321 Transform Home Listings with Virtual Staging - Chad Davies May 27 2026

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

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

Greg Bray: And we are excited to have joining us today Chad Davies. Chad is the CEO and founder of Davies Imaging Group. Welcome, Chad. Thanks for being with us again.

Kevin Weitzel: Thanks, Greg. Nice to be back.

Greg Bray: Well, for those who haven't met you yet, Chad, let's just start off, give them that quick background overview about yourself.

Chad Davies: Would love to give you the [00:01:00] two-sentence description. I started Davies Imaging Group 10 years ago to serve home builders with the best photography services on the planet. We only focus on home builders, and we serve them with model home photography, lifestyle photography, and now spec home services. So, listing photography, and most exciting development is our new virtual staging process. So, I'm hoping to talk to you about that today, but I'm sure we can talk about a lot more than virtual staging.

Kevin Weitzel: Alright. Before we jump into virtual staging and anything else that has to do with aperture and F stops or anything like that, let's go into the answer to this question. I need an interesting factoid for our listeners about you that doesn't have these four rules, because you're a repeat person. Number one, nothing about the home building industry. Number two, nothing about family. Number three, nothing about work itself. And number four, not your previous interesting factoid.

Chad Davies: Gosh, how personal can I get without being weird?

Kevin Weitzel: Get weird, buddy. Let's do this.

Chad Davies: Let's get weird. Okay, this is fun. So, I started my [00:02:00] business in California, and like a stereotypical person that lives in Los Angeles, I was vegan for, like, five years. And when I moved to Texas, of course, I started eating meat, and my life has changed. So, a lot of people still think I'm, like, pescatarian or I don't eat meat, a lot of close friends are still figuring this out. But over the last two years, I've reintegrated barbecue in my diet, and I'm a changed man. Which, no surprise there, but, like, Texas has incredible barbecue, and when you don't eat it for almost seven years, not eating meat to then eating fish and then now eating steak again. Brisket is my favorite. there you go.

Kevin Weitzel: Or some burnt ends. Come on.

Chad Davies: The tips?

Kevin Weitzel: Oh, the tips? Come on, now. I have one follow-up question.

Chad Davies: What's that?

Kevin Weitzel: Are you like me, because I know a lot of vegan converts out there that become meat snobs. Are you one that, like, it has to be a grain-fed or grass-fed cow? They have to be massaged daily kind of meat eater, or is it if it's chunked on a plate, you're going to eat it?

Chad Davies: I'm pretty [00:03:00] open. Like, if it's Whataburger, I'll eat it. I'm not too picky at this point. My better half definitely has preferences on the type of beef she's eating.

Kevin Weitzel: I've become quite the meat snob. I actually go to a butcher that gets all their meat from Minnesota. I don't know if they fly it, I don't know, maybe they ship them in. I don't know how they get the cows here. But I've become a meat snob. I will only buy from this one butcher.

Chad Davies: I can taste the difference. But after abstaining for so long, I can tell you I accept all kinds of beef.

Kevin Weitzel: So, you're saying at the International Builders' Show, all the rules would be thrown out anyway, because you're just going to eat whatever you can grab a hold of.

Chad Davies: Yeah. And I think I figured this out, like, because I was going to conferences, I was going to shows, I was traveling so much for a while. And it became just unsustainable to have a restricted diet and still, like, have kind of your macros in place. Like, I wasn't having enough protein. I was iron deficient. I was actually anemic for a little bit. It wasn't good. So, my lifestyle choices definitely affected my health. I had to swing the pendulum back the other way. So, now it's all on the table.

Greg Bray: When he starts raising his own cows in the backyard, then you know he's really going all the way.

Chad Davies: Hey, [00:04:00] give me a couple years, we'll get a ranch. We'll get a ranch. We'll make it happen.

Greg Bray: Well, Chad, you already mentioned a little bit about a new product that you guys have been working on related to virtual staging, and I think that was something that kind of intrigued us and we wanted to learn a little bit more about what got you headed in that direction, why you felt like that was something that builders could really benefit from. So, describe for those who haven't heard the term virtual staging, let's just define what it is, what you mean by that as just a baseline to start.

Chad Davies: Most home builders have used virtual staging, but if you're not, like, listing property, maybe you haven't interacted with it directly. But virtual staging is when you typically upload your inventory home photos that are empty. You know, these are just shells, they're houses that are going on the market, and they're not really inviting. So, the idea is virtual staging puts 3D furniture inside of those spaces and makes them look a little more inviting to a home buyer. This is not a new service. Virtual staging has been offered to the real estate industry for the better part of 10 years, and it's gotten better and better and better and [00:05:00] more affordable and more attainable, with time.

Interestingly, there's never been a solution specifically built for home builders. So, we saw that as an opportunity. But virtual staging is just when you take an empty space and you put in 3D furniture that makes it look like real furniture's there, and sometimes people do it really well, and sometimes people don't do it very well. You can definitely see a good virtual staging job versus a bad one. But that's in a nutshell what virtual staging is. It just makes the house look lived in without actually bringing in real, physical furniture.

Kevin Weitzel: There is a good and bad for sure. With any product line, there's going to be a good and a bad. There's the people that go for the cheap. There's the people that do it really well.

Chad Davies: Yeah.

Kevin Weitzel: But there's a noticeable difference in a period of time, because they all, I don't care who supplied them five years ago, they all looked like cartoons. What was it in technology that allowed the change, that transformation, from all of them looking like cartoons to some of them looking, in my opinion, practically photoreal in a lot of cases?

Chad Davies: Yeah. A few years ago, like graphics cards [00:06:00] became more attainable, especially to the studios who are actually doing the heavy lifting of actually integrating those 3D assets with the pictures. So, once graphics cards became more powerful, more attainable, computing just went kind of to the next level. It became a lot easier to recreate these 3D scenes with realistic lighting. So, really like graphics cards advancements are key to that kind of making a turn and looking more realistic.

Just like in movies, stuff that's made on a computer and put into a movie, it looks like real life. Same technology there has kind of trickled down into virtual staging. But it's just technology advancements have allowed lighting to look better. That's what you see is you see the fidelity in the textures, you see the lighting kind of fall across those textures, and that subtle stuff is what the human eye picks up on.

Like, our eyes are so advanced that we can call something out when it looks like a cartoon because the shadows aren't landing right on the floor, or like the highlights aren't wrapping around the edge of the couch properly. That type of stuff is like you subconsciously can process that, and [00:07:00] now we can integrate that into the scene. So, that's probably what you saw a few years ago, is everything kind of made that step, and suddenly all the furniture started looking pretty good.

Not to say that the furniture styling looked very good, and I think that's still where there's a lot of progress to be made. Everyone's pulling from the same couple hundred sets of furniture. You'll notice this, a lot of virtual staging out there today looks the same. It's hard to discern, you know, one builder from the next because they're probably using the same vendor to provide the same furniture sets. The houses at the end of the day end up looking exactly the same.So, that's a whole different problem.

Kevin Weitzel: So, in the rendering world, we had built a series of wall art, you know, like just pictures, random pictures, you know, like some seahorses and crap. We uploaded it into like a share drive of sort where people could, you know, go and take this 3D assets and put in there. I can't tell you how many renderings, whether our company or other companies have made these where I can spot those couple of pieces for sure that I'm like, "I know for a fact our artist made those." We made the [00:08:00] mistake, not the mistake. I guess it's just kind of like a communal thing where everybody benefits from it, all ships rise. I've seen that in hundreds of renderings. But you're talking more virtual staging. You're talking more on a photographic sense more so than rendering.

Chad Davies: Yeah. Yeah, correct. I mean, it's the same principles. It's interesting you mention that. From a rendering perspective, virtual staging is like half render, half photo. We're rendering furniture in a 3D environment and then exporting the 3D furniture kind of at a certain perspective, and then using Photoshop to combine them. That's essentially what the staging process looks like, is you're rendering the furniture and then you're inserting it into the photo. That's how virtual staging's been done over the last 10 years. That's the fundamentals is you render the furniture, you drop it into the picture, so you're kind of doing both processes. So, advancements that you've seen have trickled into virtual staging as well.

Greg Bray: So, Chad, when you start talking to a builder. Okay, we're going to do a photo shoot. You show up and you're like, "Hey, look, this house is empty. What can we do about that?" You say, "Hey, hire somebody to bring in truckloads of stuff and [00:09:00] stage this house, or we can let the computer do it for you." What are the kinds of reactions you get from a builder? What do they not understand or misunderstand about virtual staging when you start having those kind of conversations?

Chad Davies: I think builders today are actually like very well-versed on this. I don't want to slight any of them because I think most marketing professionals in home building kind of know their way around virtual staging at this point. They know the benefits. They know when to use it versus not when to use it. And some just have a brand preference or kind of guidance from the top that says, "Hey, we're still going to actually stage our spec homes with real furniture." Because the in-person impact of real staging is palpable. It's real. When you walk into a house for the first time and there's actually furniture there, it is a different experience, so that's something virtual staging cannot help you with.

Virtual staging is really the first impression on Zillow or one of the listing platforms like realtor.com, or it's kind of [00:10:00] mid-funnel when like they end up on your website and they're kind of browsing through different options. The virtual staging can help someone visualize that space, just like they could visualize the space in person with real furniture. So, most people have come around to virtual staging, and most people use it.

Because home builders are very sophisticated, especially marketers, like they're kind of experts in design and sales and human psychology. They kind of get all that stuff, and they somehow have to mash together with a pretty slim team and figure out when to use these tools and when not to use these tools. A lot of the pushback we saw over the last 18 months kind of introducing virtual staging and coming up with our new product was that the virtual staging available to home builders wasn't as nuanced or advanced as their design palette was.

So, like a marketing director in Indianapolis pushed back saying like, "This just isn't as good as our real merchandising. The virtual staging looks fine, but there's no plans, there's no accessories, there's no window furnishings. Like, the furniture looks nice, but you're missing all these things." That made us think really hard because she was [00:11:00] right. The model home merchandising is on a completely different level compared to, like, what is typically available on the virtual staging front because virtual staging is all templated little kits of furniture that get dumped into a house really quickly and really cheap.

Model home merchandising that everyone kind of knows really well, and we know that builders spend hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars sometimes building model home parks and merchandising those and making sure they have this incredible customer experience, those have so much care and attention invested into them that it almost, like, levels up the whole home building organization and their expectations of what staging should look like.

So ,when you start offering templated solutions that were really designed for real estate agents and real estate brokers who do not have the design finesse or care or know-how that a home builder does, the two worlds kind of clash. And the builders start rejecting a lot of the products available to your run-of-the-mill real estate agent or broker because it's just not on the same level as their model home merchandising. There was a big gap [00:12:00] there. Everyone's always known about virtual staging, but I don't think the standards were ever on the same level to, like, really meet their expectations in a way that got everyone excited about it.

Kevin Weitzel: Let's talk about an expectation. It's no secret I'm a former Marine, and I used four-letter words almost like they're alphabet soup coming out of my mouth. Greg is not really that akin to four-letter words. However, Greg, I'm going to need your permission to use a very bad word today. Ooh. And that bad word is bounce rate. So, let me tell you this. Here's a little factoid for our listening audience.

Greg Bray: I'm just counting the letters in bounce rate real quick.

Kevin Weitzel: It's more than four. Yeah, I know it's not a true four-letter word. Outhouse was one of the first Matterport partners in the state of Arizona. One of the first, so we're talking way back when the first cameras came out. We were there.

Chad Davies: Yeah, eight or nine years ago.

Kevin Weitzel: I can tell you that we've been keeping track of all the data, all the touchpoints, all the hotspots, you know, the heat zones, places that people go when they're in the Matterports. Here's a funny little bit of information for you. This is just looking at Matterport content alone. We're not talking about still [00:13:00] photography. We're talking about Matterport here. If you have a staged Matterport versus a raw shell Matterport, there is an eight to one stay/bounce rate. So, people are eight times more likely to bounce out in a very short period of time out of a raw shell Matterport experience than one that is staged. Eight to one.

So, for the builder that says, "Oh, I don't really know if it's all that important." Guess what? An eight to one ratio over more than 10 years says that they're wrong and that they need to rethink that psychology there. Because the psychology will prove, and data will prove, that people want staged environments because their mind can't put together, looking at a blank canvas, how that room is going to be laid out.

Chad Davies: Yeah. The prevalence of open concept floor plans are incredible when you put furniture in them, but otherwise, they kind of feel like empty [00:14:00] caverns. It's hard to imagine how you position the sofa and where the dining table goes and how many stools you can fit in the kitchen when it's just one big empty rectangle. So, I think that's where the staging really helps elevate a space and helps someone imagine how they're going to live there, is seeing the furniture.

And most builders, Kevin, kind of figured this out and they're just reusing their model home plans for Matterports, and they're not even doing Matterport on most of their listings anymore because they know the model home Matterport is more compelling for a viewer to look at. I'd imagine there's some lift there in some of the data, just because it's more fun to go through a model home than it is an empty spec. That figure is surprising. Eight to one, I have not heard that, and I'm going to use that everywhere now. Thank you.

Greg Bray: Hey everybody, this is Greg Bray from Blue Tangerine, and I am so excited to let you know that the registration is now open for the 2026 Builder Marketing Summit. We're going to be in Dallas, Texas this year on September 23rd and 24th, and we are working on an amazing lineup of marketing, OSC, and leadership content for you. Please check it out at buildermarketingsummit.com and get your registration in today. Remember, there's limited seats available, so don't miss out. Again, buildermarketingsummit.com. Can't wait to see you there.

So, Chad, you were talking about this clash between kind of the home builder expectation versus maybe the realtor view, and I'm assuming that's because realtors are more dealing with one-off, one at a time, individual homes, [00:15:00] whereas the builder's got the reusable assets because they're building the same model multiple times and some of those things. And so, what you're really going for now though is we now have technology so that you don't just have to have the model, you can get into this at each individual inventory home. Is that really part of the message that I'm hearing from what you're trying to say?

Chad Davies: It's exactly the message. Right now more than ever builders understand that brand is really powerful. If brand isn't everywhere in your presentation, it's nowhere. If there's any gaps in your brand presentation, then your brand has gaps, and that's not good. Brand is what's separating Builder A versus builder B right now. Because they might be building in the same neighborhood, their price points might be similar, their brand presentation's going to be the differentiator. That perceived value someone gets from landing on their website and kind of doing the research is what makes the really well-presented builder look like a better value than the one who's doing the bare [00:16:00] minimum.

So, there is this, like, focus on brand that you definitely see in model home merchandising. You see it in the care they take in spending all this money to merchandise these homes perfectly and paint the wall the perfect color and make sure they have the perfect pillows, and they go back and forth on making sure that kitchen cabinet is perfectly set in there so there's no gaps or anything like that. That's brand presentation because that customer experience, that aha, wow moment that someone has when they tour a model is really important. Everyone knows that. No one's going to say that's not important.

But for some reason, when it comes to marketing the spec homes in the same community, the same attention to brand has not been paid to those spec homes for whatever reason. Maybe just because the technology hasn't existed or it was too expensive or whatever. They know that getting furniture in the homes is important, but the furniture was never good enough to really entice someone to do it all the time.

What we've found is if you give builders stock furniture when they're a brand-focused home builder and really care [00:17:00] about their presentation, that stock furniture gallery doesn't really get them excited. It often has issues with it that don't represent their brand in the way they want to be represented. Furniture choices, styling, what's kind of on trend, what's not on trend really do influence a buyer's behavior. Builders know this. So, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel and cobble together stock furniture libraries, we figured out a way to just take the model home as art direction and almost copy and paste that furniture into their specs and use their model home merchandising as the art direction for their virtual staging and their spec homes, and it solves a lot of problems really quickly.

Greg Bray: All right, I gotta stop you because I want to make sure that you're not making this sound too quick and easy. The phrase cut and paste makes it sound like it takes you like two minutes and it costs five cents to get it all done. So, don't oversimplify it for us, right?

Chad Davies: This is exactly what a builder has to do. They upload their model home pictures to what we call a model match gallery in our [00:18:00] portal. It's where you order all your photos. There's a section called model match. You upload your model home pictures there, and then when you submit your virtual staging order you just select that model home gallery, and then we put the furniture in there for you. It's that easy

Greg Bray: So, Chad, is there ever opportunity because of the virtual staging to give the buyer, like, different versions they can choose from? Because we all have our own style, and sometimes I look at a home and it's like, "Okay, yeah, that's great furniture, but that's not my house because I would never have that color of a or whatever it might be." And so, can we have three different versions of this room now at a reasonable cost so that the buyer has some options to make it feel more like theirs and connect better?

Chad Davies: The cost that we're charging for the service is the same cost people are used to paying for normal virtual staging from stock furniture galleries.

It's like 25 bucks a picture. It's the same cost as you get anywhere else. You can stage a house multiple ways. It's going to cost you, you know, two or three [00:19:00] times because you're re-staging the house. But I think you might actually be open to that because it's reflective of your actual brand. You're going to reference three model homes and all the furniture within them, and you can restyle a space multiple times if you'd like to. That's fine. There's nothing stopping you from doing that.

So, I would say yes, you can do that, Greg, if you think it's worth it, absolutely. The quality is there. I think you'll be impressed by the results, but it really depends on what's important to you. If you're selling a home that could be marketed to a 55-up buyer or a move-up buyer or a new family, like, you're going to want to stage that differently of course. So, I think that all comes down to the marketing manager or the coordinator who's placing the order, and them just knowing it's an option.

Kevin Weitzel: Do you happen to have any tin foil window covered mobile home, trailer trash, crystal meth furniture in your library or no? Or do builders not ask for that stuff anymore?

Chad Davies: You know, they stopped asking for it like in 2011.

Kevin Weitzel: No. Here's my serious question.

Chad Davies: Yeah.

Kevin Weitzel: My serious question is that you [00:20:00] do this in still photography, and do you also do this in Matterports or no?

Chad Davies: The problem with Matterport is their backend's really locked down, and they make it really difficult for us to get in there. I've asked, I've reached out, and we've cobbled solutions up to pull down the assets from Matterport and re-upload them as new tours, and they kind of work, but it's not ever the same fidelity as like a dual Matterport tour they compress your exports.

Kevin Weitzel: But you can take the stills that are generated from Matterport and fashion all those to the nines.

Chad Davies: Yeah. We can do that. We could take Matterport stills from a model home and use those model home stills from the Matterport as your reference images for your new virtual staging library. So, even if you don't have great photography, you can take the Matterport stills and that still works. We did it yesterday.

Kevin Weitzel: That's nice.

Chad Davies: Yeah.

Greg Bray: Chad, what about the fact that I'm a buyer, I see this amazing house on the website, and then I show up and I open the door and it's empty. You know, because you've got virtual staging, [00:21:00] and I have not really connected the fact that, oh, this was maybe put together different, and I'm walking in expecting to see that. Have you had any of those kinds of conversations with builders and customer expectation management?

Chad Davies: Yeah. Let's get into the law. California Assembly Bill 723 was passed January 1st, went to effect. Any builder who's using virtual staging is obligated to call out that they're using virtual staging. They're supposed to put it on the photo, and they're supposed to also provide the un-virtually staged version of the same room in their listing. This goes for all brokers and agents and builders who are listing anything on the MLS. AB 723 is the legislation.

It is designed to kind of combat this mismatch in expectations for buyers, and I think it's a good thing. You don't want to mislead people. You want to sell them the dream, but not misrepresent what they're walking into. I don't think that's good for anyone. Saying, "Look how beautiful this space is with all this pretty furniture," and then having someone walk into an empty house and never mentioning that it was virtually staged isn't going to [00:22:00] help your sales pipeline. You're going to have a lot of people making appointments and never calling back because they were misled. It's just not a great way to do business.

Kevin Weitzel: I understand a simple disclaimer that would just say that, Hey, this thing's virtually staged, or this home has been done this way and it can be done a multitude of different ways. This is just an example, yada, yada, yada. There's tons of verbiage you can do there.

Chad Davies: Yeah.

Kevin Weitzel: However, this applies more toward used homes more so than new homes. I've seen an alarming number of used homes that have pristine lawns, fantastic landscape, and then when you get there, it looks like they had a 58 Chevy in the yard for the last two decades. left an oil spot and dead grass. How is the industry fighting that?

Chad Davies: That's what that legislation is actually made for because people were, like, redesigning the kitchen with AI and saying, Hey, redesign this kitchen and put modern appliances in, and all this stuff. And then, like, it's the same kitchen layout but with brand-new cabinets and countertops and appliances and floors, and they were using that for marketing, and people were showing [00:23:00] up to a dump.

Kevin Weitzel: Doors barely hanging on anymore.

Chad Davies: Come on. Like, that's rookie stuff. You shouldn't ever try to mislead someone to get them to show up to a meeting. It's not going to be good for anyone's business. So, the agents that are probably the most desperate are doing that, and they're probably the most desperate because they're not very good at this.

Kevin Weitzel: Yeah ... note to self, stop using pictures of George Clooney on my personality profile on dating apps?

Chad Davies: Hey, that's different.

Kevin Weitzel: Oh, that's okay.

Chad Davies: Yeah, that's different. Yeah. You're not selling property. It's more of a rental thing. Well,

Kevin Weitzel: I am. I am for sale, you know. Anyway.

Chad Davies: Oh, that's funny.

Greg Bray: Well, Chad, are there any other big gotchas that builders should be watching out for as they kind of explore the space of virtual staging?

Chad Davies: Right now, I know some of the platforms are just giving away virtual staging at like next to nothing. Where you can get it for, like, 10, 12 cents, just some ridiculous price. There's other platforms. I saw one last night. It's like three cents per image when you get the big plan. My immediate reaction to that is you're just going to end up with the same situation we have now, which [00:24:00] is suddenly every single house is going to be virtually staged everywhere, because it's basically free. Those platforms are just giving you stuff to keep you on their platform. They're not doing it to help your home at all. They're just doing it to kind of tie you in to whatever service they're offering.

Beyond that, if everyone starts using the free thing that has the same 10 or 20 sets of furniture, everyone's houses are going to start looking the same. The goal of marketing is to capture people's attention and set yourself apart. That's how you get attention is, you get noticed, and you can't be noticed if everything looks the same. So, I'd just be cautious of, like, the free options or the next to free options out there, because they're just going to serve you the same content as they're going to serve everyone else for that very low price.

What we've designed is fundamentally different. It's based entirely on what you actually built in your model home, and you can copy and paste that. Again, I know it sounds oversimplified. Copy and paste that furniture into all your spec homes. If you have 50 model homes, great. You have 50 sets of furniture to lean on. That's incredible. Give us all that and then only you will have access to that [00:25:00] furniture. That is a huge distinction, and if you're looking for differentiation, as everyone starts doing virtual staging for next to nothing, like, this is the way to do it. So, I'd caution people, unless they're just doing it on a one-off project and need something out the door today, maybe don't do the AI. I don't think it's great for your brand in the long term. It's going to wash away any differentiation you have.

The other thing I've heard is just some horror stories of marketing coordinators spending four or five hours using these platforms to generate virtually staged images of their rooms, and it takes them half the day to make a handful of pictures. That's not the highest and best use of their time. Anyone can download the programs and learn how to do virtual staging and create a business out of it. Anyone can go buy a camera. It doesn't make them DIG.

We've been in this space a long time. We built our whole business on model home expertise. We understand what builders are looking for at the highest level in terms of fidelity, quality, what their expectations are for layout. All that stuff is kind of embedded into the product and what we deliver now. So, whether you're ordering big model home photo shoots from us, [00:26:00] or you're ordering this model match virtual staging from us, you're going to get something that has kind of passed our checks of approval. It's gone through our process, which I think is the best in the world. You're going to, I think, benefit from that process.

If you have someone on your team just cobble it together on their own, it might turn out fine, but as soon as you do fifty or a hundred or two hundred specs a year, they turn into a full-time virtual stager. I don't think that's what you hired them for. The free stuff, I think, is designed for realtors and real estate agents to, like, get stuff out the door. I don't think it's designed for the corporate demands of home building.

Kevin Weitzel: The free and near free things that Chad is not mentioning, most likely because you can't sling mud. But guess what? Kevin's going to sling a little mud. So, let's look at the ethical aspect of this, the ethics of illegal and pirated software that they're using to make this. To offer something for pennies on the dollar, you are using illegal and pirated software. So, if you're okay with that and it can make you sleep at night, great, more power to you. Number two, they are almost always [00:27:00] offshore using slave labor and prison labor. If you're okay with slave and prison labor, then more power to you. Just keep looking at yourself in that mirror and telling yourself that it's okay.

And then, of course, number three is that absolute and utter waste of resources of your own staff. Yes, it doesn't cost you anything for that service, or it's pennies on the dollar, and I use finger quotes for anything. But how much is it costing you to have that sales professional or that marketing professional that's earning X number of dollars a year to be working hours and hours and hours on doing that? That is money being just lit on fire and tossed out your window. So, those are the things I'd like to add to what Chad said. So thank you, Chad.

Chad Davies: Appreciate the fire.

Greg Bray: Chad, one more scenario here. So, what about the builder who's maybe more in that startup phase, or maybe it's just a brand-new line or a new community where they don't have a model yet that's done. They haven't finished the physical staging piece of it all, but yet [00:28:00] they're trying to get some product moving, get some sales happening. How does that fit into this process?

Chad Davies: So, if you're a builder who has never built a model yet, ever, we do have the regular furniture galleries kind of divided by style for you, if you want to use that. They're still very good. We built a business on it over the last 12 months of providing that furniture, and everyone's happy with it. But as soon as you have a real-life model merchandised with your furniture, you should use that. And if you're building a new community in a new market, my bet is there's a lot of builders, like, growing into other divisions or whatever. You might have like a sister market a state over that you can use model home photography for as the reference. So, I'd encourage you to do that.

But it's a good question. Like, if you don't have model home images to dump in here, of course, you're kind of like, "Well, what do I do?" I'd start with the model home first. Invest your energy there because that in-person experience is going to drive results for you. It always does. I think the model home experience is incredibly valuable. We do have stock furniture to kind of fill the gap, but make sure [00:29:00] you do build a model. I'm definitely not saying don't build model homes anymore because that would be a disservice and I think a bad idea.

Kevin Weitzel: Let me ask you this because this is a scenario that comes up from time to time. For a builder that is pre-selling, they're marketing their product from CAD. So, they come to a company like ours where we're going to build them a, you know, 3D model, an interactive floor plan, yada, yada, yada. We build them that 3D model, and we do a little virtual tour of it. Can we supply you with that virtual tour and have you virtually stage it for them instead of getting the one version that they get from us? Could we send you that shell, if you will, and you could give them four or five different options for them to use as a palette?

Chad Davies: Yeah. A picture's a picture.

Kevin Weitzel: Nice.

Chad Davies: Yeah, any picture's a picture. I mean, it's fine. It doesn't have to be from a Canon R5. It can be from anything. If it's a well-composed iPhone picture, that works, too. We could export Matterport stills and stage those if that's all you have. I think really good virtual staging now is dependent on a generally well-exposed photograph regardless of where it comes from. We're just putting it on a JPEG, so it doesn't matter where the source [00:30:00] is. The lighting and everything we can do now is just so realistic that I think it looks convincing. So, good question. It doesn't have to come from a camera.

Kevin Weitzel: Nice

Chad Davies: I do want to say, like, the results we're getting from this are really, really good. We had one builder in Fort Worth that had a whole bunch of inventory that just wasn't photographed super well, so they had us come in and, like, re-photograph everything, and then we virtually staged these spaces for them. I think it was almost 20 houses. It was a big chunk of work. So, we photographed them, we virtually staged them, we created videos from that virtual stage stuff, which is a whole different topic we can talk about later. I checked in with him a couple weeks later. I'm like, "Hey, how, how's it going? Sales good, whatever?" He's like, "Chad, the last two weeks have been the strongest sales we've had in almost a year."

Just because they kind of revamped their presentation and, like, brought something that really told their buyers a story about these really beautiful homes they build. They just, like, gave them some furniture to build context, and of course it was really pretty furniture, but it kind of created a story for people to envision themselves in, and suddenly they're making sales again. It's incredible. It's not just, like, pretty pictures look nice. [00:31:00] I think pretty pictures really drive the needle right now when you're looking to make a change and you don't want to keep dropping the price on something, invest a few hundred bucks and do virtual staging. Like, it might move the needle for you.

Greg Bray: That's a pretty powerful story, first of all, because they didn't change their sales training, they didn't change the location of the homes, they didn't change the pricing, all these core dials maybe that people look at. You're talking about imagery that was used not when the person was there in front of the salesperson. You're talking about imagery that was used in listings and on the website and in all the places where people look before they call the builder and before they schedule the appointment.

Chad Davies: Guys, this was during the Iran conflict. This was a few weeks ago in the peak of, like, all the uncertainty. This was just recently. Presentation does matter. It is critical. If you're sleeping on presentation and you're only relying on a render to promote a house that actually exists, you need the pictures too. You need good pictures. If it's sitting there for longer than a month, you need virtual staging. [00:32:00] Give them a reason to show up. Don't be lazy.

Kevin Weitzel: I 100% agree with you, and here's why. Because you said something very important, that the presentation is important. You can spend tens of thousands of dollars sending your entire sales staff to a rah-rah, I call them rah-rah rallies, where, "Ooh, you could do, just do it 110%, be positive." You can spend all that money and still be presenting craptastic content. And guess what? Those salespeople, no matter how excited and how many percentages of above 100 they give of themselves, it doesn't make a difference, it doesn't move the needle because it still comes down to it, people aren't impressed with the craptastic presentation you've given them. Make it beautiful, make it something that they can emotionally engage with and envision themselves living in.

Chad Davies: Don't create hesitation. Your job is to remove friction. You do that by showing them what actually exists. Put it in nice light, make sure it's presented well so that they don't have any questions that stop them from reaching out. If you're presenting a cellphone [00:33:00] picture and, like, really cheap photos that you just got because the national vendor provides them at zero dollars, good, but if you're not moving houses, like, you might have to rethink that strategy. Because if you're just getting the pictures online and no one's calling you about those houses, it's because they don't care about your houses. Like, make them care. It doesn't cost that much.

The carry cost on houses, like a $400,000 home in Dallas, carry cost is, like, $145 a day, okay? So, like, if you let that home sit there for a month without any traction, just because you're the builder carrying the cost of that home, it's $4,500 out the door. Virtual staging is a lot cheaper than that. Good photography's a lot cheaper than that. Just focus on presentation. If you're not getting the results you want, focus on presentation for your specs and things will change in a positive direction for you.

Greg Bray: Well, Chad, this has been a great conversation, some great insights. Appreciate you sharing. Do you have any kind of last thoughts or words of advice before we finish up?

Chad Davies: I have so many things I want to tell people. I'd say the one thing is, I feel like spec homes are treated as an [00:34:00] afterthought right now. If you think about how most people find you, it's through a platform, and your spec home is often, like, the point of entry for them to experience your brand for the very first time. People don't know the home builder names. They don't know the communities. They know which city they kind of want to move to, and then they're just going to click through pictures until they find something that grabs them and makes them want to click in and learn more about that. And if you have a great presentation, that first click and the first swipe look really good, you're setting yourself up for success.

Don't do the minimum amount of effort to market your spec homes because right now I think people don't have to buy, they want to buy. So, make them want to visit. And you can only do that through a really good presentation. That's really what we're trying to do. We're trying to match that presentation you've worked so hard on your model homes and inject that into all your spec homes and make it as easy as possible so you can be more successful. That's all we want.

Greg Bray: Well, thank you so much, Chad. If somebody wants to connect with you and learn more, what's the best way for them to get in touch?

Chad Davies: [00:35:00] I'm super active on LinkedIn. I'm a LinkedIn power user. Connect with me there. A lot of people just follow me. Just connect with me. It's fine. And then, if anything from this conversation was interesting to you, just mention the podcast and say, "Hey, Greg and Kevin, this podcast is really good. I want to try that Model Match thing." Send me a message and, like, we'll set up a free trial for you so you can try it for yourself.

Kevin Weitzel: You get a free ottoman with a virtual staging of a lounge chair?

Chad Davies: Yeah, you can get five free pictures.

Kevin Weitzel: What? That's even better than the free ottoman.

Chad Davies: Yeah. We'll set you up on the platform. We'll get you started with five free photos and you can decide for yourself if it's worth it.

Greg Bray: Well, we appreciate the special offer. Thank you everybody for listening today. Thank you, Chad, for being with us. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse. Thank you. [00:36:00]