Episode 49: Interview with Gavin Palmer - Owner of VirTour Media

Scott Williams: Sweet home Santa Barbara, where the skies are so blue. Sweet home Santa Barbara, what’s worked for me can work for you.

Jonathan Robinson: Welcome back to Sweet Home Santa Barbara. I’m Jonathan Robinson, your co-host. I’m with my friend, Real Estate broker, and co-host.

Scott Williams: Scott Williams.

Jonathan Robinson: We have another guest today, Scott, who is always fun to interview people in their fields of expertise. This is Gavin Palmer. He’s the owner of VirTour Media. Maybe I said that right. How do you say it again?

Gavin Palmer: VirTour Media. Virtual Tour, VirTour media.

Jonathan Robinson: Okay. He’s the number one real estate media provider in Santa Barbara County. Welcome to the Sweet Home Santa Barbara.

Gavin Palmer: Glad to be on. Great to talk to you two.

Jonathan Robinson: I know actually almost nothing about what you do, so I can ask the first question from complete ignorance, but I know you do some professional photography in real estate marketing. Can you share with us what that entails, what that looks like, or what it’s for?

Gavin Palmer: Yeah, definitely. I can give you a quick one-minute overview of exactly what I do. I provide real estate agents with high-quality/world-class level marketing materials so they can market their properties and grow their brands whether that’s through really nice architectural photos, still, drones, interior, and exterior, whether that’s through videos of either like themselves branding videos or just listing videos, social media videos, social media campaigns, we can generate people, we’ve done stuff for like Marsha Coly or Crystal Clark has gotten them like hundreds of thousands of views just on their socials. We do really accurate floor plans. We have Matterport Pro3 so we can do indoor-outdoor virtual tours, and scan entire lots, property websites, flyers, and postcards. Anything that you think you would need in the market real estate, we provide. They have a very fast turnaround.

Jonathan Robinson: Scott, you’ve been working with Gavin for quite a while. I’m wondering what he has done for you and your business.

Scott Williams: Gavin has expanded me from just professional photography, which is a must in real estate. We don’t just take iPhone shots of people’s houses into the world of video. That wasn’t a giant leap, but expensive homes in Montecito deserve that, but he is more than that. He’s taken me into the world of the drone, and that is pretty much a requirement these days so those were two large steps for me.

Jonathan Robinson: I’m your average cheap homeowner that doesn’t know anything about this so I think, well, I could just take some photos of my house or whatever and I’m assuming that would put a smile on your face, Gavin, which it did. I’m wondering what some of the common mistakes people have around this whole area and mistakes and possibly trying to do this themselves.

Gavin Palmer: That’s actually probably the worst thing you could do, just sharing your home on your iPhone, because there are only so many agents in the MLS. There are like 1200 agents in the MLS and everybody sees, everyone knows each other. Everyone sees the same listings. If you look at the property report, you’re going to see the same listings. Those would be the one that stands out that just have the iPhone photos that then every agent just thinks in their head, why? Like, why didn’t you just pay somebody to come and shoot this place because it’s just how you represent it? It’s like this is at least a million-dollar asset typically. Anything included[?] is not under a million dollars, at least, that I see. Sometimes, there were even like 5, 10, 15 million dollars. Once you get to that level, you start shooting them pretty professionally, but you don’t market a million-dollar asset with just like dark low-resolution iPhone photos. That’s just my take on it and it’s how you present it too. You want things to be bright, you want things to be inviting, and you want to show the space, and how it looks. If you’re not doing that, you’re really doing yourself a disservice, in my opinion.

Scott Williams: I agree. There are not a lot of people who do this anymore, but it definitely occurs to people as it occurred to you. Well, can we save a few hundred dollars? No, it’ll cost you thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Oops! Wrong direction.

Jonathan Robinson: If I’m a homeowner and I want you to do a shoot, is there some way that I prepare my house? What do I do to make it look as photogenic as possible?

Gavin Palmer: There definitely are things you can do. The number one power lot is declutter. The less stuff you can have in your home, the bigger it’ll look, and the more open it’ll look. Even when you’re actually showing the property, people will walk in and feel like it’s more of an inviting space. There’s decluttering as much stuff as possible. The moment you think you decluttered enough, I’d probably declutter some more.

Jonathan Robinson: That means I have a lot of work to do.

Gavin Palmer: Are you selling your home anytime soon?

Jonathan Robinson: No. If and when I do, I will hire a crew.

Gavin Palmer: It’s a lot of work. It’s an age-old tale. Every single time I photoshoot a house, I always hear, wow, you should have seen this place look like three weeks ago or two months ago. It’s a lot of work to prepare a house and Scott, I’m sure you know that.

Scott Williams: Yeah. Well, in the same territory, Gavin, oftentimes, I’m the person who’s just off the edge of the camera ahead of you picking up stuff and moving it out of the shot just long enough to shoot it. Then, we push it all back and then you shoot in another direction but just that act alone of like last minute, go grab the stuff and move it, makes a big difference because those pictures are pretty much everybody’s first impression.

Jonathan Robinson: I’m curious how technology is affecting your business, drones, AI, virtual reality tours, all that. What can you say about that?

Gavin Palmer: Definitely. One of the things that actually always gave me an advantage in this market is I always chose to buy the best new stuff. Even with the virtual tours that we do, you can do a virtual tour with a thousand-dollar-like camera. Scott, have you ever seen eye guides? You kind of like jump around or have you ever looked at a virtual tour and it looked really blurry almost?

Scott Williams: I know there’s a difference.

Gavin Palmer: Yeah, so you can do that or you can pick the latest Matterport camera, which I think is the top of the line. There are some leak cameras that are pretty crazy too but that get up to like $25,000 range. I think that was overkill for what we’re doing. The Matterport Pro3, I think it retails for around $7,000 but with that, you get really high-resolution virtual tours, and they’re very seamless. Most of the time, they’re very jumpy to walk around and it’s not a good user-friendly experience. When you’re representing these properties and representing the clients, you don’t want someone to have to struggle to see the home. It’s supposed to be easier to see the home. Investing in the latest tech lets people jump inside, and go outside, they can see the backyard even in these days where before, even two years ago, the camera wasn’t out and that was impossible. You’d only be able to tour the inside of a house. I’ve scanned acre lots where you can go all through back trails and woods and direct sunlight. It makes a huge difference. With drones, we’ve even done some really cool stuff where you can map properties, you can like scan them from the above. You can do virtual tours but from drone views. I’ve done ranches as big as 3,500 acres, where typically, it would take someone six hours to show this property driving around it but with a drone, you can literally jump around all of it in five minutes and we can literally just map all these aerial views and cover the entire property. The technology has made it easier to show these properties to a lot more people with a lot less time.

Jonathan Robinson: I’m curious, do people do virtual tours more than open houses now? What’s the ratio? How many people have their first hit of a house as a virtual tour?

Gavin Palmer: Scott, you might be a better person to answer that than me. I feel like people still see houses in person.

Scott Williams: They do. It’s their first choice. Jonathan, you’re getting at something that’s really important that’s over the last 15 or 20 years has developed, maybe even less time than that. I was counting up just this week, I’ve had 11 offers on pieces of real estate where people saw the home through FaceTime or Zoom like what we’re doing right now. They got a video. They were looking at the property through a camera lens on the tour, their very first view of the property, and talking with a real estate agent or talking with me, but only later decided to come and see it. This whole area of looking at property through a lens is now very acceptable to the public. Don’t you find that, Gavin?

Gavin Palmer: Definitely, especially during Covid too. I saw a lot of situations where out-of-state buyers would buy homes without even seeing them. They would just see the Matterport and they will be like, “Yes, looks good.” That happened actually a lot.

Jonathan Robinson: Yeah, I’ll spend a few million dollars on a house I haven’t actually been to. Why not?

Gavin Palmer: Yeah.

Scott Williams: Well, there…

Gavin Palmer: It sounds crazy. People do it.

Scott Williams: Here’s the thing that we discovered in accepting this new technology, is that, generally, people had a great deal of trust in the camera, which was a good way to start, and when they arrived at the home of those 11 people who did this that I know of, through me, they all had the same opinion. This is nicer in person than it was through the cameras. It doesn’t give a false impression of the property.

Jonathan Robinson: That’s nice. You get the people to the property and then they’re even more impressed. I’m curious, what trends are happening in this business now? What do you see in the future of where this is going?

Gavin Palmer: Just from the marketing side?

Jonathan Robinson: And the technology side.

Gavin Palmer: The technology side is interesting. I think the virtual tours can get better, and more seamless. What I see, at least in the Santa Barbara Montecito market, is the demand for brand building is really trending. People want a higher class or higher quality videos. Everybody is doing a video nowadays. It’s not just having one listing video. It’s having videos for their socials and having videos that they can put out to their clients. I just see a lot more of it than I did even three years ago.

Jonathan Robinson: You see the same thing, Scott? What’s your perspective?

Scott Williams: Well, I certainly feel that I load my website up with video and I don’t think that’s going to stop. I think Google and the algorithms of the search engines love video. Gavin and I are doing a video right now. We’re reusing artificial intelligence. I’m writing the script, but it’s not even going to be my voice that says it. It’s going to be an artificial intelligence that reads the script.

Gavin Palmer: That’s actually something that we didn’t discuss too, so I used to have to pay. When you get a video narrated, it always comes out very nice. You basically tell the story of the property and I used to have to pay voice actors, sometimes $300, $500 just to send me a read and I would’ve to send them a script. They would’ve to then go to their studio or go on their computer, actually send it to me. I’d have to approve it. If I want an edit, it might take a day or two. We have to go back and redo it, or if I want to change the tone. Now, I can go on multiple websites and I can just plug that script in and have an AI read it and it’s indistinguishable from a human and I can make edits in real time, download the new versions, and plug it into the video. It costs $5 a month to have a robot read the narration. I can actually have more people do them so my cost is way down. I don’t have to charge someone like $750 for a narration.

Jonathan Robinson: Wow! What’s your favorite website for doing that? I saw one today, Synthesia.io, and I was pretty wowed by it. Soon, I and other people will be fully out of business, so thank you very much.

Gavin Palmer: Yeah. The technology’s too good. It is unfortunate that you have voice actors who are probably having a hard time these days, but it’s way better than experience. That’s just a rate no one can compete with. I use ElevenLabs. That’s my answer to your question. That’s great.

Jonathan Robinson: Wait, what’s it called?

Gavin Palmer: ElevenLabs. It’s one of the bigger ones too. The one you mentioned is good too.

Scott Williams: The changes to the editing and post-production, the processing of the photos or the video that you shoot, what’s involved in that?

Gavin Palmer: There are different styles depending on who your photographer is. Some people still like to do everything themselves. I thought I’d never actually done that. From the moment we started, I always thought that the editing could be outsourced because there was someone who could do it better than me so I have outsourced all my photo editing to a team that I trust for the past four years, and they do a great job. I can submit them six or seven properties at night and they’ll have everything ready for me by tomorrow morning. That’s just my style. That’s the way that my clients are happier. The people who do themselves typically are very architectural photographers. These are the guys that charge two or three grands just to shoot photos for a property and they have their style dim or light and magazine-quality stuff but from the video production side, it really hasn’t changed much. I don’t think I’ve seen a lot of AI applications in real estate videos yet. Maybe other than item removals and content-aware fill that’s getting pretty good. Say, there’s an ugly whatever in your video, you can just now draw around it and AI will remove it, which is pretty nice but you still have to cut it. You have to lay the song[?] out. Not much has changed.

Jonathan Robinson: Do you have any memorable or interesting experiences you can share about a video shoot?

Gavin Palmer: Yeah. Okay. This is probably one of the first five shoots I ever did. I was shooting a mobile home, and I was talking to the client while I was flying the drone, and it is actually like FAA law. You’re always supposed to keep your eye on the drone, right? I was like, yeah, I just got this thing. I was being arrogant, like, yeah, I got the insurance, I got everything like I could crash this thing like five times if I wanted to and I would keep getting a new one. I was looking at it while I was flying it and the next thing you know, I just hit the screen, I landed a 30-foot tree and my drone just got stuck in a 30-foot tree and I was looking at it, I was like, well, that’s a bummer, but I’m not going to leave it up there because I got to, at least if it’s broken, I have to retrieve it so I can exchange it so I climbed. At a shoot, I had to climb a 30-foot tree but then when I got up to the top of it, I climbed the wrong tree. I had to climb down and then climb up the right tree, and I got it. I came down and I looked at it, it was actually salvage[?], but I just switched the propellers out. A few of them were broken and I finished the shoot and that was one of the first shoots I ever did that was pretty memorable.

Jonathan Robinson: You survived?

Gavin Palmer: Yeah, I survived.

Scott Williams: Well, I think that photography has been an enormous step forward in the 15 years or so that I went from doing it myself to hiring professionals and I think it’s just going to go more and more amazing that people love entertainment. We all stream all these, Hulu, Apple, Disney, Netflix, or whoever you get. We all have this idea that this media is everywhere, and you are that media and we need you in real estate.

Gavin Palmer: Oh, thanks, Scott. Yeah. It’s really how we’re competitive too because everyone wants the best photos, and everyone wants the best videos so you’re constantly working on how I can make the light look better. How can I make the compositions better? Everything is just getting better, I feel like. It’s not going anywhere, like you said.

Jonathan Robinson: Yeah. How can people reach you, Gavin?

Gavin Palmer: Yeah, just virtourmedia.com. There’s an order form on there if anyone wants to book a shoot. The thing that helped me scale my business was just making everything systematized and automated. If you want to book a shoot, you can do it through the website or just gavin@virtourmedia.com. Virtourmedia on Instagram.

Jonathan Robinson: For those who don’t have the benefit of watching this on YouTube, it’s V-I-R-T-O-U-R media.com.

Gavin Palmer: Yes.

Jonathan Robinson: Any last words, Scott?

Scott Williams: No, I was glad we could have you on, Gavin. That was great.

Gavin Palmer: Oh, thanks for having me. Yeah, it was good talking to you guys. It was a good conversation about real estate media.

Jonathan Robinson: Yeah. Very interesting. Keep listening to Sweet Home Santa Barbara. Thanks for showing up. If you want to reach Scott Williams, what’s the best way of doing that, Scott?

Scott Williams: scott@scottwilliams.com.

Jonathan Robinson: Okay. Catch you next time. Thanks for listening.

Scott Williams: Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to our podcast on your favorite app. If you know someone preparing to sell their home, please tell them about the podcast. Visit scottwilliams.com to contact me and download the two free e-booklets: Is my House Saleable Now and How Not to Buy a Money Pit? Thank you for listening.