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.
Natural language processing
The company has yet again smartly timed the use of technology in the market by introducing natural language processing (NLP) to its property storybook builder. NLP is a behind-the-scenes technology that finishes emails for you or — in the case of Studeo and Agently — automatically writes property descriptions for you.
Studeo uses NLP to analyze the contents of your listing photos and produce narrative descriptions for each page of a presentation. It weaves in snippets of text between pictures and Studeo’s cinemagraphs, or motion photos.
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.
How heavily can you depend on this tech?
Does this mean you don’t have to do anything to create an impressive property marketing piece? Does it mean you can now just upload and go? Well, yes … and no.
The quality of NLP — from a writer’s perspective — remains pretty stilted. It reads chunky and pedantic. But hear me out: It’s getting better very quickly, especially under Studeo’s marketing savvy and technological guidance. I was told that what I saw was the “alpha” version of the product.
Studeo still has some time before it rolls out this feature in full (it’s soon starting a small private beta), so expect it to be more market-ready than what I saw.
Auto-generated copy helps in other ways, too. If you’ve ever sat and stared longingly at a blank page waiting for the words to come, then you know how wonderful it feels to suddenly discover inspiration. This can help you feel that way more often.
Real estate marketers can leverage Studeo’s smart copy to greatly enhance the pace at which they create listing collateral. All the basics will be there, needing only to be dressed up and tailored for final production.
Studeo still creates fast, attractive marketing materials according to brand and agent profiles, and added a cool new feature called “The Bookshelf.”
The online compendium 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.
They’ve also enhanced the mobile viewing experience, orienting storybooks to function like stand-alone websites. It looks really nice.
Natural language processing has applications far beyond creating real estate copy, such as voice analysis, stock performance predicting and software testing.
But as of right now, for the real estate world, it’s a bright, twinkling sign that the days of you having to write your own property descriptions are waning.
“It’s a strange paradox,” Nir Betan, the chief strategy officer at Studeo, said. “To make the online real estate world more human, we actually end up having to use machines to tell us stories.”
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.
