WGAN-TV Podcast: How & Why to Offer Residential RE Virtual Staging by AI

WGAN Forum Founder & WGAN-TV Podcast Host 31.32K Website Atlanta, Georgia Linked In Facebook Twitter YouTube TikTok Instragram Matterport Service Partner Google Street View Trusted Photographer Zillow Certified Photographer We Get Around Network Member	31.32K DanSmigrod private msg quote post Address this user	plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 3
	WGAN-TV \| A Real Estate Photographer's Perspective on Why and How to Offer Virtual Staging Powered by AI \| Guest: Scan Your Space (a Division of Sparks Media Group) Founder and CEO Tom Sparks \| Thursday, 15 August 2024 \| Episode: 218 www.ScanYourSpace.com \| www.SparksMediaGroup.com \| @ScanYourSpace \| Virtual Staging via AI \| www.WGAN.INFO/VSI Transcript (video above) - Can you really get virtual staging by AI done within 30 seconds? - How do you roll out [www.WGAN.info/VSAi] to existing clients? - What are some price strategies for virtually staging images by [www.WGAN.info/VSAi] Stay tuned. Hi, all. I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder [www.WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com]. Today is Thursday, August 15th, 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: A Real Estate Photographer's Perspective on Why and How to Offer Virtual Staging [www.WGAN.info/VSAi] Our subject matter expert is Tom Sparks, Founder and CEO of [www.ScanYourSpace.com], a division of [www.SparksMediaGroup.com]. Tom, thanks for being back on the show. - Thanks for having me. I've sent you Zelle, Venmo, PayPal, and Cash App, so you should have that shortly. I'm making it rain. - Before we jump into today's topic, tell our viewers about Scan Your Space and Sparks Media Group. - Sure. So I started Sparks Media Group to cater to the residential real estate market, providing media needs from everything from photography to floor plans, virtual staging, videography, everything that somebody could use to market a property for sale or for rent. And shortly after, I realized that there was a need for the same services in the commercial space and hospitality and industrial, that sort of thing. So I created Scan Your Space to cater to the non-residential real estate market. - And your geography, your coverage area? - We're based in California, but we're covering other states, including Nevada, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Maryland, and branching out hopefully globally. So I always say that I'm able to bring on people and get them up to speed fairly quickly. So we cover the world, but we're based in California. - And the gear that you use, the kind specifically for 3D/360? - We're using primarily Matterport Pro3 Cameras. And I have a couple Matterport Pro2 Cameras - still - that we use from time-to-time. And we use iGUIDE a fair amount, both the iGUIDE IMS-5 older camera system and the new IMS-6, which is the iGUIDE PLANIX Pro. - And Matterport Pro3 Cameras, you've been using Pro3s for quite some time. And we've even done a number of shows, WGAN-TV Live at 5, with you talking about the Matterport Pro3 Camera and how you're using that. And thank you, because you've provided a lot of training and help for the community along the lines of the Pro3. - You're welcome. - Tom, for today's topic, how about jumping into a demo of [www.WGAN.info/VSAi]? - Sure. You want me to share my screen and we can upload some images? - Yes, please. - Okay. Let's get right into it. Can you see it okay? - Yes. - Okay. So I have some images I've already uploaded, but we'll go and do some new images. So we go to [www.WGAN.info/VSAi], log in. I'm going to click Upload Photo. And then I have this house that I just photographed the other day. Do you want to do a blank canvas or do you want to do some decluttering and staging? - Let's do both. - Okay. We'll start with the blank canvas. So I'm just going to take an image that I like and drag it and drop it. We don't need to check this to remove existing furniture because there's no furniture there. We're going to click on Add Furniture. And should we set this up as a bedroom or an office? - How about a home office? - Okay. We have different furniture styles. I'm not a staging expert, but I typically would choose Standard or Modern. Do you have a preference on this? - Standard's fine. - Okay. And then we hit Process Photo and it will give you a percentage complete. Could see it's pretty quick. [www.WGAN.info/VSAi] - I wasn't timing that, but I'd say that was probably 15 seconds. Certainly under 30 seconds. - Yeah, I would say close. Yeah, 30-ish. So it gives us three results. We can click on it to see them. On the left side, you'll have the original photo and you can download it if you need to. And then on the right side, it's going to give you a preview of what it's done. Now, interestingly enough, they'll charge for this as a processing. this will count as like one use. And depending on the plan you have, you may have 10 photos a month, 20 photos a month, 1,500 a month. But if you didn't like any of these examples and you want-- - Oh, I only see one example. So is there-- - Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I'll go into that. If you didn't like any of these examples, you can hit Create Another Variation and it will regenerate without charging you for an extra photo used, if that makes sense. - Yeah. Let's maybe see your third image there. - So there's the three. - Okay. - Now, let's say we didn't like any of these. - So, yeah, if you didn't like any of these three, then what? - I'm going to check Modern and we're going to do Create Another Variation. And it takes about the same amount of time. - So I want to say for [www.WGAN.info/VSAi], if you're not happy, there's unlimited revisions. So you literally could do 50 images until you got one that you were happy about. - Yeah. And I can go through and, for example, this one, I didn't necessarily care for how wide it looked. It looked like it was covering some of the closet doors. - Mm-hmm. - This one was okay, I guess. Let's see what they did with Modern. See, this one's way over into the closet. - Yeah. - Kind of like that one. This is the one I probably would settle on and download and deliver to the client. - Mm-hmm. So you've been doing virtual staging using an outside company. How long does it usually take to get it back? - So I have an in-house editing team that does all my edits, regular editing and virtual staging. And it takes them about 24 hours, usually a little less. And that's what I call hand editing. So you don't have to worry about any issues. It looks really natural. - And do you promise that in a day or in two days? - I say 24 hours to receive. - 24 hours. - Yeah. - So the difference, while we're talking, maybe you could go off and declutter a room too so we could see that. - Sure. - So the difference on [www.WGAN.info/VSAi], it's available immediately. So you could literally deliver it to your client the same day if you chose to. - Yeah. - And then you've been playing around with this for a while. What's your sense in terms of quality? Is it as good as your hand-done virtual stager? Is it good enough? How do you look at it? - I would say good enough. I hear that they're still making some improvements on the process. There were some issues early on where, and I have some examples I think I can show you, where the window was kind of blurred after the staging was done. - Mm-hmm. - And I did one today with backyard furniture where it was a little bit not as sharp as it could have been. So I would say good enough. It's not quite the same as having somebody hand-do it, though. - Yes. And I guess if you did outsource it, I would suspect you'd probably pay around $25 per image. And if you're using [www.WGAN.info/VSAi] and depending on what plan you're on, you're probably around a dollar or under a dollar. So you're looking at same-day delivery or virtually instant delivery if you wanted to give it to your clients that quickly-- - Yeah. - At a fraction of the cost. - Yeah. And there's some limitations with it that we can go into if you want. - [Dan] Yeah. - Let me show you the removed existing furniture because this I found pretty interesting. I'm going to take this image that is fairly cluttered for what I would say, and you can see it kind of found what I would want to get rid of, the sofa, the rug, the TV. If we wanted to keep some of that, you could do Remove From Mask and then you can simply paint that out and it would keep that in the image or we can put it back. So I'm going to-- - Yeah, let's take it out so we can see what the whole room looks like. But that's good to know if there's something in the room that you wanted to keep that the AI thought you wanted to remove, you have that option of overriding it. - Yeah. Yeah. So, maybe I don't necessarily need to get into the details of cleaning this up exactly, but you could be really finite with the brush size. - Mm-hmm. - And I'll put it back to kind of where it was just so, so then we're going to add furniture and we'll select the living room. And you feel IKEA-ish or do you want to do Modern? - IKEA-ish sounds good. - Coining these terms. A little longer. - What is your sense of when you go out and scan, when your team goes out and scans, do you have any -- what I'm thinking about, Tom, is I got an email from one of our WGAN Forum members today @Dataventurer. And yesterday he counted listings in his MLS and he found that seven out of the 75 had no furniture whatsoever. Do you have any sense of when you, your team is out scanning, what percent of residential places have zero furniture? - Yeah, I'm in a unique market because we have houses that are $300,000 up to houses that are $35 million all within a two-hour driving radius. - [Dan] Mm-hmm. - And so I'll say on the higher-end listings, higher value houses, they tend to do real staging. On sort of the quote, unquote lower-end, everything a million and under, we've seen that sometimes they have staging. It's not a lot. Sometimes they'll just stage one or two or three rooms of the house and not the entire house. I did a house yesterday where the agent used their own furniture in two of the bedrooms, but then hired a staging company to stage the living room, family room, and the primary bedroom. It's kind of a mixed bag. And then you have the houses that just use the seller's furniture in the house. So we have seen a lot of vacant ones. I wouldn't be able to quantify an amount. Yeah, I couldn't. - All right. All over the board. That's fine. Let's take a look at the results on this first that was going to declutter it. - So here you can see some of what they removed. They did a decent job on the floor. They put the planks a little bit sideways here, but they added this. - Would you ever deliver a space decluttered or you're always decluttering to then virtually stage it? - I would, yeah, because you'll see that once you add the furniture back in, it doesn't look as bad as this looks to me. This doesn't look that great just because-- - Yeah. - Of that. - Yeah, it doesn't look usable. Yeah. - Now, my editors could declutter this and it would look amazing. - Yes. - So, yeah, this hid a lot. - So for clarification, this is [www.WGAN.info/VSAi]; it took less than 30 seconds. It generated three images. We're looking at the first one. And so we're looking at what's on the left of what was there and on the right, what [www.WGAN.info/VSAi] generated in less than 30 seconds. - Yeah. And let me try to bring up the original image a little bit bigger so I can show you. See the top of the sofa here? - Yeah. - And here there's just a solid kind of blurred line. - Yeah. So you might say that it's a good question of what would your judgment be? Usable, not usable? - Well, I'm going to put this as third on the list. - Yeah. - Let me see what else they got. - Okay. See if it does any better. Wow. That's amazing. Except that's interesting because you wonder whether that's changed what is actually there. - Yeah. And there's a little bit of noise. This does look better, though. - Yes. Did you shoot this particular space? - I did. - Do you remember whether that was a window or a floor-to-ceiling door? It looks like it's a window to me. - Oh, yeah. I see what you're saying, where it goes all the way down. Yeah. - Yeah. Can't change the physical structure of the space. That's not cool. - Correct. Yeah. - Yeah. Okay. Let's take a look at the third option. - Sorry, I was just seeing if I had another window view of that same, yeah. And then this is, they removed the blinds and added some bushes and there's still kind of an outline here. - Yeah. - And then right here. So, yeah. It's got some work to do. Let's try a Modern and see. - Okay. - Need the "Jeopardy" music. - We're having a zen moment during the show. We'll just experience the pleasure of quiet. Now, that's interesting. That's certainly a beautiful treatment, but I just suspect that that window is actually a window. It is not-- - Yeah. - A door. So, okay. So, that might say, hmm, not going to work with this one. It is what it is. For a dollar or less than a dollar an image, it may be hit or miss. I think probably most of the time it's probably going to be good enough. And I think we happen to have a room type that may not work because that sofa is hidden to begin with. - So I just clicked the down arrow. I was thinking as you were talking, I wonder if there's a way that I could say, hey, I don't like any of these. Can I get my money back on this? - Well, for a dollar an image, I'm not sure I'm going to worry about it. But let's take a different image where we didn't have that issue of the sofa blocking the window. - This is to give them feedback because I got an email from Support and they said that they liked the feedback. This really helps them out-- - Okay. - To improve. So do you want to pick a different image, you said? - Yeah. Let's take one where we didn't have that particular problem. - Okay. I got another example here. And the reason why I would say, hey, can I get my money back on this one, is because if you're doing, 10 images in a house and you're doing 10 houses a day and you're getting issues with a lot of them, you know that-- - Yeah. - Can eat into your allowance. - Fair enough. Looking at this one, I think, wow. Who would ever want to show this room with this setup? So. - Yeah, now-- - Yeah. - You see, try to leave the computer. I'm going to edit the mask and add that computer in. - Yeah. And there's a little bit to the left of the door there too. If you go back to Edit Mask just for a second, I think you missed it. Did it get it all? Oh, that's just the floor. - Yeah. - Yeah. So it's okay. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - So before you click, let's go a little bit slower on this particular screen. So the options for room type are... - Yeah. Bedroom, Living Room, Kitchen, Bathroom, Home Office, Dining Room, Kids Room and Outdoor. - Okay. And then the furniture styles are... - Standard, Modern, Scandinavian, Industrial, Mid-century, Luxury, Coastal and Farmhouse. - Okay. And then I see an option for Add Logo. Have you tried that at all? - I haven't. - Okay. - Just because I don't put my logos on images. - Yeah. Fair enough. Yep. Yep. because you'd really have to [deliver with/without a logo]. I'm guessing it's not giving you the option to give me two images: one with the logo, one without the logo. - Right. - Yeah. - Do you want a bedroom? - I think it might lend itself to a home office again, actually. - Can we do Mid-Century? - Yeah. I don't even know what that is. Let's find out. - Queued. AI bots are busy. - Do you generally find that you're getting back three images within 30 seconds? - Yeah, sometimes it says two, and then when I click on it, a third one will pop up. - Mm-hmm. - Because I think it loads them literally as it's finishing them. - Yeah. Fast. I think that's probably the operative word, fast. - Picturing some guy who's trying to take a bio break and he's getting pinged. We got another one and he had to run back to the desk. - I'm thinking it's like an ATM machine. There's really people behind there pushing the cash in the receipt, returning your card to you. - Yeah. - Right. So let's see how we did here. - Something better and it looks good. - Yeah. - I would probably-- - That's even better ... If you were going to show it without furniture, I wouldn't show that house with the existing computer setup. - Yeah. Yeah. - I think it looks way better than just empty. But that said, let's see how the furnishing looks. Wow. Look at that! Now, I have no idea what that yellow thing is on the door. That's imaginative. - This is a light and here's the base, but there's no arm connecting it. - Okay. That didn't work. Got it. - Yeah. - Everything else looks pretty good. - Yeah. - What's your second and third image look like? - And here it is again. There's no like-- - Yep. Yep. - Or maybe it's there, but it's very, I don't know. - No, I don't see it. I don't see the light. Okay. - Yeah. Don't see the light. - Here's a good one. - Yeah, except it put-- - Right in front of the closet door. Yeah. - Yeah. That's a bit weird. Okay. So we'd have to keep trying. So you've literally, I think, shown us everything about how to do virtual staging. You're only making a few decisions. What room type. What furniture style, and create additional variations. Am I missing something? That's it. - Pretty much it. - Okay. - Let's see what Industrial is going to look like for this space. - Well, let's come off that. - Okay. - We got a lot to talk about. Besides that, was there anything else that you wanted to show me? - Let me show you, well, let me show you an outside example. - Okay. You have some that you've already have previously done. - Correct. - So, yeah, let's take a look at some of your maybe before and after ones that you wanted to show. - So here's a before. - Mm-hmm. - And I'm going to go this way. What I didn't like about this is, and it happens when you're using Photoshop, so I know this is a thing. It blurs the details of the cement. So you see it's kind of-- - Yeah. - Blurry. - And then again, around the fence, wherever there's real detail, it's kind of blurred. - Yeah. Yeah. - So, it took it from that to that, to that, and to that. And I didn't deliver any of these to the agent just because I felt that it wasn't the quality that I would've wanted to put out. - Uh-huh. It is very interesting because, and I think that'll come out. Let's look at some more and then we'll take it off screen share, and then we'll have that discussion. What other ones would you like to show us? - One of the limitations that I found is that you can't stage the same room from different angles with the same furniture. So I couldn't do this image from this corner and then go to this corner and do the same image and have the same furniture. - Yes. - And I'm still working on that. - Yeah. So, Tom, about that. I interviewed the Co-Founder and CEO of Virtual Staging AI, Michasel Bonacina, on a previous episode of WGAN-TV Live at 5. Our viewers can see that episode at: www.WGAN.info/VirtualStagingAi When I visited with Michael, we discussed that exact point, and by the end of this year, that feature will be available where you'd be able to upload, say, an open floor plan of a, let's say, living room, dining room, kitchen, and have them all staged so that you can get them from different perspectives, and as I understood, that you'd also be able to say, okay, I like this image from this angle. Now show it to me from this angle. I could be wrong on that ladder, but certainly the open floor plan so that when you're in the dining room, looking at the living room, in the living room, looking at the dining room, everything is staged the same. And in addition, Michael also let me know by the end of this year, 360 panoramas will be able to be virtually staged. What else do you want to show me? And then we'll take it off the screen share. - Yeah. This is just one of the examples of two rooms. And I can't remember if I added a mask on this. I don't think I did, but for some reason it removed the fixture. Maybe it did it automatically and I just didn't notice it. - Yeah. - But interestingly, it put the living room furniture on this side in the dining room over here, where traditionally I probably would've put the living room furniture here, dining room here. - Mm-hmm. - And same with that, and same with that. - Mm-hmm. - And then just to show an example of another, this is a closet that's, there's no closet door on here, obviously, but it's interesting how they staged it. They put a dresser here and they put a TV in the closet. I ended up delivering, I think, this one to the agent just because-- - Yeah, that looks nice. It also looks nice the way they did the lighting above the lamp. - Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, that's what I got for you. - All right. Let's take it off screen share. - Okay. - So what's your conclusion? - Is it at the price point with the same-day delivery, is it good enough for agents that are willing to have good enough at a different price point? - I am a -- let me deliver the best of what I can. I don't want to be Big Lots. I'd rather be Target. I don't know how else to word it. So I've thought about this, and I think I'll offer it to agents with a kind of caveat that it's a you get what you get. There's no revisions as far as, you're not happy with the image, you want it completely redone. I think it's just going to be what you get in this kind of situation. And I would have to lower the price point significantly from what my editors are charging to hand-do it-- - Mm-hmm. - Just to differentiate the two. - So let's talk about that a little bit. Let's say... Let's pick, say, six images. Let's say the house is empty and you're going to deliver the dining room, the kitchen, the living room, a bedroom, a home office. In fact, let's make it two more and we'll just kind of round up. So maybe there's yet another bedroom. Maybe there's an outdoor patio. That would be eight images. If you were doing eight virtual staged images with your team, how would you charge for that? - So we charge $40 per image for virtual staging and we charge $60 an image for virtual decluttering, which also includes the virtual staging. So for eight images, we're at $320 or $480. - So let's stick with the $320 for a moment, just the virtual staging. Just parenthetically, do you get many requests to get both, empty and with furniture? - Yeah. Yeah. - Why? - Sellers aren't ready to pack up all their stuff and move out and agents want to get a house listed, and so they want furniture removed, boxes removed. - Yes. But why not virtually stage it? - Oh, no, I'm sorry. We do. Yeah. We always do virtual staging after the declutter. I haven't had a request to just declutter and leave it blank. - Oh, I see. Okay. - Yeah. - So if the room is empty, you're going to charge $40 for an image. If there's stuff, then you're going to charge $60 because first you're going to declutter and then second you are going to stage. - Correct. Correct. - Oh, okay. That makes sense. So which one do you get more of? Do you get more of the $40 an image or more of the $60 an image? - The $40, and we have two packages that are most ordered. So it's either three or five images. They can always add more if they want. But we've seen that people have wanted either three or five images. People aren't -- For a typical 2,000 square foot house, we may deliver 35 to 45 images and they're not going to want to stage virtually all of those. - Okay. Well, interesting because where I'm heading with this is, let's just assume, I'll just make an assumption that your cost, got to have a cost for somebody to do this, is $25 an image. So let's say if your cost is 2$5 an image and you're charging $40, you're making $15. If you're doing three, you're making $45. If you're doing five, then you're making $75. So now-- - Now, my margins are better than that. But yeah-- - Okay. - That's a good assumption. - That's good. Many of our viewers outsource and the likely person that they're going to outsource to is probably going to be about $24, $25. - Sure. - An image for a real person to actually give you what you want and be willing to revise it if you go back to the client, either if you don't like it or if your client doesn't like it to do revisions. - And good point. My editors will, if you're not happy with the couch color or a wall art selection, they're going to include two revisions with that to get it really dialed into how the client wants. And we also do not just photos that we've captured. I have customers who are not agents of mine, they may be other photographers, and they're just saying, "Hey, can we utilize your editors?" So we take projects outside the company projects. - Okay. All right. So, but I'm going to try and speak for most of our viewers, if they were charging a client $40 and they were doing three to five and it was costing them $25, then they're making an upsell to net $45 or $75. So now let's just say that the package is, you get six images for, I'm just going to make this up, let's say $25 an image. So let's call that $150. So let's price it at $149. And let's say your cost is, I'm going to round it because depending on what kind of account that you have with [www.WGAN.info/VSAi], it's around a dollar. If you're doing volume, it's going to be less than that. If you're just kind of playing with it to learn how, it's going to cost you more than that. But we'll assume a dollar. So if you do six images at a dollar, then you're at a margin of like $143. If you're charging $149 and it's costing you $6 and your margin's 143, then if you were doing five, where you were in the previous example where you were using your bespoke editor, your profit was $75, or almost, not quite, but almost doubling your profit. Now the question is, if you're selling it at $149, let's call it maybe even if it's $99. So you're able to offer, say, six images for $99, but the bundle is to the agent, look, it's AI. It's not perfect. It's getting better. You can't edit it, but you can have it the same day and it's good enough. Is that a hard-sell just between me and you because you like things to be awesome? Or is there an opportunity here between not doing virtual staging or a client doing virtual staging, or they're not willing to pay for the virtual staging, but maybe at a lower price point and getting more that this model makes sense? What are your thoughts on this topic? - Yeah. I've kind of gone back and forth, arguing with myself about this. I like to be as Burger King as... I like to be as-- - I have this picture of you doing this argument with yourself. - Yeah. I like to be as Burger King as possible. you get it your way. - Yeah. - I was thinking of offering it for just $15 an image, a flat fee, however many you want to order. Maybe I'll put the most picked amounts as a package that people can order, but $15 an image and it's kind of just like, here, you get what you get. But at the same time, I don't really like telling customers, here, deal with crap. And I'm not saying that this is crap. I'm saying that-- - Yeah. - It's not the best that I can do as a company, so-- - Yes. - I would need to see a little more refining in the way it's done, for example, with that window where it made that -- - Yeah. That was unacceptable. Totally get it, but I think we may have picked a really hard image for it to deal with because the sofa was blocking the window. So it doesn't know, is it a window or is it a floor-to-ceiling door? - Hard image, but common problem. - Common problem. Okay. - So, it's frequent that I'm in houses and I always say that stagers and owners and everybody are putting furniture in houses, not thinking about the photographer that has to come in and photograph it. They're putting stuff in corners, right against walls. And we like to stand in corners to get whole views of the rooms. And when we can't do that, we stand in front of that furniture, it makes the room look smaller, yada, yada, yada. So that's maybe a hard image, but it's a common type of scenario. So I would think that they would see that and say, okay, this happens a lot where there's a couch in front of a window. Let's figure out how we can work around this. - Mm-hmm. - And, ChatGPT and AI are coming up enough where you can say, "Hey, you got this wrong. Recraft this statement." And it will spit out something new. Maybe we could have a little box that says, hey, you made this a full length window. It's really a half window. And it would say, okay, sorry, let me redo it and take that input. - Mm-hmm. - Yeah. - So I'll pass that on to Michael as a suggestion is to say, but I would imagine hopefully he's working on something like that as a dialogue with the AI so that you could have that conversation about, "hey, treat that as a window, not as a door." Yeah. - Yeah. Or not as a, yeah, yeah. - But work with me here, though, in terms of pricing. I mean, I can't imagine offering one image for $15. It doesn't seem like there's overhead associated with dealing with virtual staging. So wouldn't you want to offer a bundle and just pick a number that it's six, it's eight, it's something and it's a flat fee and it's-- - Yeah. - so it's $99, it's $149, maybe, depending on your market. And it's positioned as virtual staging by AI-- - Yeah. - Which comes with some caveats. You get it the same day. It's not going to be bespoke and you can't make any changes. Do you want it? And is there a place in your rate card where it just fills a void for an agent that is totally satisfied and it's good enough? - Yeah, I would probably still stick with the three or five image model. - Yeah. - Just especially now that we can't do the same room for multiple angles. If we're doing a 900 square foot condo-- - Yeah. - To find 10 or 15 individual images that are unique enough that they're not the other, image-- - Yeah. - It would be hard. So I would probably stick with like, three images for $49. - Okay. Living room, dining room, and a bedroom staged as a home office. - Yeah. Maybe five images for $79 or something like that. - Okay. Tom, have you tried this with any clients? Have you given them your output and asked for their feedback and try to figure out if this is something that there's a market for for you with your existing clients? - I have. I've given it to maybe eight or so agents and just threw them in. Didn't tell them about it until after the fact. One feedback I got was from an agent who said that the furniture style didn't fit the condo. It was a condo right by the beach and I think I picked Modern or Standard. So I ended up picking Coastal. And I think that ended up being a better choice, which makes sense. I should have picked that one to begin with. But then she was happy with it. And then another agent actually used the images. The first agent used them too, but the other agent put them on MLS. I saw them right away when I looked at the house on Zillow. And so I was happy and I asked him about it yesterday and he said he was happy with them and that's why I used them. So good feedback for the images that I delivered. But I was being really critical with my OCD eye to make sure that there wasn't blurred windows and-- - Yeah. - Blinds without cords. - With your OCD eye, would you feel more comfortable using [www.WGAN.info/VSAi] with empty spaces rather than decluttering to avoid the issue that we just ran into with that window or with that lamp, for that matter? - If I was delivering images to this agent that had that house with the window, I would probably just pick a better angle and just try a different image and maybe not rely on that image. I would use it for both. - Mm-hmm. - Yeah. I would use it for both as long as it's non-cluttered. - I heard eight agents. Were there other agent feedback that you had gotten? - No, just the two. - Okay. Does that mean that they accepted the images and used them and you went from an internal cost of whatever it was that you were charging for your $40 an image to now that's something that's sort of, kind of about a dollar an image? - Well, I gave them to them. I didn't charge them. I just said, here you go. - Ah, okay. - Take them and use them. In exchange, just give me some feedback. And the one agent who said the furniture wasn't the right style, I appreciated that because I really thrive on constructive criticism. - Yeah. - Rather than just not hearing anything at all or-- - Yes. - They suck and I'm never going to talk to you about this again. I would rather have the feedback and say, "Hey, these aren't good." - Yeah. - "I wouldn't use them." And then I could say, okay, well, let me try something different. - Yeah. - So, yeah, I've heard from two, but that's kind of the way things go when you're asking people for their feedback. - For clients that don't pay for virtual staging, is there an opportunity here to just differentiate yourself from other photographers to say, "Hey, just gratis, we do this by AI. It's not a big deal. Thank you for your business. We appreciate it." And uses it as a differentiator knowing that it's costing you about $7 for that goodwill that may have a perceived value of $99, $149, $199 in value? - I think next time I raise my rates, I may just bump it up by, let's just say $10 an order and that'll account for the time that I would be paying me or an assistant to get on and have to deal with virtually staging images and then uploading it to the platform and, paying for the service. So, yeah, I could see a world where I was doing that and saying, "Hey, hire us because we're giving away free [www.WGAN.info/VSAi] images." I've given away plenty of free services just as kudos for placing orders with me. Somebody will order a regular photo shoot and I'll throw in aerials or a floor plan or even a 3D tour. So I could see a world where I'm doing that. I'm making enough margins and the cost is so low that I wouldn't feel like it's taking money off of my table to do that. But I would probably wait till I was able to bump my prices up maybe $10 just to account for that. - On that way to perhaps differentiate, would you, gee, I'm wondering if it's just easier that you're just making your own decision to say, "oh, this room's a train wreck. There's boxes and everything else in here. I can't bear as a photographer, even if the client has not ordered virtual staging, I'm just going to do this virtual staging by AI" in order to surprise and delight the client. And the perception was it didn't cost them anything extra, even if you had bumped up your price. - Yeah. The clients that I decided to give the images to in this test were ones who typically hadn't ordered virtual staging or they said, "Hey, I really want to do a good job on this listing." They don't want to pay for staging. I don't want to pay for staging. And, just casual conversations, stuff is coming out, or where there was clutter in a room and the rest of the house looked fine except one room was all their storage stuff. - Mm-hmm. - And so those are the kind of the ones that I picked for this project. And I think that as photographers, I can see a space and say, okay, these are the images that I would want to see if I was looking for a house to buy, or these are the hero shots of this property. Let's stage these ones. Versus, maybe an agent is not looking with the same eye and that's why they rely on us is because we have that eye for what shots we want to get. So, yeah, I could see a world where I was picking the angles and picking the style of furniture and then just saying, "Here you go." - Mm-hmm. Do you ever get depressed when the listing … - All the time. Do you want to talk about that now? No, I'm kidding. - Do you ever get depressed because the space is just so cluttered and the client's not willing to pay for the virtual staging and you feel like, oh, this is a problem you could solve, surprise and delight them, not charge them for it, and have them be happy? - I haven't been depressed in the last three months since I've kind of learned of this. So, no, that hasn't been a thing for me. But I have come across houses that were like, oh, man, Freddy Krueger horror-type houses that probably just needed to be torn down and you would get more for it than just with a house on it. And then I've photographed a $35 million penthouse in San Francisco that looks immaculate until you get to the bathroom and there's a clothes hamper with underwear in the shower and toothbrushes and just not a $35 million listing. - Yeah. Did you try and declutter that space, just out of curiosity? - No, because this was years ago. - Yeah. - But I was thinking as I was doing this, this would've been perfect because although the agent was at the house and said, "Hey, how come you didn't move the laundry basket with the underwear?" I'm like, "That's not my job. I'm not doing that. You were there at the house. You should have done that." And so the option was you can pay $60 and we can virtually declutter it and then stage it. And I didn't have this option. So he didn't want to do that. So we put the images out there with the laundry basket in the $35 million penthouse. Had I had this option, I probably would've just said, "Here you go. Have at it." - So, what's the verdict? Going forward, what's the plan? - I like your idea of a bundle. So I think I'll do three images, five images, maybe nine images, keep those three options and offer them for $15 or a little less per image and say, "Here you go." - And do you put words around it? This is virtual staging by AI and can't make change. The good news, you can get it the same day. - Yeah. - Probably good enough. The bad news is you can't make any changes. - Yeah. I got to thinking of a creative marketing tactic because what I've been saying is it's virtual staging with AI and it's kind of get what you get and you don't throw a fit deliverable. So I have to think of a nicer way to put that in my description when they're placing the order, but yeah. Yeah. And then, again, when I go to do my next rate increase, which probably won't be until next year, maybe the year after, I'll probably just increase it by $5, $7, $10, whatever it is across the board. And, I'll just throw in a couple images for free. - What would you do if you did your package and you figured out your marketing language about good enough, probably good enough, can't make any changes, client still comes back and says, "I don't like it?" Do you just simply say, "Okay, we'll take it off the bill?" Do you go back and virtually stage it again? Or do you use your bespoke staggers and say, "Hey, we made a change, not a problem, no extra charge, but knowing going forward, if you'd like to be making changes like this, this was done by our editor and this is how we charge for that," and then maybe upgrade them because they are a higher maintenance client and they need to be on a price tier that delivers the service that they're expecting? - My initial thought is you saw the fine print that said "You get what you get" and so you're stuck with it. But I'm really customer-focused or centered. So I think what I would do is say, "Yeah, we can go back and retry this. I'll take another stab at it using a revision of the software." And then at that point, you're going to get what you get. If you're really not happy after that, I'll have my editors do it. But you've now been excluded from being able to order this service going forward. - It's not a good fit. - Yeah. Yeah. - Yeah. - And I'm okay with it. Yeah. - You just tell them. Say you totally get it. It's just not a good fit for you. It's okay. But maybe that's still an interesting thing to learn because I just wonder if there's enough clients out there where good enough is actually good enough at a price point that's half of what they would pay delivered same day versus one day or two days later and there's a trade-off and that, because in fact, Tom, when you were pointing out everything on that patio where the Photoshop was and the fence-- - Yeah. - And all that, I would say I didn't notice it until you pointed it out. And-- - Yeah. - If I was a homeowner, I'm probably not looking for any of the issues you've described. I've just had this big impression and maybe I've spent three to five seconds looking at the image and then that's what formed in my mind and I went on to the next image, next image. We as photographers may obsess with that level of detail, quality, et cetera. But I wonder at the end of the day when a prospective home buyer, prospective home renter, apartment renter is looking at something, particularly looking at it on their smartphone on a small screen and they're just going through the images pretty quick and going, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I like that. I like that, I like that. Oh, yeah." - Yeah. - You know. - No, that's a fair point. Yeah. I mean, you think about looking at Zillow and you see, I've seen photos on Zillow where I don't know if you're going to be able to see my phone, but agents are doing this in the bathroom mirror and they're all in the shot and they're like, just... - Yeah, all right. We've concluded they're not a good prospect for you. We totally get that. - Right, but I'm saying, they may love this because obviously their bar of photography standards is set. - Ah, point taken. Lower bar, right? - Yeah. - Yeah. - So they may jump at this and be like, "This is great." Yeah. - Yeah. I mean, just to put things in perspective, I have talked to Virtual Staging AI Co-founder and CEO, Michael Bonacina, I've talked to him recently. And the company's going gangbusters. They're tons of real estate agents in particular, photographers in general that are ordering [www.WGAN.info/VSAi] services. So they're doing great. Their volume is increasing somewhat at an exponential pace. So I wonder if we might be a little bit too critical with the hyper-eye to go, well, I see where that Photoshopping was done. It changed the fence. Totally agree with you on the window, but maybe that we should test and try with clients because we actually may have clients that go, "Great. Love it. Half the price, get it the next day, I can live with it. There are no changes, I can live with it." - I'm not a betting man, but I'm going to guarantee that I'd say 80% of their clients right now are probably agents who don't want to pay for staging or don't want to pay an outsourced editor $20 an image, $40 an image, whatever they're having to pay for that. - Yeah. - And if it is true AI, I'm kind of ignorant to all of it, but there's got to be some machine learning capability in there where it could see all these examples. And if people are putting thumbs down on some of the images they don't like, hopefully it's going to be learning from that and only improving. I'm really hoping there's not some guy getting dragged back to the desk every time a bell dings that they have a new order and he has to sit there and manually edit the photo. I'm hoping that it's going to be some sort of learning environment where it could say, okay, we missed the mark on this window, or we missed the mark on this fence. Let's try to get better on the next one. - Well, the feedback that I've gotten from Michael is that over time, they're getting better and better and better and better. So I guess the question is, today, Thursday, August 15th, 2024, your assessment of whether you're going to keep playing with, using [www.WGAN.info/VSAi], or are you going to stick with your bespoke virtual staging editors? - No, thanks to this wonderful coupon code, I have it for a year to try it out. - Yes. - So I'm going to continue to offer it, continue to play around with it and I'll keep in touch with you to let you know the outcome of if I'm giving it away or charging for it and what I'm charging for it and that sort of thing. - Yes. And before everyone reaches out to me for that coupon code for a free year. - I didn't say where I got it. - Well, I obviously gave you that coupon code, but just so our viewers know, if you are a We Get Around Network Standard Member, you get the free use of [www.WGAN.info/VSAi] for 12 months at no charge. It's just a WGAN Standard Membership benefit of being a WGAN Standard member. And in fact, if we have Standard Members watching, please reach out to me so we can make sure that we get you the coupon code to get the free use of [www.WGAN.info/VSAi] Standard plan for 12 months. If you didn't have the free use for the remainder of the year, would you still be using [www.WGAN.info/VSAi] or, nope, that was fun, but I'm going to stick with my virtual staging bespoke editors? - Yeah, I'd want to get some more feedback to know that it was valuable to the client. So I would probably try [www.WGAN.info/VSAi] for two or three months and offer it to everybody for as many photos as I can throw out to people. And then at the end of the two or three months, see what the feedback is and decide to continue to use it or not. - Yeah. I think my last question would be -- going forward, do you think you'll just arbitrarily make decisions about where rooms need to be decluttered, where rooms need virtual staging? Simply give it to the client and ask them for feedback versus, hey, I can do this virtual staging, here's my package, meaning you start doing this with existing clients and if you find that they're happy to say, oh, by the way, I offer a package of three, six, nine images for a bundled price of this in my [www.WGAN.info/VSAi] good enough package, if you'd like to use that going forward, meaning sample it for free, gauge whether there's interest, and then see if there's an opportunity to have an upsell going forward with that client. - Yeah, and I'll say that I forgot to mention that the ones that I gave it to, I also said, if you find this valuable, consider ordering it on your next order. So I haven't given the virtually staged AI images to the same agents over and over. I'm trying it with different people and I'm saying, if you find this valuable, just consider putting an order in for it in the future. So, yeah, but I would pick the angles, I would give them free to the agents that I felt would probably give me some feedback, and then still offer it for those three, six, nine packages to everybody with the caveat that I'm still going to pick the angles because I don't want them to pick two of the same room right now. And, yeah, it's going to be you-get-what-you get. - Tom, thanks for being back on the show. - Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. - Tom's websites: www.ScanYourSpace.com, SparksMediaGroup.com Tom has an awesome YouTube channel: @SparksMediaGroup You can chat with Tom in the We Get Around Network Forum @ScanYourSpace for Virtual Staging AI the short link, our affiliate link: www.WGAN.info/VSI And if you want to see the previous show on Virtual Staging AI with Virtual Staging AI Co-founder and CEO Michael Bonacina, www.WGAN.info/VirtualStagingAi And again, we've been visiting with Tom Sparks, Founder and CEO of Scan Your Space, a division of Sparks Media Group for Tom. 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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WGAN-TV Podcast: How & Why to Offer Residential RE Virtual Staging by AI20173