PMRE Conference 2025: AutoHDR CEO Matt Gia Delivers a No-Hype, Practical AI Playbook for Real Estate Media Creators

On Wednesday, 19 November 2025, AutoHDR CEO Matt Gia took the stage for one of the most talked-about sessions of the week:

▸ The AI Playbook for Real Estate Media

The Kaos Showroom was packed with photographers looking for clarity on AI — not buzzwords, not futurism, but actual, implementable tools that save time, reduce bottlenecks, and accelerate business growth. Matt delivered exactly that.

Drawing from his own experience launching a real estate photography business in college and scaling it past $100,000 per month - while now spending about one hour a week operating it - Matt emphasized a theme that resonated across the audience: today’s AI tools are powerful enough to fundamentally change how photographers run and grow their businesses, but only if those tools are applied with intention and structure.

The mindset shift: from artist to business owner

Matt opened with a challenge many photographers quietly struggle with: believing that “nobody can do it as well as me.” That belief, he explained, is the number one barrier preventing photographers from scaling, delegating, and freeing themselves to focus on high-leverage work.

The critical decision he urged attendees to make:

▸ Will you run your business as an artist?
▸ Or will you run it as an owner building a scalable operation?

Either path is valid - but getting stuck between them keeps businesses small and owners overwhelmed.

The One Big Thing: automate or delegate the rest

Matt pushed photographers to identify their “one big thing” - the single activity that, if they could spend all day doing it, would move their business forward fastest.

▸ For some, that’s brokerage presentations.
▸ For others, it’s training new shooters.
▸ For many, it’s client acquisition.

Everything else should be delegated or automated.

And today, AI can do more of that work than most photographers realize.

How to build SOPs in minutes, not months

Matt introduced a simple, immediately usable system for building standard operating procedures (SOPs):

▸ Record yourself doing any task using Loom or a screen recorder
▸ Narrate what you’re doing as you do it
▸ Transcribe the recording
▸ Paste the transcript into ChatGPT
▸ Generate a step-by-step SOP with screenshots

What once took weeks can now be created in under an hour — and these SOPs form the foundation for delegating QC, delivery, scheduling, revisions, and more to virtual assistants or new team members.

The real unlock: building your own internal AI system

Matt showed how to turn a scattered set of procedures into a unified, internal “AI employee” by creating a custom GPT trained on four document types:

▸ Your SOPs
▸ Your packages and service offerings
▸ A complete client FAQ (the most important document of all)
▸ Your brand voice, pulled from your last 20 emails

Once loaded, the AI can instantly answer staff questions, guide them through client situations, write client-ready responses in your tone, and provide step-by-step actions based on your preferences.

This eliminates the constant interruptions that prevent photographers from doing high-value work.

Scaling client acquisition with AI + VAs

Matt demonstrated how AI can 10x marketing output with minimal effort:

▸ Virtual assistants can respond to Instagram posts with perfect English using AI
▸ AI can generate 20 viral-ready real estate scripts per day (instead of 1–2 manually)
▸ Lead magnets that once took hours can be created in minutes
▸ Podcast transcripts can be turned into a month of social content in under an hour
▸ Zapier automations can request Google reviews automatically after every shoot

The core message: photographers can grow dramatically without adding work - if they build systems that scale for them.

Creative tools finally worth using: image & video AI is “there”

This was one of the biggest surprises of the session: Matt argued that 2025 is the year when creative AI crossed from “interesting experiment” to “practical production tool.”

Highlights included:

▸ Nano Banana (Gemini) for hyper-specific virtual staging
▸ Veo 3.1 for photo-to-video sequences
▸ HixField for multi-frame video generation
▸ 11 Labs for voice cloning, narration, and audio cleanup
▸ AI-generated property lifestyle visuals
▸ Sketch-to-render architectural concepts
▸ Upscaled 4K property visuals

Matt showed examples of turning rough sketches into photo-real homes, transforming noisy iPhone audio into clean narration, and producing viral-style video scripts instantly. These are tools photographers can use right now to deliver higher-value content without higher effort.

The AutoHDR metadata study: what the top producers actually do

Matt revealed new insights from AutoHDR’s analysis of over 200,000 shoots across the U.S.:

▸ The average shoot lasts 40.6 minutes
▸ Large teams shoot 13% faster than small teams
▸ Bigger companies tend to shoot more handheld to improve speed
▸ High-volume companies deliver more photos and spend less time culling
▸ Gear spending drops significantly among the highest-volume teams
▸ Scale does not come from multiple markets - it comes from dominating one

Perhaps the most striking insight: the largest media companies in the dataset don’t use the most expensive gear. They use efficient workflows, repeatable systems, and automation - and they often outperform the “artists” using premium equipment.

The future of AutoHDR and full automation

Matt closed with a view of where AutoHDR is heading:

▸ “Camera → Cloud → Client” workflows
▸ Fully automated image editing
▸ Zero QC required
▸ Consistency that surpasses human editors
▸ Automated customizations such as green grass and twilight conversion

AutoHDR’s goal is clear: make the entire editing pipeline fully autonomous — with lower error rates, better consistency, and no workflow friction.

The takeaway for photographers

Matt’s message was both practical and energizing: AI isn’t something to fear or “wait on.” It’s something to deploy right now - to win time back, unlock scale, and make your business more resilient.

The photographers who document, automate, and systemize will move faster in 2026 than those who rely on perfectionism and manual workflows.

About AutoHDR

AutoHDR is an AI-powered image editing platform built specifically for real estate photographers, enabling fast, consistent, fully automated HDR processing.

Under the leadership of CEO Matt Gia, AutoHDR has become one of the industry’s most widely adopted AI editing solutions. The company focuses on seamless workflow integrations, high-volume consistency, and continuous improvements in image quality driven by machine learning. AutoHDR’s vision - “camera to cloud to client” — reflects its commitment to removing bottlenecks so photographers can scale faster without sacrificing quality.