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After three years of email teases, fleeting discussions at Inman Connect parties and the occasional hint on a Facebook thread, image marketing proptech BoxBrownie has finally shared some concrete information about its new mobile app, called SnapSnapSnap.
BoxBrownie is adept at championing and building its products around the often unrealized imaging capabilities of today’s mobile phones. SnapSnapSnap is no different.
The app “delivers professional-quality photos for real estate directly from an iPhone, according to an email sent to Inman by the company’s CEO and co-founder Mel Meyers. “Users can shoot photos and upload them to us for editing, all within the app.”
This will prevent users from using BoxBrownie’s browser experience to send images.
The app’s game-changing features include highly augmented image quality, Meyers said in the email.
“This is why the app took us three years, and the result is iPhone real estate photos that are better than anything else out there,” Meyers said. “We are using a combination of Apple’s photo algorithms and our own. For every shot, the camera takes 45 to 70 photos which are condensed into five to seven photos on the device. Those photos are then uploaded to us, which we use to edit and produce a single ‘after’ photo.”
The app is as simple as an “easy button,” Meyers said, meaning it’s ready to go upon launch, with all settings for each level of phone or iPad being used. The app can work on iPhones as far back as version 7, but 11 or greater will yield the best results.
The only stipulation is that users must attach their iPhones to a tripod ensuring stabilization when the photos are captured. A human hand simply isn’t steady enough for capturing that many photos as anyone who has screwed up a “night mode” photo can attest.
Agents or property managers can upload their photos from their phones immediately after shooting. In some cases, edits can be returned within three hours, but most in no more than a day.
The Australian company named after Kodak’s first consumer-grade camera all but launched the category of overnight listing photography editing.
For only a few bucks, American agents could upload photos in the afternoon and in most cases have them returned the next morning bathed in twilight, lined with emerald-green lawns and totally, virtually decluttered. The company ramped up quickly and soon included digital staging, individual item removal and HDR bracketing, or the act of clearing up exterior sun glare from windows, among other benefits. It’s updated the line of products to include virtual tours, architectural renderings, floor plans and other marketing services, such as copywriting.
The red and black of BoxBrownie’s brand was as ubiquitous a site at real estate conferences in the U.S. as the NAR logo. Naturally, the covid pandemic put an abrupt halt on the company’s global travel and in-person trade show marketing. Nevertheless, it was nothing less than a resounding success.
SnapSnapSnap is available in “preview” mode on Apple’s App Store while it’s being stress-tested with a small number of users for the first couple weeks of 2023, Meyers said.
The interface is being tweaked, and an official launch is expected by mid-to-late January. It will be available in English and Japanese upon initial release, followed by versions in French and Spanish.
