Zillow Group acquires AI company offering virtual staging Gaylord Contreras | usagoldmines.com

Zillow Group has acquired Virtual Staging AI (VSAI), an organization whose expertise helps dwelling sellers, brokers and photographers create digitally staged itemizing photographs with out the necessity for bodily furnishings and decor. The acquisition closed Oct. 7, 2024, and the VSAI groups are starting to combine into Zillow. 

We’re excited to convey this expertise to actual property professionals as a part of Zillow’s broad suite of software program and promoting options. VSAI gives the following era of itemizing innovation to raise the itemizing expertise on Zillow for dwelling buyers. Their AI-powered digital staging expertise generates itemizing photographs which might be almost indistinguishable from historically staged listings. 

Actual property professionals can simply add room photographs, choose a room sort and furnishings fashion, and create high-quality, absolutely staged photographs virtually immediately with the press of a button, due to VSAI’s cutting-edge, interactive expertise. Having the ability to stage areas and edit the pictures inside seconds eliminates wait time and back-and-forth to implement modifications.

The acquisition of VSAI underscores Zillow’s dedication to enabling the true property trade to turn into extra digital, built-in and productive. By leveraging Zillow’s tech, AI and product experience, actual property professionals can give attention to serving their shoppers with the high-value, person-to-person work that makes a buyer expertise distinctive. 

Zillow’s analysis reveals dwelling sellers think about interactive media when getting ready to record their dwelling. For instance, 71% of sellers say they’re extra more likely to rent an agent who contains digital excursions and/or interactive ground plans of their providers, in keeping with Zillow’s 2024 Client Housing Developments Report. Digital staging provides sellers one other interactive media possibility to reinforce their itemizing.

Digital staging is at the moment out there to actual property professionals by VSAI’s web site, and we look ahead to providing this tech to brokers and photographers by Zillow’s product suite within the close to future. 

VSAI was co-founded in 2023 by Michael Bonacina and Mikhail Andreev. They started engaged on this expertise at Harvard Innovation Labs as college students whereas researching AI and picture processing. Many of the VSAI group is predicated in Munich, and as a part of the acquisition, they’ve joined Zillow’s AI and tech groups to proceed creating this digital staging expertise.

We’re working to combine VSAI’s expertise into Zillow Showcase, creating an much more immersive itemizing expertise to assist shoppers promote their houses by giving consumers essentially the most reasonable, correct sense of a house earlier than they step inside. Zillow Showcase drives highly effective outcomes for brokers and sellers — listings utilizing Showcase sell faster and for more money.

Zillow is main the digital transformation of actual property, and we’re excited that the VSAI group and their spectacular expertise will now be a part of this effort.