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Digital twin creator Matterport has introduced a new lineup of property marketing features to enrich its appeal as a more accessible downmarket resource for listing agents and brokers, including a de-furnishing tool and an artificial intelligence listing description tool. The company made the announcement in an Oct. 1 press release sent to Inman.
The company’s de-furnishing product, often known as “de-cluttering,” is a function that digitally removes outdated furnishings, random room accessories or other items considered detrimental to a property’s market potential, more important than ever as the majority of consumers search for homes online and use AI to uncover specific features.
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A number of companies deploy this technology already, BoxBrownie being typically identified as the first such image marketing company to mass market quick, high quality room edits.
“Imagine being able to de-furnish a home with one click or generate stunning property descriptions automatically, using just the data from your digital twin,” said Matterport CEO and Chairman RJ Pittman in the release. “These tools save time, elevate listings, and simplify complex workflows for everyone — from real estate agents to contractors and enterprise teams.”
Matterport’s de-furnishing function does more than create a one-time static image of a better looking room, it allows the user to dynamically look at before-and-after visuals from any tour experience using it. The user can toggle the feature on/off as they view a digital twin, similar to Proptexx’s browser app but deployed on full-house scale. Its intent is equally about envisioning what the room can be for the viewer as it is making it more mass-marketable.
The AI listing descriptions can be tone-adjusted to fit marketing or property styles and also dropped into an MLS page in a couple of clicks. The software’s automatic, lidar room analysis helps ensure any specific room dimensions wanting to be included are communicated accurately, alleviating the risk of leaving out what could be a critical reason a person chooses to tour a property.
They’re not by any means the only player in the live-edit image marketing space, but Matterport did largely commercialize the immersive, walk-through home tour for the U.S. market. It made terms like “built world” and “digital twin” industry parlance, even if it didn’t coin them.
Exceptionally accurate and technically sophisticated, Matterport’s very expensive and physically burdensome cameras hampered adoption and stigmatized the company’s offering as a luxury item, out of reach for the majority of agents and brokerages. The comparatively lengthy image capture and processing times couldn’t keep pace with the rapidly expanding fleet of consumer-level palm-sized alternatives that shared Matterport’s vision, but not its mechanism for realizing it. The Ricoh Theta, the Insta360 3X and of course, the majority of mobile phones, all managed to carve out a slice of the virtual tour space.
Matterport responded with a mobile application experience of its own that pairs with a rotating tripod-ready mount called Axis, which can also work with the Insta360. Its bigger cameras evolved, too, with the Pro3 cutting scan times by almost 5x while offering powerful exterior and outdoor capture capabilities.
Pittman discussed his company’s mobile scalability when reached via phone, as well as its competition in general.
“They see us as the pricey, high-end industrial player, but our freemium smartphone capture, with a really nice iPhone, is the secret sleeping giant. It is so easy to use, and those camera lenses, as you know, are only making 3D capture on the lower end really really great,” he said. “The barriers to entry are going away.”
He said that if Matterport’s full vision is to be realized, it’ll need all of its digital twin-creating colleagues to get there, platforms like Giraffe360 and iGuide, for example, as well as the lightweight mobile options.
“This can’t be won by any single company; it’s just too big,” Pittman said. “It’s the largest industry and asset class in the world several times over; there’s room for hundreds, and we got to spark a movement.”
No doubt helping Pittman in that respect is Matterport’s April acquisition by CoStar. The parent of search portal Homes.com offered $1.6 billion.
Fresh off a series of Super Bowl commercials as part of a $1 billion celebrity-infused consumer advertising campaign, and emboldened by web-traffic-minded CEO Andy Florance, it was easy to see what CoStar planned to do with its new toy — make 3D tours a household name.
“Matterport was a company that was not for sale,” Pittman said. “We had a great bright future as stand-alone public company, but the reason this deal is happening is because of the shared vision — which, I suppose, that’s the best way to contemplate a partnership, when you don’t need one, you aren’t looking for one. When you want to democratize 3D capture, virtual tours and make that part of the built world, part of the fabric, front and center, of residential real estate. That’s our sweet spot.”
These practical listing marketing features could crack the door for more agents to encourage their sellers to embrace the full digital twin treatment, especially if emboldened by the Homes.com search experience. Asked about that, Pittman concurred.
“Your vision of what this pair-up with CoStar is all about is right on target,” he said. “For that [shared vision] to happen, you need a catalyst, even if it feels like you’re going at warp speed with a bigger partner, it’s still not fast enough, but it should be enough to get this industry moving.”
The company’s Cortex AI, which offers the ability to automate capture of an entire physical space down to the inch, including the recognition of design minutiae like sockets, tile types and molding choice, will provide its large language model marketing engine with cleaner data in greater volume from which to learn.
It’s not being taught by an iPhone image uploaded to an MLS. The better the images, the more information the AI has to process. The Pro3 model camera works outside, too, meaning its accuracy won’t benefit only interiors.
Matterport isn’t forgetting about its institutional owners in its latest software release. The new Merge tool gives property managers of warehouses, office properties, hotel owners, apartment communities and those who need to market obscure capital assets the ability to connect separate digital twins to form a more cohesive tour experience. It allows for spaces to be scanned by multiple parties at different times and helps facilitate integration at a later time.
The fall release includes enriching scans with “Field Tags,” narrative waypoints or observations to highlight critical parts of a building, document safety issues or even share insights about a renovation or capital improvement.
“With the Pro3 camera, we can do really big spaces a lot faster because it has much bigger range,” Pittman said. “Now we’re doing data centers, retail like Walgreens, Whole Foods, Home Depot … they all want digital facilities management.”
The CEO explained that 3D captures lead to a better digital system of record, and when applied to residential, can make a home’s history much easier to track and share when changing hands.
“We’re feeling some real wind at our backs right now; it’s not a headwind,” he said.
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