doctor because you can Google your symptoms. People being more and more aware that they can do things themselves, and so these people are also becoming more and more demanding.

Now, I think this is a great moment also to speak about other macro changes in the environment. I think Martin you guys have a very strong vision on this new buzzword maybe, but at least this is true reality of the future which is called the Metaverse. This might be really interesting for you to explain to the audience how you guys see the Metaverse.

What's the definition of the Metaverse and how are you guys talking this [inaudible 00:09:36] today?

[00:09:40]
Martin Bromfield: We have Facebook to thank for this. There are many different definitions of Metaverse, so I do think it's fairly confusing for a lot of people and for us the Metaverse is a virtual environment that connects real-world people. But it's not something that can be owned. It's more of a collaborative pursuit really to build these virtual environments.

I do get asked sometimes is Matterport, the metaverse. I suppose you could loosely maybe think of each Matterport space as being a mini Metaverse and from that perspective, real estate agents and indeed many other sectors are already reaping the benefits of these virtual environments.

[00:10:31]
Martin Bromfield: I think it's worth actually framing the opportunity here with regards to real estate. There are some people out there who perhaps think 3D is just a fact that it fades away as we learn to cope with COVID. But I would argue really that COVID has just brought the inevitable shift to 3D forwards by a few years.

To really get real estate into perspective, there's some solid research out there. We've actually used the study done by UK estate agent severals that estimates there are around four billion buildings in the world, which equates to about 20 billion spaces. Now there were more spaces and buildings. Just because some buildings, you might have a five-story building where it's retail on the ground floor.

Might be officers on the next floor and residential penthouse so that's why there are more spaces and buildings, but that's a huge amount. Actually if you add up the value of all those buildings globally, you come out at something like $230 trillion. I mean, it is by far the largest asset class in the world. It's about two or three times the size of all of the global equity markets put together.

The ridiculous thing about this is that it's almost entirely offline and therefore undervalued. There are hundreds of billions of dollars and in unrealized efficiencies that could be gained by companies if those buildings moved from analog to digital, to unlock powerful insights. Those insights could be things at a high-level market data.

Now obviously you need a very good coverage of captured spaces in regions to make sure it's statistically representative of that market. But nevertheless, you could see a time where you could say, Hey, what's the average size of a kitchen in London versus Paris? Or the typical color of wolves in offices in Amsterdam is white, but in Berlin is blue, whatever.

All very high-level market type of data. But also of course, you can get company level data from this too. By using object recognition, computer vision techniques, you can start to get incredibly clever with these Matterport 3D tours. How many windows are in my five-story office? Or how many of my retail stores have two or more self-serve checkouts?

Where are the sprinkler heads and the fire extinguishers in my factories. Of course, you don't have to travel to those buildings anymore and spend weeks gathering that data. It's all there really at your fingertips immediately, but importantly, it's remotely available. I think if you really had to condensed the value that the 3D tools bring to real estate.

But really right across the board, it really often boils down to the significant production and travel. I mean, if you consider all those trips that we make or maybe used to make before COVID, and we'll do again, I'm sure. But you look at that, and you think of all that unnecessary time and money spent on car journeys maybe to do viewings.

May be trains or flight, sometimes there are hotel costs on top. I mean, of course, very hot topic right now it is net 0. Of course, you look at all that traveling. You think of all those carbon emissions. It's mind-boggling what all of that travel, and the consequences of that. Companies are now thinking, hang on a minute. We can view these buildings remotely and in many cases, we can get the same job done just as effectively, but at a fraction of the cost.

It's a no-brainer to switch to the virtual world. I think hopefully that gives you a good positioning, Thomas, that this is an absolutely massive market opportunity.

[00:15:00]
Martin Bromfield: I can't hear you actually now, Thomas.

[00:15:08]
Thomas Lepelaars: All right. Let me see.

[00:15:12]
Martin Bromfield: I can here you now.

[00:15:13]
Thomas Lepelaars: Can you here me now?

[00:15:14]
Martin Bromfield: Yeah.

[00:15:14]
Thomas Lepelaars: Okay. Sorry.

[00:15:15]
Martin Bromfield: You could have me doing that.

[00:15:18]
Thomas Lepelaars: That's perfect I think my microphone died. I think that's indeed one of the super interesting things about having a digital copy of a building is, and it's super interesting to highlight this now to using today is that indeed what we're talking maybe this moment where you're exchanging a house, when you're trying to sell a house.

Which is indeed one of the very important moments in the life cycle and building, but if you need to this federal on there are so many applications of having a digital copy of your house which I think it's a Matterport CEO RJ Pittman who said this recently the Metaverse is what you guys have always been about, it's about creating this environment.

I think this is important to highlight today because people will see often view the Metaverse as an avatar walking in a 3D, an imaginary world. But if you do zoom completely, what is the Metaverse? Metaverse is just an alternate way to communicate with people in an environment and that environment doesn't have to be just a fancy or imaginary it can be something that exists.

I think that's the combination of Matterport with highly interactive solutions is probably a great definition of using the concept of the Metaverse just to be more efficient and probably to reach more people and basically build relationships in a known or maybe today it's atypical, but a couple of years it will be totally standard way which is just reaching.

Making sure you're able to reach people in this digital lay out. Now, I think what you were saying is super interesting. There's been this impact of COVID and the pandemic and people are saying, okay, but everything remote has been, it was only during COVID and now that COVID is hopefully, phasing out and that we're getting back to new normal, do we still need these interactions?

I think there's some really interesting micro data which is actually showing that COVID was just not a one-time event, it just accelerated these phenomenon's on market that were already there. Everyone was already doing video calls, everyone was already shopping online, everyone was already doing some things online.

But what COVID did is it drastically increased the adoptions of these and of alternate ways of consuming. McKinsey said that, the big change in consumer behavior of COVID-19 has been the shift from offline retail to online e-commerce interactions. It's showing that beyond real estate, there's this is behavioral shifts of people moving to more convenient.

Probably more equal conscious online interactions and having the benefit of being able to access everything at their fingertips. I think that's really interesting. If we go back into the real estate realm, and we looked at this from the perspective of a consumer looking for a place or new home, which has been very relevant, of course, since COVID because all the markets were in and Matter.

I think Matterport isn't even more markets than and Nodalview, but there's this general shift of people moving into new places. There's the really hot real estate market where properties sell pretty fast because a lot of people are moving. But what we see is on these real estate portals and I know many of these are optimized for customers.

Everyone is starting to add this filter about do you want to have a visit with virtual visit? I think this is a very good sign that people who are leading the search for real estate, they're adapting to these modern customer requests, which are, do you have this highly interactive online virtual visit because it generally contributes to the experience.

If we go back to another perspective, there's this need for people to have personalized interactions. This is the million dollar question of how can I be present online, but how can I maximize the personalized experience because everyone hates that horrible chatbot, which endlessly replies the same question and doesn't really answer your question.

On one hand, people wanted to have online interactions and then on the other hand, people really want to have this personal connection, which I personally think is fantastic because if you look at the real estate industry and I think most of the people following us today, if you are in the real estate industry, know that probably it's huge advantage in the transaction itself is the human being.

Is that personal experience that you bring as a real estate agents to comfort people in this is one in lifetime transaction that you're doing, which is probably buying the most expensive, I think you are ever buying housing. Bringing this personalized interaction into this digital world is definitely something that has been changed or that has significantly accelerated since COVID-19.

Now, the paradox is if you look at the traditional way of selling, you're actually not really meeting modern consumers. Because if you look at what happens when you list the house on market, the market is pretty hard, so you get a bunch of inbound leads and we constantly hear people and a customer is saying everyday.
No, I cannot manage all of my inbound leads I've got too many requests to the viewing. This results in only contacting probably the first 10 people that contact you because more than 10 viewings is almost impossible. If you bring these 10 people on site you do physical visits and the market is pretense, so you'll probably get an offer.

But actually if you're simply doing this, you're missing out with this huge untapped potential and maybe you're creating this bad experience for quite a lot of people. What we consider to be the future and how you can really use and leverage digital assets is by building a modern customer journey. That modern customers journey starts by attracting as many people as possible.

Then it's how do you create these engaging and personalized experience. Then we'll go into how do we qualify things. This will be three steps that we will cover. First of all, of course, content, I think here Martin, you can definitely agree that modern listing today should have pictures, videos, floor plans, and a 3D tour. I think one of the great things is if you capture 3D space, you get all of these within the features that you are citing.

[00:21:37]
Martin Bromfield: Yeah, absolutely. It should be very much visual medium. You definitely have the ability, yet within the Matterport account to use the 3D tour, but also if you need to just create unlimited high resolution 2D photographs from the 3D tour you can freeze-frame anyway you like.

[00:22:01]
Thomas Lepelaars: Yeah.

[00:22:02]
Martin Bromfield: You can generate floor plans. You can generate short-form videos as well in there. Yeah, absolutely there are all the tools there to really bring the entire experience alive.

[00:22:16]
Thomas Lepelaars: I think you were saying that this is now available on Matterport with any capturing and camera that you would choose for it from a smartphone 360 camera all the way to the Pro2, you can get access to this awesome library of all virtual assets.

[00:22:30]
Martin Bromfield: Yeah, absolutely. As I mentioned earlier, this vision of us being the Google Maps of the built world. That, of course, you can't do that with a 3,000 euro multiple camera. You need to extend the capture possibilities and so the first way for us was to be compatible with the likes of Ricoh cameras and Insta360s.

Then more recently, as I mentioned, Android and Apple smartphones. Really we've now enabled pretty much anybody on the planet to capture a space across a whole variety of different use cases.

[00:23:07]
Thomas Lepelaars: Yeah, and I think let's really deep dive into all of these individual assets. If we decompose these four visual experiences that are today a must have at your most of listings and unfortunately not yet something that has been standardized, but it starts off with pictures. I think Airbnb was the best example of high-quality pictures would bring you more engaged and more trustworthy online consumers.

I think the story was, they brought professional photographers to New York. They took professional photography of all of the listings and that's when booking started to explode on Airbnb because it was the first time that people had this general sense of I trust these pictures because they look good and so I want to visit this space.

I think this is hugely underestimated, but there's still a lot of markets across Europe and even in the rest of the world where there's still not this high-grade photography quality on listings. The Wall Street Journal said, 60 percent of the time is spent of pictures and it's the first thing you swipe on when you are on listing photos.

It's important to get these really high-quality. I think that's definitely something a vision that is shared between Matterport and Nodalview is that the output of your capture has to be high-quality. I would even go beyond high-quality, it has to be a high-fidelity.

[00:24:30]
Martin Bromfield: Yeah.

[00:24:31]
Thomas Lepelaars: What we noticed is that high-quality pictures generate four times more views online. It really basically attracts more eyeballs to the content.

[00:24:43]
Martin Bromfield: Very quickly to mention on that, by the way, is that for anybody who it wants to virtually stage furniture, for example, inside the Matterport tours the photographs that you can then download from that will actually also show the virtual stage rooms from every angle. I just wanted to mention that photography, of course, it doesn't go away from all this. It's still very important.

[00:25:09]
Thomas Lepelaars: Yes, it also means that I can shoot a 3D twin then I can virtually stage in then I can extract even pictures of the virtual stage house. I think that's super important, especially if you're showing this pictures and then 3D virtual tour and we'll talk about this later, which brings this confidence about the space itself.

It's important to have that consistency in the way that you're marketing content online. Videos I think this is the up-and-coming format. I mean, it's ideal for social media. It's a great way to present your properties. You get five times more views on portals and the National Association of Realtors said, that actually is 73 percent of sellers want video.

Again, particularly to customers and I think today most of the real estate agents connected today, what they're especially looking for are sellers, they're looking for people who want to trust them with their house to list it online and so offering video is a great way of meeting those expectations among customers.

Now, floor plans, it's cited by Zillow to be the second most important feature on their listing. Write move which is the nucleating property. It says that, floor plans increases the click-through rate by 52 percent which is genomics. I think that's one of the great things that probably comes also in this virtual staging and the measurement features that you also have actually mass for digital twin is that you can start really projecting yourself once you have a floor plan.

That you can really understand how I'm going to furnish this, where my couch fit, where my dining table fit. I think these are all small questions and it really brings this convenience you [inaudible 00:26:45]. Now, Martin I'll just let you present this part, because you're cleaning the expert here. I'll leave you to illustrate on some of all the benefits of having a 3D virtual walk-through over listing.

[00:26:59]
Martin Bromfield: -Yeah, sure. I know will probably come on some more stats as well later on in some brief case studies. But I think these are two really good stats for agency, 74 percent of agents win more listings with Matterport, 95 percent of people more likely to call buyers, more likely to call about properties, so it's very powerful.

I think when you look at this to say the benefits to agents, so I think if you take a step back and first, look at the benefits to both the buyer and the seller, because they are inextricably linked really to the agent benefits. If we look at the buyer, is a far better buying experience, so there are no surprises when you finally visit the property.

How many times have we all wasted precious weekends visiting properties that were a really core match, it's hugely frustrating. But this way the buyer knows exactly what to expect. It's of course, a huge time-saver, so the buyer is only physically visiting properties that they are truly interested in. Just going back to what you were saying Thomas about measurements.

One of the reasons that you keep going back, either to help inform your decision or even when you made the decision, you still want to keep going back in because you have these questions around. "Would my sofa fit in the corner of a lounge next to the window?" Well, of course you can actually use the Matterport tour to do that, because we have automatic measurements in there.

So you can measure a room, you can measure any objects within the room, so massive time-saver there. It also engenders trust, because this is a true walk-through, so the buyer is controlling exactly where they go inside the tour. They're not standing in the middle of a room and just spinning 360 degrees around a fixed point, and then maybe magically tell-porting into the next room.

They're actually moving through the property as if they were there, so it generates trust. They trust what they see, and it also really shortens therefore, the decision-making process. In fact, in regions where the property market is hot, many people are buying properties without ever stepping foot inside, and the one that absolutely blows my mind is in the US.

It's the record that we have anyway. There was a property which sold site unseen for $18 million. How about that?

[00:29:45]
Thomas Lepelaars: - $18 million.

[00:29:46]
Martin Bromfield: - I'm not sure I could be quite that trusting, but there we go. Then when you look at the seller's, huge benefits here, and of course, this is really key for the agents because in most markets anyway, it's the seller who's paying the fees. These are the people that you need to win their listing. Some of the key benefits here really, convenient is a huge one.

As a home owner, you don't really want to be opening your door to time wasters or poor matches. Each person that enters your house, you want them to be genuinely interested, because they've already seen the property virtually. Even tight to that there's a safety angle, particularly today with COVID, the fewer people entering your home, the better.

All of the data, and we'll come on some more stats, but the data confirms a quicker sale and often at a higher selling price. These are incredibly compelling selling points really for agents to leverage when they're trying to win over these sellers and win the listing. I mean, who wouldn't want to sell their home quicker for more money with fewer physical viewings? It's a no-brainer.

[00:31:01]
Thomas Lepelaars: - Absolutely agree. I think this is exactly what we're going to dive deep into its saying, how can we put all of this together and how do we probably increase all the effects that you were saying as a real estate agent? Because I think saying indeed, other neighboring countries like in Belgium.

For example, you still have 70 percent of the transactions that are initially listed through real estate agent. Then out of those 70 percent, you still have 30 percent that end on to impact to a real estate agent. I think this is because it's unquestioned today, the adding value of a real estate agent. What we often see an overview is this questioning of how do I stay relevant indeed in this era.

Where we've talked about metaverse, you've talked about virtual tours and the true question is, what is the added value of the real estate agent? I think the true added value for real estate agent is still to help people make this decision, and part of that decision is by being informed in the best way possible. You were highlighting most of these questions, where my safe will fit?

Will this be the right measurements? But there's this whole other aspect of the job of real estate agent, which is also giving the history of the building, explaining those couple of smooth things which will really bring you even closer to the building themselves. I think this is what we typically see and definitely from Nodalview during the COVID period.

It has been one of the biggest changes that real estate agents have adopted, which was allowing them to engage within a virtual tour. What is this? This is really saying, what we've just covered in this first part, the advantages of having all of these was what virtual assets will give you basically an insane amount of online views.

It will bring more comfort to your buyers, to your sellers. But the true question is today of how can you leverage those to build a really strong and online experience? I think one of the people joining us today, was saying truly there's going to be a ton of new UI UX experience is built around these digital twins, and I think this is exactly what Nodalview allows you to do.

It's basically creating this very real-estate focused online experience to really help real estate agents built stronger online experiences to be more relevant than to close and win more business. Now if we take a small step back, and we were talking about this offline with Martin, is this tendency for the real estate industry to drop its efforts when demand is high?

You were saying it, if you can sell a house remotely, then you get to drop your standards because everything becomes easy. It's very easy to sell a house today in most markets, especially if you have a nice garden or terrace in big cities, these are must haves now the modern generation. We were talking with customers in Paris saying the Parisian people want to live in Paris.

But don't want to have any noise anymore, which is impossible when you live in a big city. You have these people who are looking for these incredible places to stay and that's why demand for real state is very high. Now there's this adjacent risk to all of this, which is if it becomes so easy to sell and you constantly hear your neighbors saying that they sold in 24 hours.

Bearing that, your cousins sold their own very fast and your relatives are selling very fast, the question that arises from consumer perspective is, should I be using the professional? Should I be using a real state agent who might take a fee and I'm going to cut, if I can sell it myself because everyone is telling me today that it's really easy to sell?

By lowering the efforts, it's making it even easier to consider selling by yourself, and which action says that it's just increasingly important for real estate agents to prove their value in the transaction. Now, there's a very positive study that came out, and this is a study that was done by Harrison [inaudible 00:34:51] which is a French.

They said that 79 percent of consumers would consider selling with a professional if he has digital sales too. What is this saying? This is basically saying that one of the reasons that made the people consider going through the real-estate agent, is if they can provide tools and sales strategies that consumers don't have access to.

There's a need to prove that you can not only capture and list all these marketing assets, but there's this need to prove that you are also the best person to do the job. Now this is exactly what our integration with Matterport is about. It's about bringing modern selling to the built world and leads to better attract, engage and qualify with leads online. Now, what do we do?

Concretely, is we create, remember this traditional real estate transaction We bring this to 21st century. What we're doing is we're bringing this unique moment which today is rarely exists, but it's creating this moment between your leads and your visits, which we call remote qualification, so imagine this, as Martin was saying, as the interaction in your mini metaverse which is the property of your house.

What does this allow? Well, it's much more efficient and convenient to connect into this environment and we'll show you how you can do that. But basically, what we're doing is we're allowing you to qualify the interests of your buyers as a real estate agent. As Martin was saying, real estate agency have buyers incentives by customers, and your sellers they might not want every single potential buyer.

Just even a curious person to come into the house. One of your roles as a real estate agent is to qualify the interests of buyers, to bring many highly qualified buyers on-site. Now, to show you how easy this is, and how this really reproduces the same experience as you're doing today with your customers when you are bringing them in the house is.

This is a screencast of what life guided tour, looks like inside of a Matterport space, so it's very easy. You can put in your Matterport content directly into the Nodalview platform, and then you can seamlessly connect with your customers inside of this virtual environments. I don't know why my video is not playing.

Basically you can seamlessly invite people by e-mail, by text message, or even by sending a direct link. This will invite your hosts into this private environment where you control the digital twin. You can connect as an agent, you can connect with your bias. The great thing is that you can connect with multiple people at the same time, and the awesome thing is that this digital twin is actually replicated within your customer.

So contrary to what you guys are seeing here today, which is a screen cast, which might be a bit chalky and a bit laggy, you're really getting that super crisp and high-quality, and high-fidelity digital twin directly with all of your hosts and all the people that you're inviting. Now the great thing is that this allows you to tour the property the same way you would do on-site.

It also allows you to give that explanation of this has been renovated in 2020, can basically give all your commercial speech, which is still your role as a real estate agent, which is selling the property. You have the advantage has also having all of your portfolio on the left and remember this is a qualification call. You're getting to know your customers.

You're getting to understand, is it a husband and wife with one, two, three children? Have they already sold their house or they renting currently? Basically, you're maximizing your experience and the interactions that you're having with your potential buyers. Now it's super important to understand this notion of also building up an experience.

Contrary to a classical Zoom screen-share, you're also allowing your customers to interact within the free space. The same way you would do a physical visit, your customers can really take control of the tour, and they can start touring the property by themselves, and you can see exactly where they're walking into.

If you see that they're spending a bit of time on that outdated kitchen, you can probably give them an idea of how much it would cost to replace that, because you have to help people correct themselves. The great thing here is that we really take the [inaudible 00:39:11] The awesome thing here is that all of the advantages, all that post production that you're doing in your multiple digital twin.

You can re-import it into this highly interactive experience with the customers and you really control how people are touring the house, which I think is also definitely an important aspect of the modern transaction. Now, if we do zoom in and check a bit of what are the advantages of this for you as a real estate agent?

Well, the number one advantage is that you're really going to speak to 100 percent of your leads. You'll no longer have unhappy people because they're not able to call you, because you're not available. You'll be able to easily interact with 100 percent of your leads because you'll be able to bring them into this highly efficient, and I think Martin, will use this word which is convenient experience of touring house.

Now, naturally, this means that you're going to filter out people, which means that you're actually going to do less visits. This is really great for home owner, it means that you don't have to, I think everyone who's a real estate agent here is dreading the fact that they have to go and visit with the kids running around, the homeowners there.

It's a total nightmare. Nothing is cleaned up and it doesn't really give you that really good first impression. Well, that is finished because you're doing that in this kind of high fidelity digital twin. I think if everything is nice and clean on that day, you're just always going to present the property the first time in the most beautiful way possible.

Now the good thing is if you bring less buyers onsite, but more qualified buyers, you will also have more competing offers. I think this is really important because if you look at what this does and kind of branding this has done in modern real estate experience. Is you're basically answering the needs of the modern consumers.

This is the biggest thing that we hear. Agents are saying, yeah, but you cannot sell a house online. Well, Martin proved that wrong, because you can actually, $18 million goes for transaction, purely online, is pretty incredible. But secondly, it's not about really selling online. It's about just creating this online experience where you match the needs of the modern consumer.

I think anyone today who gets a Zoom call requests, or Google Meet invitation for meeting is absolutely not surprised to hold those interactions. So why couldn't you have those kind of interactions around real estate? Just to understand how people are, what they are looking for if it really matches and then it's really understanding, are you bringing the right people to the right property?

I think that those are really important. Now we have this awesome customer in South France who is [inaudible 00:41:40] and what they do is they systematically apply this strategy of pre-qualifying the leads on every single house they sell. What they typically get in this very hot sale markets. They get about 50 phone calls as soon as they publish a property online.

Out of those initial 50 phone calls, what they say is they always, always offer people to remote guided tour. This is great for your buyers. It's just assessing if the property meets their needs. But it's also reassuring people say, if you visit online with me first, you'll be much more relaxed once we visit physically and you won't be rushing up.

I have I seen everything, and then you have to give in enough at the same time because you know that everyone's competing to buy the house. It's really giving this kind of convenient way of getting to know people and showing them the house that they really want to visit. Out of those 50 phone calls, 23 of them go into this live by the tour.

Then out of those 23, they basically go and visit physically with four people. These four people most often always give an offer because they're highly qualified people. Those office compete until you really get the best of all possible for your home sellers, which is really important and you give that confidence of, I've shown your house to 23 people.

Now, I don't know how many real-estate agents today here can manage 23 visits for a house, or it's a nightmare. These 23 visits, he does them in the first two or three days of when you list the house online. By just creating this super convenient and easy to access online viewing he's actually doing more viewings than before, but he's saving these 15 hours of useless travel.

I think in today's context is super important. If you can avoid 23 or 19 unqualified visits going through a property and back and paying super expensive gas fees, it's definitely a noticeable increase efficiency and also time spent to win new listings. To go back to what Martin was saying, we have three stakeholders, the agent, the seller, the buyer.

If you bring this new standard, you're basically making everyone happy. You're bringing the right buyer to the right property. You're giving this fantastic online experience. Your sellers, they're getting the best offer in a reduced amount of time. I think this is super important. It's really important to understand that you're giving a maximum amount of digital value to your customers.

Leveraging all of the easiness of my views, and then you as real estate agent, you're getting this five-star reputation, and you're not only getting it from people that you do a transaction with. You're doing it with all of these buyers that are getting served in a very seamless and online fashion. So you're really getting everything you want as a real estate agent.

On top of this, you're creating this immense pool of new business from your buyers. I think this is one of the most contradictory things we hear is people saying, I'm looking for new sellers, my biggest challenge is to find sellers who want to sell the house. The statistics that we have in Europe at least is at 30 percent of the people that are looking to buy a house or going to be selling that house in the next couple of months.

It's really important, especially in a hot market when a house is sold very fast. You're probably not going to be very confident to list your house if you haven't found a new house yet. But being able to interact with people very early in their full point, they're looking for new house and simply asking one question during that remote interaction of, are you a seller?

Creates this immense pool of new business for you as a real estate agent. But it also builds up this buyer database because you're speaking to more people. Everyone knows today that probably the biggest advantage when you're going to listing appointment is to say, I have a buyer for your house. I know someone who wants exactly the house that you're going to sell.

Please sell with me. Proving that when they turn up online and sales experience is really important because it just gives you even more value to your real estate agency. Again, what the great thing here is that you're just reinvesting that money at the time that you've spent into digitizing the space, you're just reusing this to be very very relevant as a modern real estate agent.

I think if we were looking into the kind of very easy and stats is, today's 79 percent of the customers want you to prove your added value in the real estate transaction. I think this is super important. I think Martin, you're saying that you had a couple of case studies from multiple customers who are actually had a turn of success also with sight and scenes. I think you were talking about Redfin.

[00:46:24]
Martin Bromfield: Yeah, that's right. I mean a lot of our data backs up exactly the data that you've been showing. But Redfin, Which is the number one real estate brokerage in the US. We did a joint survey actually with them and we found that 78 percent of buyers worry that listing photos might be doctored in some way. Not exactly very trusting.

Their concern that photos are basically not representative of their homes, and 71 percent of buyers said they would purchase a home site unseen. Which is amazing. That was a very, very high statistic. Also looking mover ever here in Europe, we have, for example in Slovakia an agent called BMI or BEMI just to ensure virtual listings have created a 17 percent rise in Leads compared to traditional listings.

That you've increased inquiries by 20 percent per property. They've estimated the brokers are spending about 20 percent less time on a property when they capture a digital twin which links to what you were saying about the CLO earlier. Virtual tour listings, they stay on the market 12 percent less time than homes without them.

Lots of very strong stats there. Angular Volckers is another one in luxury real estate brand in Hamburg, had been using Matterport for a long time. Actually when COVID came along, there agents were already trained and up and running with the Matterport technology. But they've seen it as a massive differentiator in the market.

I think this is really important. I think the message here is if you are as agents trying to find listings and maybe they're scarcer listings and they would normally be it's even more important to differentiate themselves. Angular Volckers have used a 3D as a differentiator and as a result by closed 2020 with record revenues up 30 percent year on year.

[00:48:44]
Martin Bromfield: I think this is really leading to some key trends and one of the things I hear a lot now from agents is they are now making it mandatory for buyers to see a virtual hearing first before they will allow them to go on a physical visit. That is their qualification process. The second thing is agents who quite rightly want to control that first viewing are now turning to these fantastic applications.

Like nodal views, so that they can actually do want to be one-to-one or open houses virtually. Agents are salespeople. You know the property well, you can sell the benefits, you can cross-sell lift may be that buyer isn't responding well to that property. Then you can just toggle onto a different property. It's all very easy in the same call.

[00:49:43]
Martin Bromfield: You're effectively, properly qualifying the buyer so to make sure I deserve to be on the shortlist. It's really becoming now a trend and a major differentiator for agents.

[00:49:55]
Thomas Lepelaars: I think you're highlighting something as very importantly is you're not replacing a physical visit. I think you're just creating a more convenient way. We had these very interesting parallel with people buying cars online. In the past, people would go in and visiting roughly 4.5 car dealership before choosing the car they would buy.

Today's statistic is 1.3 visits to the car dealership. Why? It's because you just have this much stronger online experience where you can view a bunch of stuff you can interact with before we configure it, and you still go physically to order your car but you're just going much less often and I think we're seeing the same trends in real estate.

We have this incredible statistic, which is the average time that a recent agent engage with a lead on a virtual viewing or remote guided tour is 20 minutes. That's a pretty intense moment that you're creating with buyers. It's also given 20 minutes of this super high-quality service where you're answering all the questions because there will always be questions.

I think everyone here always knows the questions about when was this redone or how much consumption is this or other neighbors too noisy? I think everyone has those questions and being able to give this convenient and comfortably is super important. I think this is what we've definitely see is in our function with Matterport.
It is this is giving trust to people to leverage Matterport tools more often on properties because they just know that extra hour or two that you're going to spend on site capturing additional tool would be easily pay back afterwards by just allowing you to enable with multiple people show this also to other home sellers who are selling the house.

There's multiple and and multitude of opportunities out there. But being able to do this systematically and I think here Martin as you said that the most advanced agents that we see are doing this systematically, which means that it's no longer possible to visit physically if you haven't visited remotely before.

You can visit remotely by yourself by just sending the max pooling, we can even choose to visit with the agent. I think this is really where as a modern real estate agent, you're creating these game changing experience because every person that goes through a live by the tool is always delighted by the experience.

Creating this delightful moment in transaction, I think is probably a good way to wrap up our session today which is saying you have these awesome visual assets and you have a ton of technology that makes it more convenient and easier to basically do your job in a way where you're still do. I think it's really important.

For real estate agents who are used to building those interpersonal connections. It's really important that you're still going to be doing that. Even if I'm talking about the Matterport I wouldn't be afraid today to be replaced by an avatar that is going to do everything for you. I think you should really take this as an opportunity to seize a new way of interacting with people at scale.

Martin shared these mind-boggling numbers of the number of square meters and that are indeed out there. I think this is actually brainwave for real estate agents to build new business lines and new business streams. Thanks a lot Martin for exchanging what I suggest that we may take the remaining 3-4 minutes that we have to cover the questions that have been asked.

I think some of these were geared towards you Martin which she was asking when will access be available in France? Can you share visibility on that?

[00:53:39]
Martin Bromfield: I don't know, actually. I will make a note and come back to you if you could actually just drop that to the webinars@matterport.com email address that would be very helpful. That will get through to me and I will give you response.

[00:53:55]
Thomas Lepelaars: You can basically drop webinars@matterport.com and they will definitely get back to you. Good question actually from Asha. So he's saying, how do you think digital staging will affect the authenticity factor of Matterport and at what point do we lose the benefit of the reality of the capture?

[00:54:15]
Martin Bromfield: I think they go hand in hand. When you have a high quality walk-through and you match that with such high quality photorealistic renderings of furniture that you actually look at it and think is that real. I can't tell if that's so far is real. That type is real. When it's fact high quality, it really does enhance the space. Now there are two types of virtual staging.

We have three partners currently who have access to our panel editing software to create that incredibly lifelike furniture. But we also have other partners who don't have access to that and provide a lower quality staging. But that's fine because it's not really for marketing purposes.

It's more for designing the room where they can self serve and click and drag a sofa from a panel into the corner of the room and change color. That's more about what a sofa look like in the corner of the room there, as opposed to selling a property that it's a very different type of virtual staging, very different use cases before you're talking about.

Secondly, if it's an empty office or house it is a huge benefit for a buyer to be able to visualize a property of how human office wherever could look like really does shorten the decision process.

[00:55:37]
Thomas Lepelaars: I absolutely agree. I think one of the main benefits of virtual staging is helping people protect themselves in empty spaces. I didn't have to stat at hand, but I do know that it's an insane amount of people that have trouble just projecting themselves in spaces when they see it's empty. I think for the authenticity part, it's just helping people project themselves.

I think it's also important to be very transparent and honest in the communication to maybe mention that part of the 3D twin has been virtually stage, but it's actually to the benefit of the buyer. It's to help him imagine how this space would look like being furnished. Actually, you're doing this for buyers to better project themselves.

There's actually no question of should this be something that is questionable or not. A bunch of questions. Maybe this one is for Martin, is Matterport available in South Africa?

[00:56:29]
Martin Bromfield: Matterport is available anywhere. As long as you have the means to capture compatible capture device, you can Matterport space there we are. We want to be the verb in the market so you got Matterport space anywhere on the planet.

[00:56:47]
Thomas Lepelaars: There's the same question for us. Is Nodalview available in South Africa? Of course, Nodalview is also available in South Africa. You can definitely use it and hopefully very looking forward to being available directly through the Matterport marketplace so that anyone who has a Matterport account will be able to directly have access to Nodalview through the marketplace.

A bunch of questions on if you will receive the slides and if you will receive a replay? Yes, of course you will receive a replay at the end of this session. The session will also be available on-demand on these websites and you want to come back checking. There's absolutely no worries. You will also get a copy of this at the end of the viewing. I think maybe to wrap things up.

We really hope today with Martin that we've given you some insights on where the transaction is going with all of these visual assets beyond just pictures, but also virtual tours and shedding some light and hopefully making you be able to say a couple of smart things around what the Matterport is at that next cocktail that you guys will have.

In essence is sharing you a couple of contractions where you can basically, if you have questions about Matterport, you can just click on the link, fill out the form and you will be in contact with someone from Matterport. For those of you who have questions about Nodalview's library and tools on top of Matterport content.

Feel free to click on the second contraction which will appear in a couple of seconds, which will directly put you in contact with a salesperson at Nodalview to give you a full demonstration of how you can leverage your Matterport tools inside of Nodalview's light granted Swartz. Thanks a lot, Martin.

It was really a pleasure to be able to share your incredible insights with everyone today. Thanks a lot.

[00:58:28]
Martin Bromfield: Thank you, Thomas. It was a real pleasure to be here and we look forward to working with you Nodalview to help agents win more listings and so more homes quicker for more money.

[00:58:43]
Thomas Lepelaars: That's a great way to wrap things up. Thanks a lot, Martin. Thanks to everyone who helped contribute to this webinar. Thank you for everyone joining and connecting it today and we'll speak to you soon. Thank you very much.