Matterport + Homes.com from a Real Estate Photographer's Perspective20526

Originally Posted by @Home3D
What is useful to know is how this works within Homes.com.

All agents are invited, at no charge, to register themselves in Homes.com's agent directory. The agent simply provides a bit of info about themselves. Homes.com automatically pulls from MLSs the number of closed transactions the agent has had in the past 5 years and shows them on a map in the agent's directory display. All good. This is intended to make Homes.com a useful go-to source for sellers to find an agent that is active in your neighborhood, if that is important to them.

Homes.com invites all agents to become PAYING customers of Homes.com. If an agent signs up, they pay a monthly fee and Homes.com automatically promotes the agent's transactions via online advertising. Interestingly, the price an agent pays monthly is relative to the number of transactions they have closed in the past 5 years. So a new agent starting out pays a much lower monthly fee for Homes.com promotion than a busy, established agent. Personally, I think this is very progressive of Homes.com.

All "Paying" agent members, each time they sign a listing, gets a "free" Matterport tour for the listing (I presume photos too) as part of the deal for paying the monthly fee. This also makes sense in their tiered fee system as a busy agent has most listings so they'll be getting more "free" services from Homes.com.

What is key here is that Homes.com knows the NAR research shows that buyers wish every home had a virtual tour. So they're doing what they can, leveraging Matterport to benefit Homes.com. They want more listings on Homes.com to show virtual tours than the other aggregators, Zillow, Realtor, Redfin.

KEY here is that these Matterport models created "for free" for their paying agents - WILL ONLY APPEAR ON HOMES.COM. These Matterport models will NOT be seen on Zillow, Realtor, Redfin or any other platform. I don't even thing they will appear on the corporate broker site or MLS itself for these "paying" agents. These virtual tours ONLY appear on Homes.com.

CoStar / Homes.com wants to make Homes.com THE go-to aggregation site for buyers (and renters via Apartments.com)

So, what effect will this have on us? Among my agent customers, no effect at all. I don't believe any of them have signed to pay Homes.com a monthly fee for these benefits. I have pretty high-end agent customers and I know they won't trust an unknown "Uber" photographer to service their listings. Also, when I do Matterport it's virtually always a "full property" virtual tour, front yard, sides, back, pool, gazebo, guest house, everything. I'm sure that's not what Homes.com staff photographers/scanners do. Really good agents know that quality photography is critical to their reputation and they won't be satisfied trusting that decision to an algorithm.

I do think that this plan by Homes.com will, slowly, increase the visibility of virtual tours, inching us toward the day when virtual tours are expected on every listing, not just a cool extra to have.

But think about it. If you're selling your home, how much will your choice of an agent be influenced by one who says "list with me, I'll provide a Matterport 3D tour" if the seller is savvy enough to understand that this cool marketing will ONLY be seen on Homes.com?

Sorry for the long post, but this is important for all of us to understand. BTW, this was all explained to me by an actual sales person for Homes.com who I caught in a friendly talkative mood one afternoon.

Personally, I think what Homes.com is doing with Matterport is GOOD for all of us, as long as you are a photographer that always goes the extra mile to deliver top-quality media for your clients. If your work is no better than Homes.com's "Uber" photographers, you could suffer. If you approach every shot as an artist, you'll be fine.

It's one thing to use Uber to get you from here to there. It's quite a different matter to trust the principal marketing of a million-dollar home to Uber. It doesn't make you look very good as an agent.