Mark your calendars for the ultimate real estate experiences with Inman’s upcoming events! Dive into the future at Connect Miami, immerse in luxury at Luxury Connect, and converge with industry leaders at Inman Connect Las Vegas. Discover more and join the industry’s best at inman.com/events.
Have suggestions for products that you’d like to see reviewed by our real estate technology expert? Email Craig Rowe.
This article was last updated Feb. 22, 2024.
Studeo is an AI marketing and business presentation solution.
Platforms: Browser; mobile-responsive
Ideal for: Agents at all levels; brokerages and teams
Initial review: April 2015
Update: February 2024
Top selling points:
- Use of AI/automation
- Highly unique presentation format
- Content flexibility
- CRM data connectivity
- Cinemagraphs
- Web-based browser presentation
Top concerns:
This is a very well-integrated bit of marketing software that is now largely automated. I’m only waiting on a direct market data integration to embed live activity and performance numbers.
What you should know
Studeo is presentation software ideal for a range of marketing needs that arise throughout the daily business dealings of real estate agents, teams and brokerages. It creates “Storybooks,” or digital albums that blend written narrative with a range of visuals depending on the user’s preference, including cinemagraphs, still photos, floor plans, video, 3D home tours and more.
Storybooks require little graphic design or artistic talent to create, as the engine is highly AI-automated, even soon reaching the point of fully autonomous creation upon command. Presentations can be shared via email and the web, their engagement can be tracked and content edited as needed. Users’ accounts are given a backend to manage their books, create templates and track interactions.
If you subtly combine multiple media types, like a video introducing the property, followed by some instances of panoramas or short slideshows, a property can really tell a story. Because of its intrinsic page layouts and fetching graphics, just using Studeo makes you feel like an ad exec, and its new personalization tools make that feeling even more tangible.
Studeo will roll out a personalization update in the new few weeks that links CRMs directly to its creation workflow. This means leads and sphere groups can be “part” of the process, allowing for the integration of hyper-relevant content and calls-to-action. Users can create an introductory video message with a simple Chrome extension that also dives into recent Storybooks for re-sending as needed.
Generative AI is now used to produce Storybooks from a simple prompt, such as “I need to reach owners of the Lakeview subdivision for a general introduction of my services” or “Please create a book about the benefits of homeownership for an intro class I’m teaching next week.”
The tone, visual themes, user perspective and even the emotion of the language and visuals can be dictated to Studeo during the prompt process.
The software also leverages a technology called “generative adversarial neural networks” to make poorly captured images look like a professional product, should you use your own uploads. It’s a complex, machine-learning technology that in vague summary works similarly to HDR images, where it blends multiple versions of related subjects.
Storybook examples:
321 East 1st Street
St. Regis Maldives
Company presentation:
Studeo also uses NLP (natural language processing) to analyze the contents of listing photos and produce narrative descriptions for each page of a presentation when producing a Storybook manually. It weaves in snippets of text between pictures and cinemagraphs.
Short paragraphs next to images can mention things like wood floors, open space and appliances. It can even recognize ceiling fans and bedrooms over great rooms. Of course, you can edit what may not have been interpreted accurately. Studeo also offers custom domains or subdomains on which to host your listing.
The company’s own reporting has shown that viewers are spending from four to 15 minutes viewing their agents’ productions. That’s impressive, even if it is based on their findings.
There’s a mechanism to measure, among other stats, time spent on a specific page, clicks on panoramic images, and general time engaged.
Inman didn’t have me use rankings when I initially reviewed Studeo back in 2015. Yes, nine years ago. That alone should raise eyebrows about this product’s appeal to its audience, as it’s not easy to keep marketing software relevant for over a decade, let alone during an era that has seen its primary field of business undergo staggering evolution. In a 2019 update I wrote:
Almost five years later, the online presentation tool is as equally creative, technologically better and still worth a place in your marketing budget.
Two years after that, this:
Studeo still creates fast, attractive marketing materials according to brand and agent profiles, and added a cool new feature called “The Bookshelf,” an online compendium that lets brokers, teams and agents categorize listing storybooks on a designated landing page, offering clients and leads a great way to peruse what’s been sold and how their agent will market their home.
A primary reason Studeo has remained relevant for so long is because its leadership is so damn prescient, recognizing marketing technologies before mainstream consumer audiences knew what they were looking at. Cinemagraphs, for example, those brief embedded animations, not only earn eye-share, but capture it in clenched fists. They make anyone viewing a listing presentation become more curious.
Now that Studeo can be used for so much more than winning an agreement signature, please don’t limit such an awesome tool. Use Storybooks for office branding, team marketing overviews, individual listing marketing, community summaries, investing guidebooks and so much more.
While I said back in 2015 that there’s a “luxury property feel to this product,” rest assured you don’t need a luxury listing to justify the use of this sharp, creative and ever-relevant marketing solution that has outpaced a lot of the advanced CMA systems that also offer consumer-facing branding and creative elements.
But I think it was something I wrote in 2021 about Studeo that holds up best:
Marketing today is all about storytelling — figuring out how to cut through what would otherwise seem like a cold sales pitch, and cleverly getting right down to the heart of the matter: the customer need.
This has always been the goal of interactive presentation company Studeo, a company first reviewed in 2015, years before storytelling in marketing — let alone in real estate — became the thing it is today.
I guess what’s past really is prologue.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
