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Seattle-based brokerage and search portal Redfin is giving home browsers an opportunity to digitally alter listings through a partnership with Roomvo, a virtual rendering technology company, Redfin announced Thursday.
The company calls the service Redfin Redesign, and the in-browser function gives curious homebuyers the ability to alter room finishes and appearance to better envision how their wants and needs overlap with what the market is offering. Its use also alerts agents, indicating that an individual may be more serious about one home than another.
“Buyers often want to know what a home will look like with some changes, not just what it looks like right now,” Redfin Senior Vice President of Product Ariel Dos Santos said in a statement. “Sellers want their listings to appeal to the broadest pool of buyers, regardless of design preferences. Redfin Redesign uses Roomvo’s AI capabilities so buyers can see what they could do with a space in just a few clicks. It’s one way Redfin’s using AI to make real estate better for buyers, sellers, and agents.”
The technology is being applied for now to Redfin-specific properties on its browser application and mobile search experience. Roomvo also partnered with Bright MLS to apply its capabilities to its mid-Atlantic database. In total, 75,000 homes can be “edited” online through the technology.
Redfin Redesign is accessible in a listing page’s primary banner image, positioned alongside view commands for 3D Walkthrough, Video and Street View. Individual rooms can be chosen for updating, not unlike the way home decor or large paint companies allow users to “test” furnishings and new color schemes.
Inman briefly tested the tool for its ease of use and rendering quality and found it to be accurate and engaging. It’s also a valuable strategy for tracking consumer interest in a listing, as well as beneficial for keeping visitors on the site to subject them to additional calls to action and data capture.
Redfin said that the Roomvo integration overlaps with its mission to better the online home search experience, which it started modernizing with 3D tours well before the rest of the market.
Redfin’s efforts are backed by an increasing amount of attention being paid to property visuals, as evidence by more instances of computer vision-backed property search, Matterport tour popularity, interactive floor plans and the wide array of image editing applications. As Nathan Brannen, chief product office of Restb.ai told Intel, Inman’s research arm, “Someone may buy a home without seeing it, but no one buys a home without seeing a photo of it.”
Roomvo is a Toronto, Canada-based company that applies its visualization software to the challenges of customers in the home design, interior finishes and real estate verticals. Its litany of well-known customers includes Home Depot, Shaw Floors, Floor & Decor, Daltile, Rust-Oleum, Engineered Floors and now, Redfin.
Bright MLS chief marketing officer Amit Kulkarni said in a statement that its excited to be part of a solution bringing innovation to the brokerages the organization serves.
“[It’s] foundational to Bright as an organization,” Kulkarni said. “We are excited to be the first MLS to partner with Redfin to offer this tool that helps people reimagine home from their desktop or mobile device.”
Redfin has plans to roll out Redesign to more multiple listing service partners, with the aim of eventually helping all 50 million of its monthly visitors.
It’s also working to better educate potential buyers on market trends with another recent feature, live home price tracking. The new tool is described by Redfin as similar to the Case-Shiller Home Price Index. The index will also include more metro-level data, with individual indices for the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the United States every month.
Redfin made news this fall when it announced it would cease requiring its employees and agents to be members of the National Association of Realtors, in part due to harassment and discrimination allegations against its top brass that emerged in the summer, as well as other grievances, including NAR’s policies on commissions.
The brokerage made the decision to resign from NAR’s national board in June, before the sexual harassment scandal came to light. Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman said in October that NAR gave the brokerage an “all or nothing” choice and they chose “nothing.”
Redfin officially joined NAR in 2017.
