282 Elevating Home Renderings and VR Tours - Greg Bray and Kevin Weitzel Aug 20 2025

Greg Bray: [00:00:00] Hello everybody, and welcome to today's episode of The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse.

Greg Bray: And we are excited today to have our favorite Mr. Weitzel in the hot seat. I reached out to Kevin and wanted him to share some stuff with us. So, welcome, Kevin. Thanks for being with us today.

Kevin Weitzel: Thank you very much, Greg.

Greg Bray: Now, Kevin, as you know, people like to learn new things about our guests on the podcast. But today I'm going to flip it, right? I'm not going to ask you [00:01:00] to tell, I'm going to tell them something about you that I don't think they know.

Kevin Weitzel: What? Okay.

Greg Bray: All right. Kevin, what that is, is sometimes you come across as the guy just trying to get the laugh and people don't always realize how smart you are. And so, I just want to go on record and say, the reason we're talking to Kevin today, folks, is because he knows his stuff. He is not the cave dweller that he makes himself out to be sometimes. That's your little insight about Mr. Weitzel today.

Kevin Weitzel: Alright, number one, thank you. And number two, to add onto that, because you probably weren't expecting me to be able to add onto this, but I can. I was the salutatorian at my high school. I got a 100% on the ASVAB test. I didn't miss not one question. 1415 on the SATs. I'm not quite proud about that, but it's still semi respectable. But I'm also a member of Mensa. So, that is an elite group of brainiacs. There you go.

Greg Bray: Yeah. Kevin is smarter than he lets on. Let's just put it that [00:02:00] way.

Kevin Weitzel: You know what, Greg? I do like to lead with laughs, and I like to extract laughs out of people. It gives me a joy. It's not just the joy of, you know, laughing about something. If I can elicit a smile out of somebody, elicit some sort of giggle or laughter out of somebody, it makes my day.

Greg Bray: But today, Kevin, we're talking about a topic that is no laughing matter.

Kevin Weitzel: It isn't.

Greg Bray: Because we're trying to help builders get better. We're trying to help them understand. And you and I have talked about this in the past, and we are still shocked at the poor quality content that we see on so many home builder websites today.

Kevin Weitzel: Shocked.

Greg Bray: So, we want to dive into that a little bit. And I forgot Kevin to congratulate you because not everybody knows that you are also now a junior partner at OutHouse.

Kevin Weitzel: Yes,

Greg Bray: So, you've been progressing in your relationship there, so congrats on that as well.

Kevin Weitzel: Thank you.

Greg Bray: Alright, so Kevin, what we want to dive into today, we're going to talk about the visual assets, especially around renderings, the [00:03:00] visualizers, the virtual reality tours, and all those things that builders can use. Often, we see just this huge mismatch of stuff that builders throw. What is so important about consistency? Is it important? Is it not? What should builders be kind of generally thinking about in their strategy around this topic?

Kevin Weitzel: I would say from a visual standpoint, from a marketing perspective, and from a web presence, consistency is still king. Not only is it king in your branding to make sure that your brand, your corporate identity, is matched from left to right, top to bottom, but that your overall look and feel stays the same too. You know, if you have a stick drawing for one home, some 2D colorized garbage for two or three other plans, and then you might have tried a 3D rendering from this company, tried a 3D rendering from that company, and then just kind of puke it all on your website, it basically says to your potential home buyer that you don't care. It says that you're lazy. It says that you are not putting in the effort to win over their [00:04:00] business, at least as a consumer, that's how I see it. And I hear it from home buyer after home buyer after home buyer when they see that kind of stuff, if they're making any shortcoming on their visualization like that, their renderings, then where are the shortcomings when they're building the house as well?

Greg Bray: Isn't it fascinating, Kevin, you bring that point up, that people judge our company and our product by the website. In reality, your ability to make a good website is completely disconnected from your ability to build a quality home. There's no skillset overlap. It's not the same person doing those two things, but they judge you based on the quality of the website and whether they even want to have the conversation. It's a fascinating psychological connection to me.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, it's not 1980 anymore. In 1980, you could get away with some billboards with some brand name recognition, and that we're building in x, y, z coordinates. You could also get away with having just a beautiful model home that people could drive to. People don't do that anymore. They search for everything online. They want to educate themselves online. [00:05:00] So, if your website is crap, that is literally the first time a lot of these home buyer customers will actually even see a builder. So, to have garbage content on your website just blows my mind.

Greg Bray: All right. Well, let's define what we mean by garbage. What are the kinds of things that you're seeing builders do out there that falls in your garbage content category?

Kevin Weitzel: Yes. Builders that just lazily extract a sheet out of their construction documents, out of their blueprints, and it's just 2D floor plan of just an extraction with all the lines, notes, the little hash marks, the electrical cues, all of that stuff that that's what they list as a floor plan. That's horrible. When it comes to renderings, if they do that same thing where they just extract that basic 2D elevation out of the construction documents and put that on their website, that is lazy. It's cheap, it's lazy. It is not beautiful to look at. It's just not acceptable.

Then you can elevate slightly higher than that. We have these colorized 2D, so basically they take that 2D image, the PDF, if you [00:06:00] will, and then they colorize that. They color it in, you know, like with technically kind of like doing it with crayons or coloring pencils or whatever markers, but it's literally colored in digitally, and it's better. It's better than a stick drawing, but it's still not photo-real. It's still a cartoon.

Then you get into renderings. Now there are these drafting platforms like Chief Architect and Soft Plan, and even Revit for that matter, that can produce when you're drafting of a plan can produce a 3D image of that plan. The problem is, is that none of those platforms actually say, Hey, you should use these for marketing purposes. Matter of fact, they discourage it. Autodesk is the parent company for Revit says you shouldn't be using these extractions for your marketing purposes.

What you should do is take that mesh model you get from that drafting platform, and then have a rendering company or have a rendering personnel on your staff, create a photo real rendering out of that instead of just taking what that extraction is. So, builders that use those self, kind of [00:07:00] drafted up extractions. Again, it's seen as lazy. It's cartoony. It's just not acceptable.

Greg Bray: And I would say, Kevin, it's not only lazy, you're missing the big opportunity, right? Because not being a builder, right, I look at blueprints, I have no clue what's going on, right? Now granted, then we get these floor plans that have all like the builder notes on them and all the extra lines and things. And I look at that and I'm just, I'm kind of overwhelmed. I can't even really process, do I want to live there? I don't know what all this means.

And so, it's all about that, looking at it from the buyer's perspective, of what do they understand? How do they visualize themselves living in these homes? And you just can't do it when it's just a black and white line drawing. It just doesn't do it. I can't get the depth, I can't get the visualization there.

Kevin Weitzel: And then when it comes down to it, when you are a builder and you happen to be building in the right school zone, near the right businesses, and you have the right plot of land, and you hit the right mark with the price points and the [00:08:00] overall aesthetic looks of the area that are appealing to people that are buying, you can be lazier because you already have them coming to want to be in that area. They're seeking you out. However, not all builders have that luxury, especially with all the urban sprawl we've seen. So, when you're out in the boonies and you're having to attract people to some of these suburbs, you have to have something that wins them there, and trust me, a cartoon drawing is not going to do it. It's not going to do it for me, and I'm a home buying consumer, so.

Greg Bray: Alright. So, if not that, then what? Where do we go next? What are the places that we should be looking or starting? Is it just like getting a good photographer? Is it something more? What's the next step?

Kevin Weitzel: Not to dissuade people from utilizing, you know, quality photo real renderings, but if you're going to get a photographer, get a high quality photographer, not just somebody out there with their phones snapping pictures. Although phone pictures are good now, they're not consistent. You want to have a photographer that understands what the prime lighting scenario will be.

They'll make sure that if they're coming back to work site after work site after work site, that they can give you a [00:09:00] consistent output. So, you don't have one that's way out from the street. You don't have one that's right up next to the home. You don't have one that is straight on from the front, one that's at a three corner perspective type view. Consistency, again, is king. If you get a photographer, make sure that you're getting quality photography and that it's consistent.

However, if you don't have that and/or you want to showcase your homes before they're built, then I would recommend having some renderings done, 3D perspective renderings. The price has come down. You know, any builder that's been around back before the crash knows that you could pay a thousand dollars plus for a rendering of just a basic production home. And now you can get production renderings from, I don't know, $150 to $800 is pretty much the spread, and that's based on the level of photorealism, et cetera, and the scale and the complexity of the plan.

But what it really comes down to it is that you have to have that quality imagery that people will see. So, what it comes down to is how much can you afford for your entire listing of plans to be done in renderings so they're consistent? And then, you want to make sure that you move the needle [00:10:00] up or down based on the level of photorealism that you can afford to have.

Greg Bray: Well, and I think too, Kevin, sometimes builders just think this stuff's way more expensive than it is. It costs more almost to do a photo shoot than it does to do some of these renderings because of the way the technology's evolved. Would you agree with that?

Kevin Weitzel: Yes. And there's actually an advantage of doing the rendering too, is in the fact that if you can go from one community to another community, you can literally do a facelift of the materials and the colors of those renders for a fraction of the cost of redoing renderings all over again. So, you can give them facelifts on a repeating basis.

Greg Bray: Well, and you can't take pictures if something hasn't been built yet either. It's that simple, right?

Kevin Weitzel: And usually, I don't know, some areas of the country a little different than others, but I know here in the southwest, in, you know, Arizona, California, New Mexico, you know, it's literally a big giant dirt field that they're building homes on. So, all the landscape will be just, you know, these 15 gallon bushes and 25 gallon trees, all this new growth stuff that hasn't [00:11:00] really taken foot yet. So, the photos are going to show all that as well.

Now you can have them digitally enhanced. There's companies out there like Box Browning and some of the other companies that digitally enhanced exterior photos. They can put lawns out in front. But all reality, it really comes down to the fact that you can take a rendering and put regionally specific vegetation and landscape around a home.

Greg Bray: Now builders, of course, have a huge variety in the size of their plan libraries, you know, the number they're offering. We've got builders with just couple of communities. We got builders with dozens of communities, and sometimes it's a set of plans that are across all communities, sometimes every community's unique and different, and all this. It can be a lot, not just budget wise, but just a lot of work to create all of this and take time and everything. Do we have to do it all at once? Is it okay to do it like a community at a time or a series at a time? What are your recommendations there?

Kevin Weitzel: That's exactly my recommendation. Don't hate me for saying this because it is the cheap way of doing things. When it comes to consistency, if you're going to have your elevations on your website, [00:12:00] at least your do your A elevation of every home, or your modern of every home, or your traditional of every home. At least do one elevation of every plan that you have, so when you showcase them on a grid on your website, that they show up and they show up consistently.

Then when you go to the, additional ones if they're the stick drawings or just the 2D, you know, colorized stuff, that's fine for the most part. It buys you time. It shows that you're at least putting effort into those A elevations. Then add another elevation later. But what I usually tell my builders that are on strained budgets or don't have, the DR Horton and Lennar dollars, you know, they don't have those buckets of marketing dollars, for those smaller builders like that, I usually recommend doing either a series at a time or a community at a time. Do one full community, every home, every plan, every elevation that's in, or do an entire series. So, if you've got this traditional series and this executive series, do the whole series at a time, and that way you can take it off in smaller bite sized chunks.

Greg Bray: Do you ever look at popularity of plans as a way to decide which ones to do? Like, if we've got 50, which ones [00:13:00] are the most popular ones that we're having the most interaction with?

Kevin Weitzel: You know, it's funny you asked that because I just ran into that with the builder. They build 25 homes a year, but they have 75 plans in their library. I'm like, how many years are you even tracking? I guarantee you've got plans you haven't built in five, maybe even 10 years. They're like, we do. I'm like, why are you even taking the time to put them on your website? If you're not building them, don't spend money on them.

Keep them in the archives. So, when somebody says, oh, I'd really like to have a house with a bonus room and a basement, poof, we've got it. It's not on our website, but I'll email you a link to a floor plan. Then you can do it that way. But yeah, when you have 60, 70, 80 plans and you only build 15, 25 homes a year. And you have to eliminate custom, full custom is a whole different ball of wax. But people that are building typical production homes, production level homes, that is spending a lot of good money at bat because you're never going to have that to where you could build them.

And what most builders will have is they'll have, let's say you have 40 plans, if you have 40 plans, [00:14:00] and you look at your history of selling those plans, you're going to see a giant curve. an arc, if you will. And that arc will be, we don't sell any of these. And this one we sell 50% time, 40% of the time, you know, out of all those planes. That'd be a lot. It'd be 25% of your entire sales of just one plane alone. So, yes, that was a long-winded wave saying select your plans, archive some of the ones, keep theem at your fingertips, but archive those ones that just aren't selling. If they're not selling, there's a reason why they're not selling. Nobody wants them.

Greg Bray: So, you talk Kevin, about consistency between like trying to have the similar type of content for everything. How different are different vendors? Well, we want to have renderings for everything. Are the renderings really different? Do I need to have the same vendor doing all of this, or can I share it to get it done maybe faster because they can only get this many done this month and this one could do this many.

Kevin Weitzel: They are similar. However, there's enough look of difference from what vendor A, B, C, and D does. So, what we do versus [00:15:00] what Anewgo does versus what Focus360 does versus what BDX, and you know, Zonda and all those other companies do, the difference that you're going to see is sometimes very minute, and sometimes it's much more dramatic. The key factor is you have to make sure that when you are shopping for your renderings, that you are shopping a consistent product line.

Because if you go to, let's go with Steve, let's go with Focus over there. If you go to Focus and you say, I want the most photorealistic rendering there is, and he gives you a price for that. And then you come to me and you say, you know, I'd really like to have something just photoreal enough. Price me on something. Well, if you don't tell me that I'm supposed to be competing against Focus with super photoreal, either one, the examples that I give them aren't going to be good enough to compete against the Focus ones, or two, because I'm showing a cheaper product, the pricing will never be able to be matched on that same photoreal product. So, in all reality, it comes down to making sure that you have consistency in what you're asking for. So if you are gonna go price shop and quality shop some vendors, definitely make sure [00:16:00] that you give them a clear and concise definition of what you're seeking.

Greg Bray: We've been talking a lot about using these things on the website specifically, but can these be used for print, like in brochures, and can we use them in other types of platforms? Does that change what you order or what you should be asking for?

Kevin Weitzel: It's almost like we have the same brain sometimes, Greg. And I know that's a scary comment.

Greg Bray: Yeah, I don't know if I want to go that far.

Kevin Weitzel: But yes. Many companies have the same philosophy. But at OutHouse, I believe this, pay for it once. Use it everywhere and anywhere that you can. So, if you get renderings done, put it on your print brochures, put it on a digital brochure that you have on your website. Put it as an elevation in your interactive floor plan platform. Put it on your apps. Put it in your MLS listings and your Zillow and realtor.com listings. Definitely use it anywhere and everywhere you can.

Greg Bray: So, talking about using it then, let's talk about some of the ways to make them even better as we use it. So, are there some best practices, especially when you're talking about how to connect these [00:17:00] things together, right? I've got multiple elevations for this plan. What are some recommendations you have there to make this an even better presentation?

Kevin Weitzel: When it comes to website implementation, and I'm actually gonna ask you some questions on it too, and I'll come to those in a second. But when it comes to website implementation, there's something that I see on a regular basis where builders will have these giant carousels of elevations where it takes up literally an entire page. That's just a lot of number one, load time, and number two, it is just a lot to have to scroll through and view.

So, I typically recommend taking that money shot, that best elevation you have, and make that a singular focus, and then having a smaller thumbnail where people can access those other elevations and/or having them somewhere else live on the website, like on, again, in a skin of an app or an IFP. Doing that is one way of kind of streamlining your overall offering. Another thing to look at is that, you know, on the best money shot, is that it takes away from the cluttered aspect of a website. It can declutter your website and make it a nice [00:18:00] cleaner look. So, that's one of the best practices.

So, you don't have to highlight every single elevation, but if you've got one elevation that's super hot, or maybe the community leans more toward mid-century modern or a modern type of build look, then you would want to utilize your B elevation or your C elevation, whatever it would be, and make that the major focus.

Greg Bray: So, define one more time for us, Kevin, the term money shot.

Kevin Weitzel: If you look at a series of renderings for the same plan, an A, B, C, D, E, F, whatever, however many you have, there's going to be one that your internal team will go, wow, that's a good-looking house. If you impress your own internal team with an elevation, that's the one that should be featured. I would even recommend testing it. Have your elevations done, email them out to everybody in the company, and say, I want you to rank these from best to worst. I guarantee you that you will see a consistent ranking over and over and over again.

Greg Bray: Alright. So, that's the only one to feature. That's the one we lead with. That's the big one, and the other ones are the small ones, things like that, right?

Kevin Weitzel: That's it.

Greg Bray: Awesome, awesome. So we've been talking a lot about rendering specifically, and [00:19:00] photography, but let's expand out more into some of the VR tours and the visualizers. Tell us a little more about what's possible now, what you're seeing be effective, and the things that builders should be considering in that space.

Kevin Weitzel: So, when we're talking about virtual tours, and you know, animated types, we're looking at three various platforms. One would be an animation style. Think of an animation as an old-timey video tour that a realtor would do, where they'd walk through with a video camera through an entire plan. Whether it has voiceover saying, Oh, now we're entering the living room, or if it has music over. But that's what an animation is.

They typically lean toward being more hyper photoreal, but they do typically cost a little bit more because it's per every couple of seconds, the cost elevates. So, if you're doing like a 20, 30-second animation to show the key features of the home, if you want to show every single nook and cranny, you might be talking about 90 seconds, 180 seconds, and that can radically increase that budget.

The next phase over would be a rendered virtual tour, and that is where you take from the CAD plans and you basically [00:20:00] build a 3D model and then you can model out as much or as little as the home as you want. So, people can go through and go point to point on their own user user-controlled, and actually rotate and view every various room. A little less hyper photoreal. On computer screens, they look a little bit more fisheye because they're designed to be used in, you know, like Google Glass and Oculus, and those 3D goggles. They're a fantastic tool. Plus, you can give them facelifts anytime you want.

And then the third would be those photographic style where they stitch them together. The most popular one out there is obviously Matterport. Matterport is where you have a camera, it does a 360-degree photo, it stitches them all together, and then makes a 3D model for you to be able to virtually walk through. When it comes to Matterport, I do recommend this. I recommend stop doing empty room, empty shell Matterports. Stage the home or get it virtually staged.

I used to discourage virtual staging because it was another garbage product. It just looked like cartoony. It was out of scale. But I'll tell you, once I met the guys over at Oda Studio, I was thoroughly impressed. I've never seen anything that [00:21:00] great. It looked very, very hyper photoreal, and then it virtually stages it at a fraction of the cost of what it would cost you to bring in a moving company, drop in the staged furniture, then move it back out, yada, yada, yada.

So, on the virtual staging side, you have companies like Otis Studio, where back several years ago, they were one of the most photorealistic virtual staging furniture platforms available. But you fast forward to now, you've got Chad Davies, with his company Digs, they have a new version of the Matterport virtual staging that is freakishly fantastic. It's the best I've seen to date, rivaling that Otis studio. So very, very good product.

Greg Bray: So, Matterport is something that I think most people are pretty familiar with in today's industry. But again, Matterport is limited to taking pictures of something you've already built and what you put in the room, right? So, while we're expanding this out to all of the homes that haven't been built yet and being able to have similar types of high quality, Kevin, have you seen people recognizing that sometimes the staging itself can [00:22:00] either be a plus or a minus for a given buyer? And so, now we have the option to say, Oh, do you want Style A interior or Style B interior, or Style C interior? And so again, more choices, more opportunities to connect. Even subconsciously, oh, I don't like that couch. I don't like that paint color. I don't like that, whatever, you know, choice that was made can push somebody away unintentionally from a given home.

Kevin Weitzel: It can, it actually can. The beauty of a rendered virtual tour is that you can reskin it, again for pennies on the dollar. You can change out the entire furniture collection. So, if you have one area of town that you know sells to one type of demographic, you have another area of town that sells to a completely different demographic, instead of doing two separate virtual tours, do one and then have it almost reimagined, even with different color schemes, different features, textures, and set that one up that way. So, therefore, you can spend a lot less money and get multiple variations of it.

Greg Bray: Now, Kevin, I think I already know how you're going to answer this [00:23:00] question, but I got to ask it, right? Builders spend a good hefty investment, a lot of time, energy to create all this stuff, and then they go to put it on the website. What's the mistake they make?

Kevin Weitzel: So, the number one mistake is Where's Waldo? They play a game of Where's Waldo with their content. Honestly, it's usually the real basic websites that cause that, but I've even seen some big players out there, legitimate builders that sometimes will take a piece of content and just toss it off into a corner, and you have to scroll and flick and find and do a solid search to even see the things. So, definitely make sure that it's visible. Again, put it in multiple places. You can have your virtual tours on a virtual tour page. You can have them in a gallery as an item within the gallery. You can have it on an interactive floor plan as a hotspot so people can find them there as well. But yeah, virtual tours, even Matterports, a lot of times, the content gets lost.

The other factor is with Matterports; this is another issue that a lot of builders have, is that you have to renew those every year. So, if you don't renew those, you literally will have a dead link on your website unbeknownst to you. After a [00:24:00] certain amount of time, once it's gone, it's gone for good. You have to literally pay to have it reshot all over.

Greg Bray: That would be a big oops.

Kevin Weitzel: Big time Oops. Well, Greg, let me ask you a question. So, when you're talking about renderings and virtual tours and stuff, but let's talk about mostly about renderings, you know, because I know that you can use, and again, I'm not a programmer, I don't build websites, but you can do alt tags, you can, you know, make it a little bit more visible to search crawlers and stuff, and web crawlers. What are some best practices that a builder could utilize to implement their renderings on their website to make it more Google-friendly or AI-friendly?

Greg Bray: First of all, from a user standpoint, let's take advantage of the power of visuals and make them big. There's nothing crazier than having these tiny little postage-stamp-size images that you can't get at. So, even if they start out small, like with the thumbnail version, make sure you've got some way to enlarge that and fill the screen so that somebody can really take a good look at that.

I think one of the other mistakes I see a lot, Kevin, is [00:25:00] they aren't labeled in some way. There's this beautiful image, but I don't know which home it's for. I don't know which room it is necessarily. I mean, yeah, can I figure out? It's the kitchen. Sure. I can figure out it's the kitchen. But sometimes it's over in this slideshow gallery or something like that, and I can't connect it back to, oh, I really like that. Which model, which floor plan does this go with? And making sure we've got all those labeled.

And it gets back into what you were just talking about, too, is understanding Google and things like that. As we move into the AI world, these labels on the images are going become even more important because we're starting to get more and more granular in the type of searches we do when we can have the more conversational type query with a ChatGPT, for example. We start asking like, I'm looking for four-bedroom homes with this feature and this feature and that feature. And if we haven't put on our website that we have all those features, then these tools don't know to include us in those types of results and [00:26:00] those conversations.

So again, just making sure it's very clear with the context around that image. I'm not talking about necessarily plastering words across the middle of it, so you ruin it, but making sure it's very clear what is this a photo of so that everybody can tell. Alright, Kevin, we've talked a lot about what's there today, what's coming next? Where is this technology going? What do you see happening over the next few years?

Kevin Weitzel: So, on the rendering side, it's not what's coming up; it's actually here, it's been here for quite a while, but visualizers where you can take a static rendering and change all your materials, your colors on it. The key thing to remember there is that most, if not all, of the vendors that are out there that produce visualizers only want to build them on their own renderings because renderings are built in a multiple variations of layers. You want to make sure that if you are considering doing visualizer where you can change those attributes to a plan, that you make sure that your vendor, number one, does them. Number two, that they can supply them, and number three, that you picked that vendor that you're comfortable with that also offers that.

On top of [00:27:00] that, again, something that's more new now. It's only a couple years old, but on virtual tours, options on the fly. So, when you go into a plan, you can change a den in lieu of a bedroom just by clicking a light switch on the wall or a little moniker on the wall. You could change out interior color schemes if you want to. So, those visualizers can not just be still, but they can also be in the 3D environment. At this time, it's not bleeding edge, but it's still in the leading edge category. So, it does cost a good chunk more to get them to where they have those variations available, but admittedly, it's cool. It is super cool to be able to see the entire home in this new palette, if you will.

Greg Bray: I think those are pretty powerful. Again, especially when you realize that buyers have different personal preferences, and it just helps them see what's possible. Instead of feeling like, oh, that's what I'm getting, and say, oh no, I have choices. I have options. And be able to really understand that. I think that's pretty powerful for, especially for a like me, who can't always see past what's right in front of [00:28:00] me.

Kevin Weitzel: Greg, I can't match my shirt to my pants. You think I can match, you know, the tile to the flooring, to the backsplash, to the cabinets. I'm color blind, fashion blind, whatever you want to call it. I have no clue when it comes to, so I'm right there in the same boat as you. And then I'd say the third one, and I'm not going to say that it's gone, but it definitely missed the mark, and I was really excited about it when it first came out. And it was mostly out of some Australian suppliers that were supplying it, but they were augmented reality of plans.

I know Anewgo did some, I know we've done some, where you can take your plan and go out to your location with a tablet and then literally see the home as it would sit on that piece of property. I thought that was going to be the next big thing. It truly has missed the mark. And I don't know if it's just that builders don't see a value in it or that it's kind of clunky. It's not quite as photoreal as it should be. But that was one that was coming. It was going to be the next big thing, that honestly has kind of fizzled.

Greg Bray: What about the headsets and the goggles? Where do you see that going?

Kevin Weitzel: Headsets and goggles. I see that it's not going to go [00:29:00] away because there's still that group of people that love to use that technology. There's roughly 17% of the population that can't use them because they get motion sick. I am one of those people. My best friend Stewart thinks it's hilarious that I can, within 30 seconds of putting those things on, make myself so sick that I can vomit. Thirty seconds. It doesn't take long for me. Instantaneously, the result is nausea.

Then on top of that, people just hygienically don't want to put that on their face. So, that's another percentage of the population that doesn't like that. Number three is that you typically need a computer program to kind of push those items to those devices, and the cost and the maintenance, and the upkeep of those devices. Plus, you have to physically be there to use them. And you got to remember that there's a large quantity of buyers. I think you even had the stats to this in one of your writs as of late, but the percentage of people that would literally buy a home site unseen. It's crazy. It's alarming the number of people that don't need to physically see something to be able to buy it.

Greg Bray: About six months ago, our family went to a virtual tour where they were giving us a [00:30:00] tour of an ancient Egyptian pyramid. It was a thing where you went in and you actually walked around and you wore the headsets and all this. It took like 30 minutes to go through this whole thing. You floated up and down on the elevator. It fascinating and amazing, and I'm sitting here enjoying this.

 But also thinking about what this going to be like when this is in the builders' design center or their model homes, where you walk in and say, Oh yeah, you can tour this one, but here's the other five that aren't built yet, but here's how you can tour them. And then when's it going to happen where we can do it from home because we all have our goggles at home and we can just plug it into the website. I don't know when that's happening. I'm not the one that's going to make that happen, but I can see a day where that technology advances and becomes affordable enough to do that. It'll be fascinating to watch.

Kevin Weitzel: The pushback is the affordability. If you do those true gaming engine scenarios where you have to have that gaming computer, sure, you can use a virtual computer, but it's not the same as having it physically on location. But then again, you have to have a 3000ish dollars computer at that location, at every [00:31:00] location that you want that to work at. And that's just to show that one feature. And that's so little ROI on that. Is there a wow factor? Yes. But is there ROI? I don't think it's there yet.

Greg Bray: The way technology advances.

Kevin Weitzel: Yep.

Greg Bray: We'll see. We'll see.

Kevin Weitzel: Until it gets to that affordability side of the house, I think it's going to be one of those, you know, yeah, it's neat, but can't afford to do it.

Greg Bray: All right. Well, Kevin, this has been a great conversation. I've learned a lot. I appreciate you sharing so openly and even sharing other examples from some of the other vendors out there. Any last words of advice or thoughts you wanted to make sure you got out today on this topic?

Kevin Weitzel: Yes. I know that builders struggle putting out quality social media content. If you have spent the money and finally got away from those garbage stick drawings, those garbage watercolor pictures, and you finally spent the money to get some quality renderings, do a house of the week, do a house of the month, where you're putting out that elevation rendering and showcasing it on your social media different platforms. It's free content. You've already paid for the collateral. You might as well just put it out there and showcase that [00:32:00] home. Tie it into a story about the community. Use those high-quality renderings that you paid for in a multitude of ways.

Greg Bray: Great idea, great advice. Well, Kevin, if somebody wants to connect with you or learn more, what's the best way for them to get in touch?

Kevin Weitzel: Kevinw@outhouse.net. Or they can just go to our website, outhouse.net.

Greg Bray: Well, thanks again, Kevin, for sharing today, and thank you, everybody, for listening to The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: Hey, and I'm the guest and co-host Kevin of OutHouse. Thank you. [00:33:00]