WGAN eBook-Intro to Virtual Staging of Real Estate Photos powered by VSI

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	WGAN-TV \| Intro to Virtual Staging of Real Estate Photos powered by Virtual Staging AI with Virtual Staging AI Co-Founder and CEO Michael Bonacina \| www.WGAN.INFO/VSI \| Thursday, 21 March 2024 \| Episode #212 Transcript (below) - Are you seeking a faster and more affordable virtual staging solution? - Are you shooting listings without furniture or that are terribly furnished? - How do you remove clutter or existing furniture and then easily virtually stage the space? Stay tuned. Hi all, I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the [www.WeGetAroundNetworkForum]. Today is Thursday, March 21st, 2024. You're watching WGAN-TV Live at 5: a podcast for digital twin creators shaping the future of real estate today. We have an awesome show for you: Introduction to Virtual Staging of Real Estate Photos powered by Virtual Staging AI. Our subject matter expert is [www.WGAN.info/VSI] co-founder and CEO Michael Bonacina. Michael, thanks for being on the show. - Hi Dan, thanks for having me. - Before we jump into a demo, please tell us about [www.WGAN.info/VSI]. - Sure. [www.WGAN.info/VSI], we are a startup from the Harvard Innovation Lab. We started a year ago. And we offer an innovative AI staging solution where Realtors or real estate photographers can upload their images and get them virtually staged within 30 seconds for a fraction of the cost of traditional virtual staging. - And in terms of ... you've just been in business for a year, how many clients, how many renderings or virtual staged images? - Yeah, we have 6,000 subscribers by now, mostly Realtors and about 15% real estate photographers and they generate half a million renders per month. - And I've noticed in TechCrunch and some other publications, you've been talking about your revenue. So how are you doing in that regard? - Yeah, we're at $1.7 million in [Annual Recurring Revenue] by now, and we're growing. - So back- - So back in January [2024] we're at $1 million in ARR and we hope to be at $2 million in early April. - So congratulations, you are actually, you may be a startup, but I would say an emerging technology company growing at a rather fast pace. - Yeah, I hope so. - It's so hard to ask you questions without actually seeing a demo. So why don't you show and tell us about [www.WGAN.info/VSI] through a demo. - Yeah, for sure, I'd love to do that. Let me share my screen real quick. - So while Michael's getting set up, he's going to: www.WGAN.info/VSI That is our affiliate link for Virtual Staging AI. Okay, so we're on your landing page. - Yes, exactly. So whoever comes to our landing page can try our service for free, without signing up or entering your credit card details. So I think it's easiest to just do that right now to sort of get started. So you just click on this box to upload an image and then you can select any image of a room you have, be it empty, be it with existing furniture. And we also offer example images. And then there's only really two buttons that need to be clicked. The first one is the room type and we offer several different room types. And this is, for example, a living room. And we offer several different furniture styles. And in the free version you can use the standard furniture style. And all you need to do then is to stage the photos just to click on Process photo. And that's pretty much it. What happens now in the background is that the AI is analyzing the input room to understand where's the floor, where's the ceiling, where are walls, windows, doors, things like that. And then based on that positions the furniture according to the room type, like in this case, living room, meaning that it will probably add a sofa and a TV and maybe a coffee table. And then it renders those furniture items based on the style preference; meaning like: modern style; farmhouse style; whatnot. And it also pays attention to the colors of the input room to make sure that the furniture matches well with the color of the walls, for example. And what's cool about it is also that you get several different variations and that's free of charge. So for example, in this case, there could be variations where the TV is on the left like in this image, but maybe some of the other variations have the TV on the right and the sofa on the left or changes like that. So that was, I don't know, maybe 40 seconds or something, and that is the first render. And we can click on it to get a higher resolution version of it. And so we can see there's a rug in the middle and then a TV and a small shelf and a coffee table and sofa. And then we have another version with the TV on the left side as well. And here we have a version with a TV on the right. So you can see that you get different results and if you play around with the furniture styles or with the room types, you can also sort of show the potential of a property by staging it in different options. And we also have- - In that particular picture, if I could just go back for a second, if you scroll up, I notice also that it added curtains. And as a photographer I noticed that there's shadows related to the lighting. So if we look at the lamp on that left side, there's a shadow cast. If you look at the TV set on the right side, you can see there's a shadow. So that is really like, in terms of making it super-realistic, amazing! - Yeah, for sure. That is something we paid a lot of attention to, to make sure that all the shadows are realistic and also that things like, for example, here it matched with the TV, so you have the accurate reflections to sort of make it look as realistic as possible. - And before you go on this, just on this screen here, so if you go to: www.WGAN.info/VSI -- you can take any picture that you have and upload it and see the same thing that you just saw with your pictures - with a viewer's pictures -- correct? - Yes, exactly. You can try it out right now and get results as we're speaking. - And then I see on the left there's a button that says Create More. So you could continue to generate some more examples in this test mode. And obviously there's a watermark that says: Virtual Staging AI. If you're a paid customer, it's not going to have that watermark. Frankly, it's not going to be watermarked at all. - Yeah, exactly. - As a paid customer. Yeah. - Yeah, exactly. So basically you can try it out for free, see the actual results, and only if you like it, you would need to subscribe to one of the paid options to get the picture without the watermark and then a higher resolution version. - Thank you. So Michael, I had interrupted, you were about to go down to show us some other things. - Yeah, exactly. We have a bunch of example images on the website. And I guess one cool feature that we also have besides adding furniture to empty rooms is removing furniture; removing existing furniture; and then you get the empty room; which you can also stage again. So here we removed it and let's see if we have another example image here, we removed this bed. And then let's go back here. And then we added a new bed in there. So that's possible as well. And that even works in very messy rooms, for example, in this room here, where there's a lot of clutter in the room, but that doesn't sort of bother our software, we can still remove that. And yeah, we also have a couple of before and after images, for example, here for the furniture removal feature that you can see that actually looks like quite realistic and doesn't really, for example, if you look at the wall on the right side or on the ceiling or the wall on the back, it doesn't change the wall in any way. It only removes the furniture. Or here it only adds furniture without changing anything else. So it got quite realistic over the past couple of months. Yeah, I guess this is one example of the re-staging. Yeah, and that's pretty much it. Here we have the example images of what it would look like as a bedroom and we get different variations as well to sort of show the potential. Now if we would have a paid version, we could go ahead and also try out different -- either furniture styles -- like we could say Scandinavian which is more lighter colors; or Industrial more darker colors; or Luxury which is more like golden elements; or try out one of the additional room types; for example, Dining Room. Yeah, I guess that's the short overview, but happy to go into pricing or what it looks like on the inside as well. - Okay, awesome. So in terms of room types, what kinds of rooms can you presently virtually stage? We saw a list go by pretty fast. - So we have the most popular room types with us right now, the most popular one is the Living Room and the second most popular one is a Bedroom. And then we also offer Dining Rooms, Kitchens, Home Office, and Bathrooms. - And in terms of the furniture styles, We saw a list go by pretty fast, but I think I counted eight. - Let me count. One, two, three, yeah, I think that's eight. Yeah, exactly. So the most popular one is the Standard style where the AI chooses the furniture style based on the attributes that it detects in the images and what it sort of learned would match that furniture; that apartment well. But we also offer users the option to manually select it. For example, they could say, "hey, I know for sure that the target audience for this property would prefer a Farmhouse style; or would prefer an Industrial style or something more Modern. And so we offer that option to choose those as well. - And is there any best practice for the kind of Living Room photo, for example, that works best? Is it shooting it into the corner? Is it showing three walls? - Mm-hmm, yeah, usually the work is best the more area of the room is covered in the image the better the AI is able to understand how to place furniture. For example, if there's a door in a wall that is barely visible, then the AI obviously can't know it and might place a sofa in front of it, which you wouldn't do as a human stager if you know that there's a door right next to it. So if you include those features in the images, then the AI sees them, it's able to understand them and sort of factor them in when actually staging the property. - Mm-hmm. So AI seems to be the buzzword of the year if not the decade, is there any reason to say, oh, well, I subscribe to DALL-E or Midjourney, is there any reason not to use these other AI platforms for virtual staging? - I mean, if they would work, I would definitely do that, as well. But the problem sort of is that they aren't trained on doing virtual staging. So if you -- and you can try it out right now, upload an image there and tell it to add living room furniture. Then you'll quickly notice that it'll completely alter the room and turn windows into walls and things like that. And it doesn't sort of meet the needs of real estate, which is like preserving the input room and just adding furniture to sort of not have an issue with misrepresenting the property. - Are the images generated: MLS compliant? - Our images, yes. Meaning that MLSs have rules. Different MLSs have different rules on what, rules on what's allowed for virtual staging, but there's typical rules like include for example, you aren't allowed to change what's outside the window. So back in the days some virtual stagers used to show pictures of the beach outside of coastal houses to sort of give the impression that the house was located directly at the beach. Which is obviously when a buyer actually comes in and sees the property and doesn't see the beach, they're very disappointed. And so that's one of the things that MLS doesn't allow and that's something our AI doesn't do, but something that could happen if you use a tool like DALL-E or Midjourney. - So if I understand correctly, [www.WGAN.info/VSI] is not changing anything about the physical structure of the space or what you see out the window, it's all about cosmetic changes. - Exactly, yes. - Okay. For real estate photographers or real estate agents that are presently outsourcing virtual staging, why should they try [www.WGAN.info/VSI]? - I mean there's no downside to trying it out. They could go on the website through your link right now and just try it out and they get to results instantly within 30-40 seconds. And the advantage is that when they're using it in their sort of day-to-day life is that they get the results a lot quicker. Because right now they're most likely using designers overseas to do it. Either working with the designers through some freelance platform. Or using one of the larger companies like BoxBrownie.com or PadStyler. And now with our software, they get the results almost instantly and at a fraction of the cost of traditional virtual staging. - So for agencies that offer virtual staging, what is the typical turnaround time? - It's usually between a day and two days. - And I think through your demo you showed it literally within seconds. - Yeah. - So is that the comparison? If you are presently doing virtual staging, the first thing to consider is you can get it virtually instantly versus a day or two waiting for the delivery. - Yeah, exactly. That's pretty much the comparison, yeah. - We haven't talked about cost and we'll get there. But, what is -- what's the average person who's presently virtually staging a space paying someone overseas typically to stage a living room for example? - Yes. It's usually somewhere between $20 and $50 a picture; it depends a bit on the quality and what kind of deal you made with the designer you're using. - So let's just assume it's $24 without really doing a deep dive yet into pricing, about how much is it for [www.WGAN.info/VSI]? - Yeah, it's typically less than $1. So 50 to a 100 times cheaper! - Could you repeat that because I'm a little bit in disbelief in terms of the cost differential between [www.WGAN.info/VSI] and existing virtual staging services. - Sure, I said it's typically less than $1 on average, like 40 cents to 50 cents, which is like 50 to a 100 times cheaper than what you're paying with manual virtual staging agencies. - So a second reason to take [www.WGAN.info/VSI] for a spin is that the cost differential is frankly extraordinary, isn't it? Yeah. How do you describe in terms of the quality of the virtual staged space by [www.WGAN.info/VSI] versus traditional platforms perhaps using overseas labor for staging a space? - Yeah, I mean quality really depends. Initially when we started [www.WGAN.info/VSI] the quality was definitely an issue. We obviously have a very skilled team of engineers that kept working on it over the past year. So it got a lot better. And I would say it's better than some of the virtually staging designers overseas. Also with the designers overseas, it depends on who you're getting. If you're getting someone inexperienced or using cheap software, then the results might not look very, very realistic. And you might have issues with the shadows, for example. And then there are high quality virtual staging designers that are based in the US that charge up to $100 a picture. And they might get you super-realistic pictures that almost look like photos. But what we get as feedback from our photographers is that, "hey, your virtual staging is typically 'good enough' for sort of the use case of selling average property on Zillow, but it's like 100 times faster and cheaper." So they prefer going with the AI solution. - So is there any time that you could make a case where it makes sense to outsource to an agency versus [www.WGAN.info/VSI]? I guess what I'm asking is, does a real estate photographer or real estate agent that is presently using a service to virtually stage living rooms, bedrooms, et cetera, is it do one or the other or is there a hybrid blend because there's certain times where it makes sense to use an agency versus [www.WGAN.info/VSI]? - Yeah, for sure. I think in the past a lot of agents used this approach of using [www.WGAN.info/VSI] for trying it for all their images and where it didn't work, they relied on the designers that they used previously. What we see now is that more and more agents just use our solution and don't use their designer overseas anymore. But obviously if you sell high-end property or if you have very specific requirements that the seller says, "hey, I want this specific item in there," then it might make sense to go with a manual designer. - So the the question is really, is "good enough" ... "good enough" ... and "good enough" maybe "good enough" for 80%, 90% or 95% of the use cases and you could still keep your other company for when you have, perhaps a client that has very specific solutions they're looking for. Because your dashboard that you showed us in [www.WGAN.info/VSI] is super-simple. I think there were only three decisions. 1) upload a photo; 2) pick what room type and 3) pick what kind of furniture. And, BOOM that's it! There's no other decisions to make. - Yeah. - So, I suppose that's a good and bad thing. Do you have thoughts on that? - Yeah, exactly. I guess the feedback we get from clients is mostly that they typically don't care about what specific furniture items get added. Sometimes clients have a preference in terms of color, but they can usually choose that through the furniture style. But as long as the overall result looks appealing, the pictures sort of serve their purpose of making the property look more attractive online and therefore attracting more buyers. And that's pretty much what 98% of agents actually care about. - So I think what I'm hearing is there's three no-brainer reasons to switch to [www.WGAN.info/VSI], if not for 100%, but for 80% or 90% of virtual staging for those that are presently using other agencies to create. So 1) the turnaround time going from a day to two days to seconds, minutes; 2) was 50 to 100 times less expensive. And 3) it's either as good as or "good enough" that most people wouldn't even know whether it was done by AI or done by an agency. Is there a Turing test here someplace in here to say, "did AI do it or did [a virtual stager] do it?" So that's pretty exciting. If you're a real estate agent that's not presently offering virtual staging, why should you? - There's two main reasons for traditional staging as well as virtual staging, which is at the end of the day just giving buyers the sort of helping them envision what the place would look like furnished and what it could look like if they actually owned the place, instead of just having this blank canvas of empty rooms that might even sort of highlight the not so appealing sides of a property and sort of furniture can sort of add to the overall sort of appearance of the property. And those two reasons are on one hand side leads to a faster sale and to usually a higher sales price. And there are lots of statistics on that, both for traditional staging as well where you bring an actual furniture, as well as for virtual staging. And depending on who does the statistics, I'm not sure if we can -- the National Association of Realtors, for example, they did statistics that show that the sales price is up to 25% higher and the time on market is like 83% less. And there's even statistics by staging or virtual staging companies that claim that these types of methods have an even higher impact. Obviously at some point you need to question if you can still trust them. But I think one statistic by the National Association of Realtors, for example, showed that 96% of buyers' agents believe that staging has a positive impact on the buyers to help them envision themselves living in a property. - Do you think for real estate agents, virtual staging is a digital marketing strategy to help win more and bigger premium listings? - Absolutely for sure. Because they can prove to potential sellers that they use innovative tools that help promote their properties and help seal the deal faster and for a higher price. And we absolutely see also that effect happening. For example, we recently had an agent that just emailed us unprompted that said, "hey, I had to sell two apartments in a building complex and they were basically the exact same apartments for the same price and I staged one of them but not the other one. And the one that got staged sold in like three days and the other one sat on the market for over 30 days," and didn't sell until he started staging that one, as well. So I think there's a real impact here. - So there's a story for real estate agents to tell to potential clients, people that might list their house, their condo, for sale with them. This is the way for an agent to differentiate themselves from another agent that hasn't yet discovered the power of virtual staging. So I think what I'm hearing, it's a pitch to the home seller to say, "hey, when you list your property with us, we're going to virtually stage some of those rooms that don't have furniture; some of those rooms that have some clutter; and some of those rooms that have sparse furniture. - Yeah, for sure, absolutely. And I think one cool feature through AI is also that it's only really become an option now to stage a room in say 10 or maybe even 100 different options, which means that you can say, "hey, this room could be a bedroom but it could also be used as a home office." And when you pay $25 a picture, you might only want to do one or two, but now you can stage it as a bedroom with modern furniture or as a bedroom with farmhouse furniture or as a home office with luxury furniture or any of the other combinations. So that really offers the ability to tailor the listing presentation to the different potential buyer groups. - So for clarification, when you're talking about paying [$25], that's to some other company, - Yes. - where [www.WGAN.info/VSI], for less than a dollar. Frankly, when I did the math, I wanted to say $0.26 and for unlimited iterations of how to stage it. So you could literally take a spare bedroom and say, "let me see it as a home office; let me see it as a bedroom." And so really for pennies, you have an opportunity to present this space in different ways and not feel like you're laying out -- for a real estate agent not feeling like they're -- oh, it's coming out of their pocket, they just have to keep spending money. So I think what I'm hearing is the story that a real estate agent gets to tell a prospective client is -- studies show that a virtually staged, staged space sells faster for more money [and faster] and we will virtually stage every room that's appropriate. And now, home buyers are searching for their properties online, so they're going to discover these images and see how beautiful that room could be when there's furniture in it. - Yeah, exactly, totally. That's the sort of pitch that they can bring to sellers. - So are there other reasons that real estate agents who are not presently offering virtual staging should be doing this? Are there stories that you hear from other clients? I mean obviously there's 6,000 clients that, - Yeah. Yeah, at the end of the, yeah, we hear a lot of stories and feel free to check our Trustpilot account; there's a lot of stories there. We have testimonials like: "I think every Realtor in the world should be using this." But yeah, I think at the end of the day, it always boils down to, "hey, it helps attract more buyers for a specific property." It therefore shows that I'm putting in effort when listing a house or a property. And it therefore also helps me convince more sellers to list with me. I think that's always the main story. - If you're a real estate photographer that's not presently offering virtual staging, why should you? - I think now there's really no downside to doing it and it can help you either improve your value proposition for existing packages or get clients to upgrade to more expensive and more comprehensive packages by incorporating virtual staging into your packages. And now you can do that at a fraction of the cost of what you would've cost you previously. - So for clarification, for a real estate photographer on pricing strategies, I think I heard at least two. 1) you were talking about adding virtual staging to packages. Most real estate photographers have at least -- or offer three packages so to put it into one or more of their packages. - Yeah, exactly. That's what we see quite often. - 2) is as an Add-On, I think I heard. - Mm-hmm, exactly if you offered free of charge just to sort of differentiate yourself from other photographers. - Ah, yeah, that's interesting. So should virtual -- I guess the question is, I mean at some point people used to -- do real estate agents still do in-home actual physical furniture staging? - They do luxury properties. But for properties depending on the market below say $1 million it's usually too expensive. And so people prefer virtual staging. - So it is interesting. You know, you say, "Oh, we're going to physically stage a space..." that could easily cost $5,000 or more. And yet how are most people looking at that space, they're looking at it online in a picture. So the virtually stage space that [www.WGAN.info/VSI] does is probably as beautiful as physical staging. So I'm trying to just make that leap: "wow, we're about to give away something that costs $5,000 or used to cost $5,000 for free." 3) So free is actually one of the pricing strategies that you recommend for photographers that differentiate versus other photographers because the cost is so low you can actually afford to do that. - I think it depends on the market of the photographer to be honest, Dan. For some photographers, if they're in a really competitive market, that might be a good strategy to differentiate themselves. In other markets, they might already offer virtual staging as an Add-On service for say staging all your pictures for $200 or $300 additionally. And now they can just say, hey, we also offer some sort of new virtual staging or they might even disclose that it's AI and say we're going to do it for only $100 for the property. - Mm-hmm. So that kind of leads to a different pricing. Because I was thinking, oh, you 4) charge per image or maybe you 5) charge for five images and no, it's like, 6) we'll virtually stage the spaces that are appropriate to be virtually staged and that's a package price and that's X dollars. So that might be essentially the photographer making an assessment to say, oh, okay, there's a lot of clutter in this room. We can't avoid that, we should just virtually stage it. The furniture in this room is pretty sparse or it's terribly furnished and we should virtually stage it. Or that this space is empty and we should virtually stage it. So it's interesting because I would say there are some photographers they might charge: "Do you want 24 images?" "Do you want 30 images?" "Do you want 50 images?" And then other photographers it's really it's kind of like unlimited photos, but you don't really shoot unlimited photos, you shoot the number of images that are appropriate for the property. So it may be a similar strategy that you offer. 7) "We will virtually stage the appropriate spaces in the property and it's a fixed dollar amount" says the photographer. - Yeah, exactly. And there's not much risk associated with it. If a photo costs you like $0.40 or $0.20 compared to if it previously cost you $20, then obviously you need to be very careful of how many images you promise to stage. But now you can just offer one big package. - Are there any other pricing strategies that you've run into with photographers? - No, I think those are the typical ones. I've heard offering 1) free to differentiate yourself; 2) charging per picture or 3) offering it as a package, as in addition to say I'll shoot your property or I shoot the property plus do virtual staging. - Yes. It's kind of an interesting thing is, a lot of photographers will base cost: on cost plus and you might say, well if something costs you $100, you're going to charge $300 because you have your cost of $100, you have the cost of you're running your operation and then you have a profit. So if you were shooting a -- if you were virtually staging with a traditional virtually staging company and you paid let's say $24 you might charge $75; if you're a photographer that's using that pricing model. So it's interesting because maybe now you can just substitute and say, instead of that actually costing me $24 as an example, it's costing me a little bit more than 25 cents, but I'm going to keep my pricing as long as I can or I'm just going to just disrupt the market by completely disrupting the space among other photographers by saying I'm giving it away or it's included in my bundles - Mm-hmm. - or it's just an Add-On that I offer for $99 for rooms that are appropriate. I mean it's crazy because you can really, it's a fraction of the cost. It's just, it's pennies literally. - Yeah. It gives a lot of room for trying out different pricing models and gives a lot of opportunity here. - Yeah, why don't you, if you don't mind sharing your pricing page and walk us through your pricing. I think that would probably be helpful. So again, our WGAN affiliate link is: www.WGAN.info/VSI And then from there there's a tab at the top, you can take it to the pricing. It's a very simple website. You have a choice of Tabs: Home, Gallery, Prices or to Log in. Can you take us through your pricing, Michael? - Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. So there's two different options that we offer. We offer monthly plans that you pay on a month-to-month basis and can cancel any time. And we offer annual plans with discounts where you pay for the year upfront, but you get a 40% discount. And we have different packages for different sorts of target audiences. We have some beginners that just want to try it out because they have one property or they might only sell a property from time to time. We have the Standard plan which includes 20 photos for $19. So that's less than a dollar per photo already. And that's typically what an individual agent would use. And then top producer agents usually pick our Professional Plan, which includes 60 photos for $40. And then photographers really use any of the Enterprise Plans which starts at 150 photos for $69. And then if you need more photos for example, we have the 500 photos plan for $199. And that's what the dedicated real estate photographers typically pick and sort of covers all their needs. - Okay. If you could just stay on this page for a little bit. Unlimited Renders, could you explain what that means? - Sure. So here, there's a number of photos listed here, but that refers to the number of photos that an agent or photographer uploads to our platform like I just did previously in the demo. Unlimited Renders means that you can generate as many different variations as you want to. Meaning you can have this one uploaded photo and then stage it in 10 different room types and furniture styles and that's free of charge. And if you want to do a hundred, you are free to do that as well. - So upload one picture and go to town, virtually stage it 50 different ways before you make a selection. - Yeah, you can do that. You can. - Yeah, well actually, I did that! If you go to the We Get Around Network Forum to help prep for the show I actually "oh, well I wonder how a home office might look in this bedroom." And I just went crazy and just kept generating images and then all of a sudden I went, oh well here's 10, I'll post 10 out of the 50 to the We Get Around Network Forum to say, these were generated in minutes and here are examples. And I think in that case, I went through all the furniture styles: Standard; Modern; Scandinavian; Industrial; Mid-Century; Luxury; Coastal; and Farmhouse. And then I also did some other rooms. So it was super-easy to do. Staying on this page for one more second is just to reiterate, there's no watermark when you're a paid customer. So if you go to the demo: www.WGAN.info/VSI and you do a demo with an image, it's going to come back with the watermark. But that watermark is only to do the demo. Once you're a paid customer, there's no watermark, there's nothing that indicates that the image was done by: there's no Virtual Staging AI logo in it. - Right, exactly. - Okay. And I noticed on the enterprise plan that it includes API access. I'm going to take it off of screen share. Could you talk a little bit about API access and what are typical customers of [www.WGAN.info/VSI] doing with the API? - Mm-hmm, yeah, for sure. So typically it's real estate photography or media companies using our API. And what they can do with the API is integrate the AI staging service into their own platforms. So for example, what some photographers have built is that they have their website where they deliver the photos to their agent. And then instead of them doing the virtual staging for the agent, they let the agent stage the photos within their website without disclosing that they're using [www.WGAN.info/VSI] in the backend. And that's what they're typically using the API for. - And other use cases that you think the API, the [www.WGAN.info/VSI] makes a lot of sense, maybe haven't gotten a customer yet but it would be a sweet spot for you? - I think medium term is something that could be interesting is offering it to consumers directly, meaning they can stage it. Because obviously if you have an intermediary like the agent or the photographer staging it, they're still staging it based on their sort of assumptions of the actual client. But if this client has this tool directly in their hands, they might do slightly different things and I think that that is something that could make sense. - Would the [www.WGAN.info/VSI] be appropriate for brokerages that wanted to offer it to their agents either on a free or minimal cost basis to encourage digital marketing -- virtual staging of their listings? - Yeah, we do have teams and brokerages buying an enterprise account and then offering it to their agents to incentivize them to use virtual staging because everybody benefits from it if property sells faster and for a high price. - There are a number of very large photography agencies. And is that the kind of thing that you could imagine? A large photography agency using the [www.WGAN.info/VSI] API in order to either offer that service to their independent contractor photographers or to automatically offer that service before delivering the images to their clients, the real estate agents? - Yeah, I think so. That could very well make sense. Obviously the different companies have different policies on who would integrate such software and who would pay for it. And we're working with some of those companies even though I can't disclose that. But yeah, in general, I think that is a strategy where it makes sense. - And there are a number of platforms, let's call them 3D/360 platforms that they're already offering digital twins, floor plans, would the next logical step for them be to offer virtual staging powered by [www.WGAN.info/VSI]? And perhaps you are transparent to that, just like floor plan companies are [white Label] - Mm-hmm. - but are delivering floor plans to large platforms that are hosting 3D/360 images. - Yeah, for sure. So right now we only support 2D images. We don't support 360 images or virtual tours yet. But that is something we're working on the backend. And yes, stay tuned for exciting announcements in the near future. - Can I ask how long? Our audience is super-charged on 3D/360, particularly interested in being able to virtually stage 360 panorama images. Is it fair to say that it's in development? It's just a question about when it'll be available? - Yeah, I think so. I mean from a technical perspective, it absolutely works. It is just about fine tuning those models to make sure that they cover all the edge cases. And once we're at a point where we feel like we're confident in releasing that and this sort of meets the minimum quality part that we want to stand for, then we'll release that. I can't give you any estimate in terms of when that will be, but I'm pretty sure it will be this year and hopefully sooner than later. - Okay, today is Thursday, March 21, 2024. So hopefully by the end of 2024, we'll see [www.WGAN.info/VSI] offer not only 2D virtually staged images, but 360 virtually staged images. - Exactly, yes. - Because it's interesting when I was talking about companies that are 3D/360 virtual tour platforms, in my head I was actually thinking about the virtual staging of 2D images. So I'm thankful that you made the leap to 360 because many of these platforms actually automatically export their suggested 2D images or allow the photographer to upload their professionally shot images to their platform. And it just seems like, "oh, you just uploaded all these images to the platform, would you like these -- check the box which ones you would like virtually staged? Which style would you like? Just seems like a natural extension. - Yeah, for sure. - So you teased us a little bit about what's coming, are there other things that are coming that you can speak about? - Yeah, I think there's a couple of improvements that we're building right now for the virtual staging product. One thing that a lot of clients are requesting, for example, is a multiple perspectives feature. Meaning that right now if you upload pictures of the same room from different perspectives and even if you choose the same style and room type, you might get slightly different furniture. And we're working on a feature, where we can upload several pictures of the same room to get the same furniture even from different perspectives. And the other exciting thing we're working on is other 2D image editing products. For example, day-to-dusk, or image enhancements where we make a blue sky and green grass instead of brown grass and cloudy sky; and things like that. So there's a lot of those types of 2D image edits that will probably be in the coming months actually. - You mentioned outdoor, are there other features of virtual staging of outdoor, blue sky, green grass; is there anything else related to outdoor? Patio furniture perhaps? - Oh yeah, that is a room type that we'll add. I just assumed that we'll integrate that into the existing virtual staging product. I guess another one for outdoors is the day-to-dusk use case. - Day-to-dusk. So presently room types that can be virtually staged: bedrooms; living rooms; kitchens; bathrooms; home offices; dining rooms. I hear that patio furniture is coming. Are there other room types that are coming? - Yeah. One of the more commonly requested room types is also like Game Room as well as Kids' Living Room with toys and such items. - Okay. And in terms of furniture style, it seems pretty comprehensive already. Standard, Modern, Scandinavian, industrial, Mid-Century, Luxury, Coastal, Farmhouse. Are there other types of furniture styles that we might expect? - We don't get a lot of requests for other furniture styles yet, so we don't have anything planned as of right now. - Yeah, it seems pretty- - You are always free to make suggestions, I guess. - Okay, seems pretty comprehensive that the only thing that might come to mind for me is international, as soon as you move outside of the United States that you have other styles of decorating. So are most of the clients today coming from the United States? - Yeah, so is most of our client base: around 70% of users are based in the US. And then we have 10% in Canada, 5% in Australia, and the remaining 15% are international. - So far the furniture style is really satisfying the bulk of the existing clients. - Yeah, pretty. - What about in terms of your roadmap for what's coming. Commercial spaces? Virtually staging of commercial spaces? Will we see that by [www.WGAN.info/VSI]? - We don't have a plan yet because right now we're very focused on the residential real estate space, but who knows what will happen. - Okay. I should point out, I'm sorry, was there anything else on what's coming that you feel confident to talk about? - No, I think those are the things that will be coming in the coming months. And we obviously have a roadmap of what we're building after that, but I guess that's a discussion for in the future. - That sounds great. We'll have you back when you're ready to talk to us more about some exciting announcements. I should point out when you talked about pricing. If you could just call up that page one more time [www.WGAN.info/VSI] - Yeah, for sure. - On your pricing page. - Mm-hmm. And, on the Standard Plan for $19 a month billed on an annual basis, that's $228. So if you are a We Get Around Network Standard Member, we have a special offer for you. You can receive the free use of [www.WGAN.info/VSI] Standard Plan for 12 months. If you take the 20 photos a month times 12 months, if I've done my math right, divided by the 228, it actually comes out to [$0.95] cents an image. It's really crazy. So I just wanted to point out, we do have a special offer for We Get Around Network Standard Members. And you can learn more about that at We Get Around Network Forum Michael, tell us a little bit about the history of how even [www.WGAN.info/VSI] came about. - Yeah, for sure. So we are a team from the Harvard Innovation Lab. We have -- unfortunately we don't have a real estate background, but I think we learned a lot about the real estate market over the last year. But we have a background in computer science and computer vision from different universities and research institutions. And we just came across virtual staging when I was actually looking for an apartment in Boston and saw that one of the services offered sort of the image is empty as well as virtually staged. And I was like, wow, this is so cool! Why isn't everybody doing this? And that's sort of how we came across virtual staging. - Why isn't everyone doing this? Obviously everyone is not doing this. How is that possible when it costs pennies to get virtually staged images within seconds? - Well, I guess back then it cost $24 and took two days to get it done. But now I think it's just a matter of time before everybody will be doing this. And I guess this show, Dan, hopefully we'll spread the message that more people should start doing this. - I mean, the words that come to mind to me are "no-brainer." I mean, you know, is there an expression -- you just can't believe that 100% of real estate photographers, 100% of real estate agents, that 100% of home sellers are not demanding this. I mean, it just seems that you've disrupted the space. [www.WGAN.info/VSI] has disrupted the space in this amazing, amazing way by taking the delivery time from a day or two to seconds or minutes. By taking the price from $20 to $60, let's call it $24 to a fraction of that under a dollar really under $0.50. at 50 to 100 times cheaper than what's traditional in this space. And third, the quality is "good enough" that probably for 80% or 90% of the jobs that people are presently outsourcing to a virtual stager could be done -- arguably could be a 100% replacement. Do you have any thoughts on why it's not 100% everyone using [www.WGAN.info/VSI] immediately? - I mean, the truth is we're improving the AI model quite quickly. And if you even take a look at what the outputs looked like three months ago or six months ago, they weren't at the level that they are today. And we see quite rapid, rapid adoption in these past couple of weeks. So I do think that if we would have this conversation a year or two from now, we would be pretty close to what you just described simply because it makes sense. Because Realtors actually like to sell properties faster and for a higher price. So it's not just some fancy tool where they can say, "hey, we are incorporating AI into our business so we can say that we're incorporating AI." No, it actually helps their business in a very tangible way to improve their business and sell properties faster. - We visited at Inman Connect in New York in January 2024. You had a chance to talk to lots of real estate agents at Inman Connect; a tech-savvy real estate agent/broker audience. What was the reaction when you visited with people about [www.WGAN.info/VSI]? - I guess there were some people that knew us already. So that was quite cool to see. And then there were others that didn't know us yet. And for them it was cool to see that there's progress being done in the real estate media space. And I guess we're pretty excited about it and what opportunities it offers to them. - My last question is, if you only had 30 seconds to tell a real estate agent, a real estate photographer, why they should be using [www.WGAN.info/VSI], you're in an elevator going up to the 50th floor, what's your pitch? - Yeah, I guess the pitch would be something along the lines of, "hey, virtual staging helps you sell properties faster and for a higher price. We have a new innovative AI solution that does the same thing you're already paying for 100 times faster and cheaper and easier. And you can try it out for free without signup. Just go on [WGAN.info/VSI] and upload a picture and you'll be convinced." - Michael, thanks for being my guest on the show today. - Thank you so much for having me, Dan. - We've been visiting with [www.WGAN.info/VSI] co-Founder and CEO, Michael Bonacina. For Michael, I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum. And you've been watching WGAN-TV Live at 5.
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