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TranscriptWGANTV Live at 5ZillowZillow 3D HomeZillow Video Walkthrough

Transcript: WGAN-TV How to Make Money with Zillow 3D Home9365

WGAN Forum
Founder &
WGAN-TV Podcast
Host
Atlanta, Georgia
DanSmigrod private msg quote post Address this user
Video: How to Make Money with Zillow 3D Home with with Zillow 3D Home with Zillow Sr. Director, Product Development, 3D & Computer Vision Josh Weisberg and Zillow Senior Development Manager, Mitch Dawson

Hi All,

The following is the transcript for the show, WGAN-TV How to Make Money with Zillow 3D Home (above).

Best,

Dan

---

- Hi all. I'm Dan Smigrod, founder of the We Get Around Network Forum. Today is Thursday, May 9, 2019, and you're watching WGAN-TV. Our show today is how to make money with Zillow 3D Home. Our two guests in the studio, hey Josh, hi Mitch. There's Josh on the left. Josh is the Senior Director Product Development 3D and Computer Vision, and Mitch Dawson on the right there is Zillow Senior Development Manager. Super excited to have you both on the show today. Thanks for joining us. How to make money with Zillow, what a great topic. Why don't we begin first many with a little bit about what Zillow 3D Home is. Perhaps maybe we can see what it looks like on a Zillow listing, to start with.

- Sure. I can give a quick intro. Zillow 3D Home is a new product that we released recently that makes it pretty fast and easy to create virtual tours. It uses either an iPhone camera or Ricoh Theta. It allows you to quickly capture a home. Our computer vision services processes that into a tour, and then it's posted on to Zillow for people to view. You can also share it through a variety of means that we can demonstrate for you, and we're excited to demo the product and show off a couple new things for you. Your question, let's see, so can you see our screen?

- You're not sharing it.

- Oh, sorry. You wanna...

- Sure.

- My bad.

- You can share Chrome.

- Okay.

- How about now?

- Not yet.

- We need to say sure.

- Yes.

- You have the search results?

- Yes.

- Okay.

- If you could maybe take us back before you've jumped into a tour, how did I find this Zillow 3D Home Tour?

- Actually what we've done is we're on Zillow.com, and we just went to the state of Arizona. Here, look, you can see the blue outline of the state, and then you can see all the listings--

- I'm sorry, I don't. I actually am in an actual tour.

- Maybe we need to reset sharing?

- No, just do this.

- What we're probably seeing is a different tab on your screen share.

- How about now?

- [Dan] No. I can see your mouse moving through the screen. Now I'm at Bing. Now I'm at Zillow, okay, great.

- Okay, great.

- All right, so I come to Zillow.com, and then I went into Arizona.

- We just picked the Phoenix area, popular area for homes this time of year, and then you can see on the right, there are listings of homes, and you can see in the upper left-hand corner where they say 3D Home. For example, see that?

- [Dan] Yes.

- Yeah, so that indicates to you that there's a 3D tour on this listing. I know you also asked about video walkthroughs, so if there is a video walkthrough but not a 3D tour, then it would say Video Walkthrough there as well.

- And if there's both?

- We show 3D Home as the badge.

- [Dan] Okay.

- For a given home, I can just simply click on it. This brings up our home details page, so you can see the primary photo, a little Street View, and then you see this panorama, and it says 3D Tour, and if you click on that, then it will take you into the 3D home experience, and there's a couple things to point out here. One is we do provide the attribution for the real estate agent. I know we have some questions about that that we can come back to, and then we have different navigation views here on the right where you can navigate by room or switch between floors, and then you have the tour experience here, where you can zoom around, can zoom up and down of course. Our computer vision pipeline will generate these wafers or these tiles that tell you how you can navigate to other rooms, so you can just simply tap on them. You can also just click on the preview here on the right. This is captured with the Ricoh Theta, so you can zoom in all the dimensions, and then of course you can also zoom in on a particular thing, so let's say you wanted to see some detail in a particular area. I apologize, I'm a lefty using my right hand.

- I know that feeling.

- Yeah, you can also zoom in as well as see more detail.

- And this was shot with a Ricoh Theta V?

- Yes, and we'll show you, we'll walk through the same tour created with several different cameras to give you an example of what that looks like.

- Okay.

- This is what it looks like on a PC or a Mac. We can also walk through what it would look like on a phone as well.

- You have a preference, Dan?

- Sure, let's take a look at it on a phone.

- [Mitch] Sure.

- Let me just share my phone screen real quick. You see the screen?

- Yes, I can see your smartphone.

- Right, so this is our newest version of the app. As you may or may not know, we recently launched 3D Home nationwide, also in Canada. As part of that, we had a big refresh to the app, so if you haven't been in the app for a while, you'll see a new capture tab in here which is you can see this is all about creating, resuming. We'll give you tips on capture in here also. If you go into your list of My 3D Tours, and see I have a couple properties here with tours and a couple of them are in progress. The example tours that we've taken, we want to demonstrate here, this one was taken with an iPhone. We have one that's taken with a Theta V, a Z1, and then also a nighttime tour also shot with the Z1 because you can do some pretty incredible things with the Z1.

- Yeah, and I think it's interesting, just another view of the property to help a buyer get a sense of what it might be like to live there is if you produce the tour at night, they can get a sense of what it looks like, so we're using that as an example.

- Okay, tell you what, Mitch, how about before we go too deep into how do you go create a tour, let's come off screen share and we'll go back to Josh and talk a little bit more first about the big picture, and then back into some of the logistics for a photographer. Is that okay? Josh, what's the big picture about Zillow 3D Home? You launched three weeks ago nationwide after beta testing certain markets in the United States. Your press release three weeks ago said, "Making 3D home tours available to everyone on every listing." That sounds pretty ambitious. Can you talk some more about that?

- Sure, yeah, I'd be happy to. Zillow's goal has always been to provide people with a better experience for buying a home or renting a property, and to really make it radically easier than it has been to start with. 3D Home plays into that by, we know, we believe that giving 3D tours or virtual tours to buyers or renters helps give them a better sense of a more authentic sense of a home, to make a decision as to whether they want to see it in person or not. Historically, they've cost money, right? We know in a lot of cases, realtors, particularly the average listing price in the United States is under $300,000, and it's hard for realtors to spend money on capturing high-quality tours and listing photos, and so we believe that by bringing this out and making it not only free, but also making it very easy to use, we'll drive further adoptions. They'll see more 3D homes on more listings, overcoming that barrier of the cost and complexity of creating.

- So free to capture, free to upload, free to host, free to share.

- It's completely free.

- Free.

- The only cost would be is if you wanted to buy a Ricoh Theta, but other than that, Zillow does not charge anything to the photographer, to the agent, to anybody for using 3D Home.

- When you did your testing, what's been your experience of why, first why a homeowner would like to have this for their listing?

- Yeah, that's a good question. For a seller, well, sorry, you asked about a homeowner. I'm assuming you meant seller.

- For seller, I want to sell my home. Why do I want to have a Zillow 3D Home associated with our listing?

- Yeah, I think it's pretty straightforward. It helps the listing stand out, right? It attracts more buyers by giving that more immersive experience, giving that more authentic sense of the home, so it's really about just standing out against other listings, similar listings.

- In your testing, were you able to get any feedback in terms of it reduced the number of people that actually did physical walkthroughs, which was actually a plus for the person listing the house because they really wanted qualified people coming through the house rather than just anybody coming through the house?

- Yeah, that's a good question. We're still measuring that. We think that that's the possibility. It's a little challenging to measure, because if you didn't show up, then it's hard for us to ask you, right? With the homes that Zillow is buying and selling, we are starting to ask those questions to get that sense. I think what we have seen is that listings with 3D Home, they do get more views, people spend more time on that listing, and that helps drive up the home in search rankings as well, so there is that benefit to a seller or to an agent where it will stand out, you'll get more views on it, people spend more time looking at the home by virtue of the fact that they're exploring it.

- And in terms of the listing agent, what is the benefit from a listing agent's perspective of why they would want to do Zillow 3D Home?

- That's a good question, and I think it's been interesting in the last few weeks what we've learned and heard from agents, or even over the last few months as we've done pilots of this. I think what we've heard from agents and our Premiere agents, the number one thing that they're seeing is that it helps differentiate themselves as they do listing presentations. That helps them come off as being more technologically savvy, providing more services to their client. That's something that's been quite interesting to us. Obviously if it attracts more views, people spend more time on the listing. That's a value as well. That, I think, is a big aspect of why would an agent go ahead and do this? Well, if I don't have the listing, it can help me attract or differentiate me. Once I have the listing, it gets more views, and then I think another key part of this is it's free. Before, I might not be willing to spend the money capturing a tour on a home unless it was a more expensive home and I was gonna make more money. As an agent, I have to pay for that out of my own pocket, right? By virtue of the fact that it's free, I'm maybe more likely to do that on other listings, and I think we're starting to see more lower-end listings, more in the sort of $300,000 to $400,000 range have 3D Homes on them, compared to before with other products, we were seeing it more in the $800,000 to a million and above is typically where we were seeing virtual tours.

- Did you have any sense in your testing of what percentage of the agents would want to shoot it themselves versus want to engage a photographer to shoot a Zillow 3D Home tour?

- Yes we do, and it was about 50/50. This is in test markets, right, so it's in the specific cities with Premiere agents that we work with. I don't know if that's gonna be representative of the data now that it's available to everybody in the US and Canada, but we did that about half the agents were willing to do it themselves.

- Today's show is about how service providers can make money with Zillow 3D Home tours. Do you have some tips on that topic?

- Tips on capturing or how--

- Not on capturing, but how a photographer can get business, can make money on something that, how a service provider can make money with Zillow 3D Home.

- Sure. I think, I'll go back to what I just said in regards to agents, right? The fact that we don't charge for it means that a photographer service provider could offer this to agents at a lower price, compared to what they've done in the past with other products, which might actually increase the demand for it. They're not sharing any of that with Zillow, right? They're not paying us any fees of any kind, so they can lower the price and increase their margin, compared to some of the other products that they've historically used. Some of the photographers that we did the pilot with, they were tacking this on to the listing photos. We saw anywhere from $75 to $150. They're at the home already, right, so it's easy for them. With the Ricoh Theta V, and now the Z1, we found that on average, they could capture the whole home in about 10 minutes. If you an charge $100 to $150 for that, that's pretty good business for 10 minutes of your time.

- 10 minutes as in terms of a 2,500 square foot home?

- Yeah, about 2,500, 2,600 square feet, yeah.

- And it's literally that quick, meaning I'm presuming you're shooting one 360 in every major room, maybe in the hallway, to help connect the tour just from a walkthrough ...?

- Maybe more in the one in the kitchen, say if it has nylon, like if you want to see behind the nylon, for example. Then also one of the nice things about whether you're using the Theta or the iPhone is you can shoot outdoors as well. We're seeing a lot of front yard, the back yard, because that's obviously something buyers are really interested in.

- I think I'm hearing a few things in terms of helping a photographer make money with Zillow 3D Home. First a note that agents are looking to perhaps get more listing presentations, get in front of more people if they get known for doing this kind of service, presumably be able to win more of the listing presentations by differentiating themselves by offering Zillow 3D Home, and that the photographer perhaps can expect to, maybe 50% of the agents that they talk to are receptive to having the photographer shoot a 3D Tour Home rather than the agent shooting it themselves.

- Yeah, I think we'll see how that, now that we're nationwide... we'll see how that data plays out. I think it's a good question like why would an agent decide to do this themselves? I think it largely comes down to do they have the time, and are they comfortable with the technology? It's in our pilot programs. We saw it was about 50/50, and then we'll see if that number shifts as we go beyond that pilot.

- Was that related to having, the agents that wanted to engage a photographer, was that because they're not tech savvy, or they didn't have the time to do it, or both?

- Some combination of the both.

- Some combination?

- Yeah, some of the agents either didn't have the time or they said hey, I'm not comfortable doing it, or they had a photographer coming out to do the listing photos already, now convenient to have them do the tour as well.

- I think the other piece that I heard was you were seeing photographers having success offering this as an add-on?

- Yes.

- You're already shooting photos or you're shooting photos and video, adding an add-on for X number of dollars for doing Zillow 3D Home.

- Correct, but the add-on amount is less than what that they would normally have to charge if they were using other products or services that cost them something, right? The fact that it's free makes it easier for them to offer it at a lower price, and still maintain the same or higher margins on their business, and again if they're choosing to use the Ricoh Theta, then it's also really fast for them to do it. It's a really strong value proposition for photographers who want to offer the virtual tour aspect. Now if there are other things that they want to include like measurements or so on, great. There's other products that do that, like Matterport for example, that's great. They can use those products that offer things that we don't, but if the goal is to differentiate the agent, to differentiate the listing by including the virtual tour, then it's fast, free, and easy for the agent or the photographer. For the photographer, they get to charge money for it, and by virtue of the fact that it's lower cost to them, they can pass that savings onto an agent, who in turn would consider offering it on a less expensive listing where they have less budget.

- Josh, you mention Matterport. Obviously many of the We Get Around Network Forum members are Matterport Service Providers. Do you ever think we'll see a day when you could shoot Matterport and publish to Zillow 3D Home?

- I might phrase that question a little differently, which is a day when you can shoot Matterport and publish it to Zillow, right? 3D Home is our capture product.

- Yeah, forgive me, yeah.

- That's okay.

- Let me re-ask the question. Do you think we'll ever see a day where you could shoot with Matterport and publish a 3D tour to Zillow.com?

- We're definitely open to this. We, in fact, have actually talked to some manufacturers of this technology about this idea. We see a lot of value in it. Technically, there's a lot of complexity in doing it, and so in discussions with some of these companies, we've talked through what the approach could be. There's obviously legalities involved where Zillow would want to make sure that they have the rights to give us the content and so on. I would say yeah, it's feasible that we would do it. We've explored it.

- I guess I would imagine if Zillow's vision is to have every listing have a Zillow 3D tour, that part of getting there is through partnering with other cameras, platforms, in order to have exponential growth take place. I'm not expecting that we're gonna hear an announcement today, but I'm just trying to at least maybe take your pulse a little bit to say, whether we're talking about Matterport or GeoCV or Cupix or Nodalview or any other platform that is capturing, in a just a general, that's something you'll all at some point will be pursing? I'm speaking from a photographer standpoint. We want to shoot once--

- Get as much exposure--

- If I show up with Matterport and then I want to Zillow, I'm doing the same space twice, right?

- Right, I get that, yeah. Now's probably a good time to mention that I have spent a good bit of my life as a photographer, including six years as a professional photographer. I did sports, not real estate, but I understand the concept that you're talking about. When I was shooting sports, it was all about getting an image onto the news wire first, because whoever got it there first, that's who Sports Illustrated or ESPN would pick it up from. I understand where you're coming from. I can't tell you definitively that we're going to do that or not. I will tell you that we have thought a lot about it. We have talked to a number of these companies about what it would take to do that, and there are challenges involved. I'll give you one example to give you a sense of why this isn't simple. I'm assuming most of your listeners are familiar with Photoshop and Camera RAW formats, right? Adobe has a team of 20 engineers who simply work on making sure Photoshop and Lightroom were compatible with all the different Raw formats, right? If you take the companies that you just listed, they all have different ways of capturing and storing the data and associating all of the measurements and other data, metadata, that goes along with those files. Zillow doesn't want to turn into Adobe, right, so the idea that we're going to have to parse all these different formats and figure out how to represent that data consistently is one challenge, right? Either we have to crack that, or we have to ask the partners to do that work. We also have to think about the impact that, what would the experience be. We have over 140 million unique visitors that come to Zillow on a regular basis. We need them to continue to enjoy that experience and be able to find the content they're looking for, and the idea of having 10 or 20 types of different tours all with different user interaction models is something that we're concerned about, right?

- I'm actually thinking a little bit different is that they would conform to your style or how it's presented, as opposed to it's completely different, assuming that all the cameras and platforms were willing to publish in your style. Just to take an example, Matterport published the Google Street View. Okay, it looks like Google Street View. It doesn't say Matterport on it, doesn't have Matterport's logo on it. It literally conforms to Google Street View. Assuming that the platforms, just generally speaking, were willing to conform to the Zillow 3D Home look, style, feel, format, would that be the low hurdle to jump over?

- Potentially, yes. We did discuss these concepts with some of these partners, and we did get feedback that they would want some form of brand attribution as a way to drive more business to their platforms, which we respect, right?

- Yes.

- Certainly would add value to them. As I said, we've had conversations. We've discussed some of the technical challenges, and I think we just have to put it in context with the other priorities that we're working on and determine when the right time to do it is, right, but we have had these conversations, and we definitely are open to continuing to have them with any service provider, right? Our goal isn't to own the capture process, right? Our fundamental goal is to provide the best experience for a buyer or renter, right, like to really help them find their home quickly and a good experience. If working with other platforms, other camera manufacturers, if that helps us do that, then yeah, of course we're open to that, right? Again, I said this a few minutes ago, but a big part of why we've built 3D Home and why we've made it free is because we want to create more demand for this experience and the technology that powers it, right, and we hope, and I think it's great that other companies have started supporting the 360 cameras, like the Thetas, because that gives more optionality, right? If I'm a photographer, I could offer either Matterport or 3D Home with the same Ricoh Theta, right? I think that's a win for the photographer to have that choice, right, and so what we're really trying to do is make this accessible to more agents, to more sellers, to more property managers, and it historically has been because of the cost.

- Yes, thank you for your thoughtful answer about other platforms, and I do appreciate you being, having your history as a photographer and me speaking as a photographer, we just hope that all the parties can figure out how to play nice together because again if, let's just say half of all the real estate agents want somebody else to shoot the content, just pick that as a number, we as content creators really only want to shoot the space once with whatever platform or tools that we use so that it's just ... we have a member of our community went and shot the same house with four different platforms, just kind of as a proof of concept to take a look at that, and if it turns out that you gotta shoot something twice or three times or four times, it's exhausting.

- Yeah, it's not ideal. It's not good for your business.

- You have to charge the client for shooting four times over rather than shooting once and publishing many places, okay, point taken.

- I totally get where you're coming from, and like I said, we've definitely thought about it, we've had conversations. We just don't have anything specific to talk about today on what that could look like.

- Thank you. You mentioned branding, and I certainly can appreciate there might be some platforms that push harder that we gotta have our logo and gotta have a linkback in the promotional consideration. We hope that all gets worked out, but at the same time, as soon as you mention branding, what kind of branding opportunities are there for the photographer that's shooting the Zillow 3D Home tour?

- That's a good question. Today we do have a place for branding, and we can show it in one of the tours.

- Could you maybe pull that up while we're chatting?

- Let's see. There you go. In the upper left-hand corner.

- It's not sharing yet.

- My apologies. We do have a place for branding today in the tour. We do default to showing the real estate agent, right? If the Realtor does not have, if it's not set up the branding in the Zillow tools, then we would show the photographer. I understand the desire from the photographers to drive more awareness of their service. Consider the goal of Zillow is to help people find the home that they're looking for, and if I'm taking this tour and I'm navigating through, and I like the home, we want you to be able to click on that agent's name and get in contact with them, right? It's a fundamental part of Zillow's business is is to make it easier for people to buy a home, and that means getting connected to the agent quickly. That's what we've optimized for. Now we've had a number of conversations about ways in which we could show additional attribution, say for a photographer or for some other type of service provider. We continue to explore that, and we're getting feedback from that, from agents, from photographers, and I think when we have the right solution, then we would definitely roll that out. We do have the Zillow Certified Photographer Program, which has almost 2,000 professional real estate photographers as members, some of which we regularly get feedback from, and so we know that this is really important to them, so that's something that we've been thinking about, like how do we provide that level of attribution, but still give the agent what they need, which is a way for a buyer to get in contact with them.

- How long does that logo stay up? Does that disappear after you begin looking at the tour?

- It'll stay up for a while while you're browsing the tour, and then it does, there you go, it disappears. We want to retract some of the things so you can have a more immersive experience, so that will stay there for some period of time, and then it will retract.

- We do also make it easy for--

- I'm sorry, Mitch, if you could take us off the screen share there, that'd be great, thank you.

- We do also make it easy to share the tour, so we do allow agents or photographers to embed the tour in their websites, so that's another way in which they could use it as a marketing tool. We've seen photographers put the tours on their site, and they can do that through an iFrame or other embedding methods.

- When it's embedded, who's branding is that in the top left if the photographer is embedding that tour?

- There would be no branding in that scenario.

- I have to just speak candidly in terms of our Community and just ask the question and say if Zillow wants to have every listing have a Zillow tour, and half the tours, just to pick a number, need a professional photographer to shoot them, even if it's a quarter of the tours to shoot them, how do you win over the photographers?

- Part of it goes back to the overall value proposition, like from a fast, free, and easy value proposition, we think that that's really compelling. The exposure that you get on Zillow is very compelling, and like I said, we recognize the importance of branding, and we've done design explorations. We've done studies and surveys. We're working through how best to do that, and consider, we have to think about how this, whatever changes we make to our experience, we're very careful about measuring the impact of that for a buyer, for a renter, for the agents, for photographers, right? So coming up with a solution that works well for everybody, that takes some time. We do have discussions about how to provide multiple levels of attribution.

- We just encourage you to keep having those discussions. I keep getting lobbied by photographers, prior to our chat today, to say, "Hey, I'd really love to get on board with Zillow, but until there is branding real estate associated with the photographer, I'm not sure that I want to offer it as an add-on because the incremental dollars are not worth as much to me as the promotional consideration to have other agents see that I shot that tour and be engaging me in shooting their tours."

- Right, I understand that. There's multiple dimensions to branding, right? In case you're gonna ask me about MLS branding, when we launched two weeks ago, we did not have the unbranded version for MLS, and we got that feedback from agents, and we're happy to announce that we actually, last week, shipped an update where you can have an embed link that does not have any branding on it, so you can use that in the MLS field.

- Great, thank you for checking that box, because that's certainly an important one.

- This is not my first time building platforms around computer vision. I pride myself on being very responsive to customer feedback, and so that was one where we're like, we gotta do that, right? Mitch's team turned that around in a couple days, and we shipped it, but it also highlights some of the challenges around branding, right? Multiple levels of attribution, MLS requirements. It's not a simple matter of just adding another name or another face to the tour. There's a lot of other considerations that go into it that cascade through the entire Zillow system. As I said, we definitely have had those conversations. There's folks on my team that actively are working with the parts of Zillow that own the details page to come up with ways to provide that attribution.

- Cool, because we're also thinking okay, here's what it looks like in Zillow, here's what it looks like branded, here's what it looks like unbranded, here's what it looks like in the iFrame that's shared by the photographer or shared by the real estate agent or both. Enough said, you're obviously, you're on it, you're working the topic. You mentioned that--

- Good news is we've, between photographers and agents, we've gotten requests for a ton of features and enhancements, so that's great news. People are using the product and are sharing those ideas with us. It's always a question of we have to prioritize. We can't just do all of them, and so that's sort of what we're working through, are ones that we have to do sooner than others. Of course we always want to keep adding new features, like new capabilities of the product as well.

- Anything that you want to talk about that's coming soon?

- Maybe next time, yeah.

- Okay. On the front page of the We Get Around Network Forum is the WGAN Instant Booking Service. It's powered by KoaWare. Are you planning to work with KoaWare in order to enable instant bookings of Zillow photographers?

- That's a great question, and we've been talking with the Zillow Certified Photographer team about this. We tend to be very data-driven, so one of the questions that I've been asking, I'd like to understand the answer to is, how many agents would engage with that service, right? When we do in-market testing, I have a handful of questions that I try to ask every agent, and one of them was, "Hey, would you come to Zillow or some other service to look for a photographer" and what I heard and, again, small sample size, but what I heard it I got a couple photographers that I work with, and I text them, I've got this listing, I need it captured, right? When we had this conversation recently with the photographer team, I said hey, let's understand, is there really a need for this? Are our Premiere agents going to use a service like that before we go off and build it, right? Again, if we do that, then there's other things that we won't be able to build, and so they're starting to do some surveys there and to try to understand that, and based on the outcome we would decide whether we want to integrate with a service like that or come up with another solution.

- I ask the question because there's so many of us that probably never thought of booking a taxi and yet we all book taxis today because the friction has been taken out of the whole process to make it easy, fast, and simple to book a taxi that we call Uber of Lyft. I wonder if that same process was applied to instant booking of a Zillow 3D tour, Zillow 3D Home photographer, whether that would just completely disrupt and make it amazing. I ask because we have a Community of 12,000 real estate photographers. They'd like to be busier, and if we can connect them through Instant Booking, which, in our case, happens to be powered by KoaWare, we just thing that that would be pretty cool.

- Like I said, we're working on a survey for agents to understand is that something that they would get value out of, and if the answers are positive, then we would do a pilot and explore the best way of doing it, but until I have some data to support that, it's hard for me to put precious engineering resources on that, say versus supporting third-party tours or branding for photographers. You kind of see where this is going, right? There's a limited number of engineering cycles that we have and a lot of different things that we could potentially do. I think this is great feedback, and I say keep it coming, and I would encourage all your members to contact us and share their feedback, and we do take it seriously. We sit down every two weeks and we go through all of the feedback we get from agents, from photographers, from consumers, from our own tech support people, and we triage this, and we look at which ones are the most impactful, which ones we have the highest number of reported incidents about, and we put these into our engineering backlog, and I'll use the unbranded MLS tours as an example of that. If we don't get the feedback, then it's hard for us to act on it, so please keep sharing that with us.

- You mention you have 2,000 Zillow photographers in your certification program? You want to talk about that at all?

- Yeah, I do. I would also love to actually show a little bit of the product as well. I think we've done some really exciting things that I think we're eager to show off.

- Okay, let's jump in, then. Let's get Mitch back into the game here. While he's setting up, maybe Josh, you mentioned that presently that Zillow supports Ricoh Theta V, Ricoh Theta Z1. Can we expect that there's gonna be a continuation of more cameras added over time?

- I think you're gonna see a pattern in my answers. Again, we get feedback from people. For support for other cameras, support for Android on the phone side, we're collecting that data, right, and we're looking at it. If users of our platform really want to see another camera supported, contact us and let us know.

- Okay, where do we write in Insta360 ONE X?

- You can write that in or whatever. I've heard Nodalview.

- Nodalview, yeah. I hope you have a chance to look at Nodalview. We've been testing that in the Community, and the imagery is just phenomenal. It's just phenomenal. We'd love to see a button that says publish to Zillow.

- Again, for things like other cameras, that type of stuff, that's feedback we'd love to hear. Mitch is actually showing on screen a really easy way to send feedback to us. If you see at the top there, it says send feedback email, if you tap on that--

- This is in the Zillow 3D Home iOS app?

- Correct, you can also email us, and we'll share the email address with you so you can put it in the Forum, but you can send us that feedback and, like I said, we regularly triage that feedback. We have seen a small amount of interest in other cameras. It's only been about two weeks, so I think we're continuing to monitor that. For now, you have three options. You can use the built-in camera on your iPhone, the Theta V, or the Theta Z1. I'm also excited to announce that in the very near future, we'll be offering discounts on both the Thetas. We've been working closely with Ricoh, obviously, and so you'll be able to buy the camera with a Zillow discount code, which is actually a pretty good discount. We'll also have Zillow bundles that you can buy, so it's the camera, it's the monopod, and it's a protective lens in a case, and it includes a getting started with 3D Home in the box, or you can just buy the standalone camera from that.

- All right, awesome. Mitch, what have you got for us?

- As Josh was mentioning, there's three options. One of the questions we got from photographers and from agents and listing presentations was how do I really look at the difference between these things? What we did is we actually shot the same property four times. We shot it with all three of those options that Josh just mentioned, the iPhone, the V, and the Z1. We also shot with the Z1 at night. I'll show you, this is captured with the Z1, and you can see the new abilities of the Z1, the 7k native shots with HDR.

- The bigger sensor and the better optics.

- The bigger sensor, the better optics. You can get these gorgeous shots in here. This is with all the overhead lights even off with just some accent lights on. It looks beautiful, but what I wanted to show, because this is us showing you some of the differences between the tours. You can see here if I come into handheld...

- By handheld, he means using the iPhone.

- Right, just using this here.

- Just rotating it manually?

- [Josh] Yep.

- Right, yeah, standing in place and spinning around, you'll still get some really great output, but you can see what I'm doing, but I'm moving my thumb up and down here. We don't get the full vertical field of view like you would get with the V or the Z1. I come into the same panorama, I can actually see quite a bit more and move around. Certainly, and so photographers, we're expecting photographers are largely going to be shooting with the Theta camera. One of the things we did to make it really easy to shoot with that Theta camera, if I say create 3D Home, we give you this option here and say, let's use the 360 camera. Well, right now I don't have one connected, but you can actually see there's a Z1 here, which we support. We've been using this one a lot, so the battery, I'm not going to demo with that one because the battery's not ready for it, but I also have a V here. One of the things that Ricoh does on the bottom of these cameras is they actually put a code on the bottom. We give you some instructions here, and you can see I can actually see with the bottom of the camera. If I just line that up right in there, we automatically detect what the camera is, and then we're going to connect to this camera's wi-fi very fast.

- This is another example where in our pilot, we found that people were having trouble getting connected to the Theta. One example was, I'll hold this up, the way you connect to the Theta is, can you read that tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny print, right? That's what you need to type in to connect the Theta to your phone, right? We found people were just having trouble getting that done, so Mitch's team built that capability where you just point your phone at the bottom of the Theta and it connects in a couple seconds.

- I'm going to not show any address here, and then once you're in here, you get a live view. You're gonna get this echo effect.

- The infinite...

- You can see the room we're in here, but I can look around and I can come back and look at the two of us, so you can make sure your shot is really lining up really well. One of the biggest feedbacks we got was around something we didn't have before was, right now if I take this picture, this is an instant shot, I did it, but I need to, obviously the 360 camera sees everything. I don't want to be in that shot. Let's say I'm shooting the backyard, and I've got my camera in the middle of the backyard. It's really hard for me to tell this camera to take a shot if I'm not near it, so what we added was the timer capability here.

- Awesome.

- If you're outside, you might want to come up to 10 seconds, but for the purposes of demo, I'll do three.

- Yeah, that's such an awesome add, it's phenomenal. That is really terrific.

- I think Mitch's team did a great job here. If you walk far enough away from the Theta that it disconnects from the Theta's wi-fi, when you come back in range, it actually not only reconnects, but it knows what you were doing last and transfers that last capture to the phone.

- Congratulations, Mitch. I know that that's been a problem for everyone who's been using the Theta with whatever platform is this whole idea of hide and seek and connect, not connect, et cetera, so completing the magic there, We can appreciate what you've accomplished. Now will you put the photographer's logo into the tour? ;-)

- Sure. We're always exploring options. In terms of completing that tour, moving forward here, there isn't a lot else to show there, but one of the other things I did want to show, in terms of the product, to show the end-to-end. Let me switch over what I'm sharing here, and go back to desktop. Here. So we also have a re-work as part of our nationwide rollout of our 3D Home dashboard. All of this is designed to make creator's lives easier. We want to help you organize your content. We want to get you onto the next listing. We want to get you on the next shoot. We want to make it really easy to move fast and previously we had some, this might have been a little bit cludgy, you could say, but now we organize all of this. The options that show up here are very clear. We got some feedback that some of this stuff wasn't very transparent. Manage users, this is a lot for creators. If you're working between photographer and agent, and you want to give, you're the creator, you're a photographer, you want to give the agent permissions, it wasn't always very clear before. We've really elevated some of these capabilities to make it easy. You want to share. Before, this was all in one screen, and it was a little bit jumbled, so now we make it really easy to share a tour. We show you what it's gonna look like. You notice here, and Josh was talking before, sharing to MLS. You want to share an unbranded virtual tour, we make it this easy. You come in here and you can get that.

- This is awesome. When I look at this and I say okay, you're watching WGAN-TV Live at 5, you're thinking about buying a Matterport camera or a GeoCV kit or Cupix or Nodalview or whatever it might be, you could literally start a 3D tour business with a Ricoh Theta V or Z1, and the agents wants photos first and maybe they want video second. The third thing may be is going to be 3D Tour, and you could literally shoot for free, with exception of that camera and your tripod, publish it for free, share it for free, and still charge some amount of money for doing it. It's nice that our Community probably has one of these other platforms, but for somebody who's just starting out, there isn't any reason they couldn't build a whole business around Zillow 3D Home.

- Right, and to your point, Dan, one of the things we've plugged a couple times, but this listed by or shot by or created by up here, it's not showing anything right now. We're always evaluating options, but we want to make it so the right things happen for the right people, where everybody gets what they want, and it makes sense for our home shoppers to see the right thing.

- Awesome. Mitch, if you could take us off sharing, I want to just wrap up. I think my last question really for Josh is if you could just, a listing has a Zillow 3D Home tour, maybe it has a Zillow walkthrough video, do I get any extra points for our agent? Does that listing get moved up in search? Is there something magical and extra that happens because it has these, one or two or both or these digital assets?

- The answer is yes. We do provide about a seven-day boost for adding a tour. There is, of course, we have sophisticated personalization algorithms that try to match different homes to a buyer, so you should definitely see a boost in the rankings, but the personalization algorithms take precedence over those, so it may not always wind up at the top, but you will get that boost.

- Terrific. Before we say "Bye" ... anything that you wanted to add?

- No, I really appreciate you taking the time to interview us and I would love to have the photographers in the Network share suggestions and feedback with us. The product's very easy to try because it's free, and we'd love to hear the feedback of how we can continue to improve and make this more valuable to your members.

- Terrific, Josh, thanks for your time.

- Great, thank you.

- Mitch, thanks for your time.

- Thanks.

- Thank you all for tuning in. We've been visiting with Zillow Senior Director, Product Development, 3D and Computer Vision, Josh Weisberg and his colleague Mitch Dawson, Zillow Senior Development Manager. I'm Dan Smigrod, We Get Around Network Forum Founder. Please check out Zillow.com if you want to find out more about Zillow 3D Home. I think probably the easiest way is if you just Google Zillow 3D Home, you're gonna land on the right webpage, and if you're watching on our YouTube channel, join us, WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com ... Thanks for tuning in. Thanks again, Josh.

- Thank you.

- Thanks again, Mitch.

- Thanks, Dan.

- Bye-bye.
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Jjd17 private msg quote post Address this user
With Zillow 3d after we shoot the photos and upload them does the photographer still own the copyrights of the photos?
Also do we get a embedded link to give to the agent we are shooting for to post on there Zillow account? Or how do we give the agent we are shooting for the tour. Also if I'm understanding this right Zillow 3d allows white labeling?
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DanSmigrod private msg quote post Address this user
@Jjd17

About your questions, Josh writes:

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1. Who owns captures & creates the tour owns the copyright.

2. Do we get a embedded link to give to the agent we are shooting for to post on there Zillow account?

- The tour can be automatically or manually published to the listing on Zillow
- We also provide embed links that can be used to host the tour on other websites, including an MLS compliant version without attribution

---

Best,

Dan
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DanSmigrod private msg quote post Address this user
Hi All,

Video: Zillow 3D Home Tour Gives Real Estate Agents 7-Day Boost on Zillow

Dan
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