Agents and buyers can work together to search and save relevant homes from their market, and then leverage Modwell’s well-built custom rendering and design services to “imagine” what can be done to the property, inside and out.
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Modwell is a home design visualization solution for agents, owners and buyers.
Platforms: Browser; mobile-responsive
Ideal for: Agents, teams, brokerages
Top selling points:
- High-end design renderings
- Full integration with existing brand
- Pinterest-inspired mood boards
- 3D interactivity
- Digital pitch page for presenting agents
Top concern:
While the software has a place in the luxury space and it’s more of a sales tool, it could be seen as redundant to what a number of capable architects, existing apps or custom home design firms can provide.
What you should know:
Modwell is a company that provides a number of visual presentations to help buyers envision the potential of a home. While it exists largely in the luxury space, there’s no reason it can’t scale to include more moderately priced homes. Agents and buyers can work together to search and save relevant homes from their market, and then leverage Modwell’s well-built custom rendering and design services to “imagine” what can be done to the property, inside and out. It uses a survey, or quiz, to determine design wants and needs, provides mood boards to collate inspiration and ways to save and share homes.
There’s a lot of preamble in Modwell, meaning users will only move to the design rendering stage after all the possibilities have been saved, filtered and commented upon. There’s a lot of upfront decision-making. Maybe aspiring buyers would pay to have two or three homes visualized for them, but it seems best used when they’ve narrowed down their best option.
Entire rooms can be re-done using a number of themes and design styles. Users can choose to just do a couple of primary activity areas, such as kitchens and primary bathrooms, or exterior living spaces, for example.
Agents benefit by being part of the design process, which helps them maintain a valuable consulting role with their clients, and it provides them an opportunity to share any insight they have on home design. Mood boards, and the agent profile page with a list of other Modwell projects in which they’ve played a role, also help them promote their services.
There’s also a Metaverse aspect to Modwell, a feature for which I can’t quite find a purpose. It seems to me like something they started working on when real estate business in the Metaverse seemed viable, not the gimmicky attempt to seem tech-savvy that it’s now considered. I’m open to being wrong here, as I’m sure the team behind Meta Residence One would bet on being true. (But what’s the point of owning a digital twin to your own home, again?)
Web3, a blanket term for highly interactive, data-rich technologies transforming the internet from an information-based transaction platform to an environment for large-scale, decentralized enterprise, was mentioned a couple of times in our demo. It’s not really being leveraged here, though. I find people just like to associate that term with their product. In truth, Web3 technologies remain wholly unrealized, outside of its most viable, and actually powerful byproduct, blockchain.
But I digress.
My point is that Modwell’s provision of VR real estate offices, complete with brands and agent bios “hung” on interactive walls, comes off as a reach when juxtaposed with its viable marketing visualization assets, a category space that continues to grow. Digital twins and the “built environment” are two of the most frequently uttered buzzwords in proptech of late. Focus there.
1 Regent Dr, Oak Brook, IL 60523, IL from Modwell on Vimeo.
Modwell’s visualizations can be turned around in about a week, and offer viewers external walkarounds of the “renovated” project, and internal looks depicting whatever design theme the parties feel is what they’re looking for. It’s certainly a good way to put an end to a moody buyer’s inability to make a choice.
Agents don’t need to be working with a buyer, of course. Modwell is a great way to revitalize a stale listing by showing off what it’s capable of becoming. Presentations can be saved on a profile page with a custom URL, and shared to social media channels. I would consider it great email marketing content under a subject such as “Envision yourself here” or “Imagine what’s possible with this beachfront home.” You get the idea.
A good case study of how Modwell can be used to move an uncertain buyer is its mention in an episode of Million Dollar Listing. Here’s the snippet.
It seems as if Modwell came to market in a partial vacuum. BoxBrownie can provide a very similar end result for around $300 U.S., and Imerza does it on a grand scale with remarkable realism and data integration. There’s also All3D and Rooomy, the former being more about retail furniture sales, but it’s worth mentioning.
I’m confident Modwell’s founding talent will make a mark in the space one way or another. There’s an argument for a pivot here, and I think we both know what it is. They developed their own render tech and that’s saying something. It’s a cool name, too. The company has been accepted into Moderne Ventures incubator program, which should help them hone the value proposition.
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.
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