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.
Are you receiving Inman’s Agent Edge? Make sure you’re subscribed for the latest on real estate technology from Inman’s expert Craig Rowe.
This story was last updated on Feb. 17, 2024.
Modwell is a real estate visualization and 3D content business solution.
Platforms: Browser; iOS; Android; Apple Vision Pro
Ideal for: Agents, teams, brokerages
Initial review: April 2023
Update: February 2024
Top selling points:
- Urban visualizations/3D locations
- 3D showcase search
- Agent-specific 3D listing pages
- Table-top AR models
- Spatial property transformations
Top concern:
Merely timing. Interactive modeling, floor plans, AR tours, headset apps and all of the associated technologies in Modwell’s arsenal need only wait on a full-fledged market turn-around to prove their value to a wider swath of the market. The company can sustain itself on higher-end custom projects until then.
What you should know
Modwell’s suite of technologies has honed itself down to where the market can meet it, meaning it’s primed to become a valuable component to a brokerage, team or tech-savvy agent’s marketing efforts, especially those willing to push their sellers into new avenues of innovation.
The company’s father and son leadership made their presence known at recent Inman Connect events and it appears, quickly absorbed the data they needed to sharpen the message. In short, if you need bespoke, leading-edge marketing for a new, stale or top-of-market listing, Modwell is worth considering.
Modwell offers a range of 3D modeling services that can be used in a variety of ways, from touring under a headset before spending time on actual tours to “flying in” over a new development project to take in how it’ll look within its existing, actual environment. Its large-scale geospatial generation capabilities make a standard 3D home tour seem pedestrian, but if you need that, Modwell does it.
It also provides on-location AR modeling, meaning using your phone or a VR headset, users can “see” and interact with a listing or architect’s vision for that new slopeside villa or mountain modern cabin. The company applies its skillset to web pages that highlight an agent’s 3D marketing projects, offering a single source of marketing credibility for those clients unsure of how their listing will stand out.
My concerns about Modwell that surfaced in our initial review stemmed from what I saw as a lack of specific direction. The technology was (is) sound, but how to use it seemed uncertain. Additionally, while it’s only been about a year, the market is more ready for what they offer. Every discussion we have about AI, Zillow’s Listing Showcase, interactive floor plans and VR staging inches the industry closer to what consumers are expecting.
The first real estate company with a market-wide search button hovering in the view space of an Apple Vision Pro is going to get a lot of attention, and it shouldn’t be long now.
Modwell’s urban rendering showcase is a compelling way to showcase properties for agents who “sell cities” and work in some of the country’s trendier markets. It can overlap dynamic map content with overhead visuals, street-level perspectives and head-turning renderings of future places, something I think will also appeal to suburban single-family developers.
Platform Showcase from Modwell on Vimeo.
The low-inventory problem isn’t a surprise to anyone who keeps up with the real estate economy. It’s been festering long before COVID-19 went airborne. However, there is a wind of change wafting into the market as new homes become a higher percentage of inventory.
Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that “Since the end of 2021 and through early 2023, nearly one-third of single-family homes available for sale have been newly built, holding at a four-decade high and up from about 14 percent of inventory on average historically.” The study goes on to discuss that builders are offering a range of incentives to get buyers engaged in their products, primarily interest-rate buy-downs.
Long story short, the stuff Modwell offers is perfect for agents who work with builders. Its rendering tools and 3D showcase search pages, which offer map-based navigation of homes with immersive tours, can combine to create a powerful case study in how these technologies can enhance the home shopper experience.
Entire communities can be mapped and virtually toured, and then individual homes can be entered and customized. This is no longer future stuff — it’s entirely now.
These ideas were discussed at Inman Connect in January, with Zillow’s Matt Hendricks trying to help the audience envision “the listing of the future.” Here’s a bit of the story:
Asked to imagine the “ideal listing” five or 10 years from now, Hendricks said that with emerging virtual reality technology like Meta Quest (formerly Oculus) and Apple Vision Pro, “It really could look very sci-fi.”
Consumers will be able to remodel a home to their taste while walking through a virtual 3-D rendering of a listing, he predicted, and listing agents will be able to do the same walk-through and have features automatically added to a listing description, Hendricks predicted.
“In my mind, that’s awesome for the agent, because I don’t want to go show 30 houses that they’re going to immediately not like,” Hendricks said. “I’d rather show them the three or four that they already have a comfort level with.”
If you’re still not sold on the immersive market, at least consider the following: There is a strong correlation between the multi-billion gaming industry and the billions of square feet Matterport manages on its servers. Every day, more of us enter a virtual world and have some form of transaction, and each one of them is leading to a new way to experience property without actually visiting it.
Upon my initial review of Modwell, I wrote: “I’m confident Modwell’s founding talent will make a mark in the space one way or another.” I may have been wrong about where the market for this product was headed at the time (I was a skeptic) but I did know the Reismans would find their footing.
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.
