Ten Questions with Thomas Lepelaars, CEO at Nodalview

What percentage of home-seekers would prefer to view a property remotely before seeing it in person? How many more clicks do properties with good quality images generate on a listing?

With more than 20,000 clients in 30 countries, Nodalview helps real estate professionals create eye-catching visual content to market their properties online, and has some interesting numbers to prove it.

Co-founder and CEO, Thomas Lepelaars (pictured below), has a lot to say about the business, which offers agents a suite of easy-to-use AI features from their smartphone. With circa one million real estate images processed and edited per month, and an ambitious, acquisition-focused growth strategy, Nodalview wants to become the dominant property marketing platform for all real estate agents in Europe.

With its first acquisition under its belt, and presumably more to follow, Nodalview may be one to keep an eye on...

What problem does Nodalview solve, and for whom?

Nodalview bridges the gap between the (ever-growing) expectations of modern buyers in their online search experience and the services that real estate professionals currently provide.

Nodalview adapts to the reality of any real estate agent by combining their smartphone and the power of AI and Machine learning into one complete marketing solution, allowing agents to shoot high-quality and engaging visuals that buyers love directly from their smartphone, all in a cost-effective manner without ever compromising on the quality.

Nodalview sits in the pocket of the agent, giving them full autonomy to work on the go with powerful AI features at their fingertips. We currently process over 1M photos each month.

How do you position Nodalview in such a crowded proptech landscape?

Firstly, we are the only solution that uses the power of modern smartphone technology combined with AI, computer vision, and machine learning to bring five distinct solutions to agents: professional photography, 3D virtual tours, 2D floorplans, AI videos, and virtual homestaging.

We are also the only solution that allows agents to use all these features independently, allowing agents to pick and choose any feature and bundle them to match their individual needs.

This means that it fits the use case of any agent, whether they work on low-end or high-end properties, lettings or sales, and we have the flexibility to be used from valuation to sale by helping the agent attract both buyers and sellers.

This typically translates into Nodalview being used every day by agents on a majority of their listings.

How is the business funded? How do you make money?

Nodalview offers a monthly subscription option, a flexible “pay-as-you-go” option, and a hybrid "subscription + flexible usage" option, without any long-term commitments. This makes Nodalview perfect for small, medium and large organisations.

We’ve raised a total of 8M€ from top-tier VC firms in Belgium, the UK & Spain. This has allowed us to grow into the market leader we are today. We have been profitable and cash flow positive since mid-2023, and will reinvest that into our external growth strategy.

The residential real estate sector is fragmented both on a national and European level, and there is a great opportunity for consolidation. Although most markets operate slightly differently, the needs of buyers and sellers are very similar in each market. Every country has small point solutions that are similar to those offered in other markets.

There is a massive opportunity to bring a dominant European leading marketing platform to all agents.

How does your smartphone technology work?

Nodalview leverages all of the modern smartphone tech (lidar sensors, wide-angle cameras, etc) to adapt and calibrate the camera settings to shoot a series of professional input photos with real-time guidance on best practices.

That input content and additional data are sent to our real-time AI editing infrastructure, which edits each image in less than 10 seconds by applying 20+ professional corrections (window enhancement, white balance correction, automatic straightening, etc) and making those images immediately available for publication on a web-based platform.

How do you address quality consistency? AI can only do so much to a bad photo…

Absolutely. That's the reason why running on a smartphone is so important.

We can give immediate feedback on the quality of an image and provide real-time guidance on the quality of the image. This helps capture the image in the right conditions. With the rise of AI models and the ability to render them locally (without an internet connection), we will be able to make sure, before the agent leaves the property, that their content was shot correctly.

What interesting numbers can you share about the business?

Absolutely!

• Good quality pictures generate 4x more clicks on property listings
• 50% of viewings are considered “useless” by buyers, creating a lot of frustration and lost time
• 85% of buyers say they would prefer to view a property remotely with an agent before visiting in person (via an agent-led live virtual tour, for example)
• 77% of buyers say they find it great to see properties virtually staged with AI
• Buyers rank photos as the #1 visual asset on a property listing, then 3D tours as #2, followed by floorplans in #3 and only put video in #4.
• Video is built to attract buyers to your listings and should be reserved for Social Media platforms.
• The buyer scores the average real estate experience at only 6-7/10, leaving quite some room for improvement

Congratulations on your recent acquisition of Flaash. What improvements can we expect to see?

Together with Flaash we will be working on four pillars:

1. Double down on our (generative) AI features for real estate agents. We’re bringing instant AI image editing and staging solutions to perform actions such as furnishing empty properties, repaint rooms in white, emptying cluttered rooms, reviving lawns, and cleaning up pools.
2. Alongside static image editing, we will also be working on our proprietary Image2Video feature, exclusively trained on real estate data. This transforms any property visuals into incredibly catchy videos!
3. We will integrate AI features to our 3D virtual tour solution, like emptying the room, repainting and refurnishing.
4. Lastly, and an exciting one, we will bring to market a highly interactive home-seeker experience, allowing buyers to customise the properties that they are interested in on a portal or an agency website. This will allow buyers to stage a property with their style and bring further lead qualification information to agents.

How are agents using your tools for analytics?

Agents can track three core metrics through Nodalview.

Firstly, buyer interest: how many viewings the 3D tour of a property has received and on which platform. This measures the actual interest of properties when listed. If a property listed with a 3D tour gets lots of views on the tour and lots of inquiries, that is a great sign that qualified buyers are coming in (in a recent study, 85% of buyers say they would prefer to tour a property virtually with an agent before visiting in person).

Secondly, pricing calibration: if there are a lot of views on 3D tours but no inbound requests, then this is great data to bring back to the seller to help recalibrate the price if needed.

Finally, qualified buyer interest: agents can send trackable property links to select prospects who have done an in-person viewing. This allows agents to measure how much interest there is post-viewing and follow up with the hottest leads.

Ultimately, we're giving more data to agents, which means more insight for their business. This allows them to (i) give more value and information to sellers and (ii) drive a more competitive sales process, which will yield higher prices, shorter sales cycles and happier customers all around.

Has Nodalview explored partnerships with listing portals or CRM platforms to enhance agent workflow?

Not yet.

Nodalview is often used by agents to publish on multiple portals at once. However, with our buyer-focused products allowing consumers to directly interact with gen AI features to home stage/repaint/refurnish properties, we think there is a unique opportunity for portals to increase the value they bring to their users and customers.

What isn’t the industry talking about that it should be talking about?

For years, the buyer experience has been neglected by the industry, with agents hyper-focused on finding sellers. Yet today, sellers want an agent that can prove that they can attract the right buyer to their property to (i) sell fast, (ii) at the best price and (iii) with the least amount of hassle.

For that, agents need experience and skills; local knowledge of their market and a vast network; and an online strategy that meets the needs of modern buyers.

In the future, building the best buyer experience will be the true differentiator for leading agents to convince sellers to choose them to list their property.