For many real estate agents, creating polished video content once required expensive equipment, editing expertise or hiring outside production teams. But Mirage, an AI-driven, on-demand video production company, is helping to make these hurdles a relic of the past.
CEO and co-founder Gaurav Misra sat down with HousingWire to detail the significant popularity gained in the real estate space by Mirage — with its Captions platform offering automated editing, AI-generated captions, avatars and property-tour creation tools.
Real estate has become one of the largest user segments for Captions, as the platform exports roughly 40,000 videos from the sector each month, according to the company. In April, Mirage launched Cappy, a texting-based AI video editor that allows users to create and edit videos by sending prompts, photos and clips through a phone number interface.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Gaurav Misra: A lot of (use of Captions by real estate agents) in the beginning circled around market updates, social media posts, stuff like that. People want to keep a pulse on social media and keep posting stuff so they can keep the audience engaged on what’s happening in the neighborhood and what the trends are.
More recently, we launched this product around property tours. So this was just about a couple of weeks ago where we wanted to see whether people will be more willing to create actual property tours through AI-augmented technology.
Obviously a big issue there is, you don’t want to misrepresent the property. You don’t want AI to come up with something that isn’t there.
Jonathan Delozier: We recently published an article about that exact thing.
Misra: Yep, nobody wants to do that. People don’t want to actively misrepresent anything, and we don’t want to accidentally enable that for anybody either.
We had make a lot of effort to figure out, how do we make a video that’s very representative of what the property actually is while also elevating the production, so it looks better than what you might be able to record on your iPhone? And it needs to look professionally produced with amazing camera movement, great transitions and stuff like that.
Delozier: When did you really start to gain traction in real estate?
Misra: (Real estate was) our biggest audience from the beginning, when we started the app. The first feature we had on making it easy to create videos was adding captions. That’s why the app is called Captions. That in itself was pretty popular for real estate from the beginning.
We have other large segments — things like faith, for example, and fitness — but real estate is the largest one. I think it’s because a lot of real estate agents are trying to be seen, right? They’re trying to be seen everywhere and that’s a big part of how they’re selling.
One Captions user shared their experience with HousingWire.
“I was competing with an agent who has 30% of the sales in the neighborhood,” said Peter Ripa, a real estate professional at Coldwell Banker Realty. “The videos opened the door to building trust and consideration. I would not have received the call or listing presentation opportunity without the professional videos I was able to create with Captions.”
Delozier: Say you’re an agent, you have 10 or 15 minutes between showings, and you’re by no means any sort of editing expert. What’s the creation process like with Captions?
Misra: The whole premise of our application is, we don’t want you to edit the video. We don’t want you to spend the time pressing buttons on a small screen with your thumbs and trying to figure it out. Almost all editing software apps that are out there focus on giving you a lot of control — a lot of buttons and a lot of stuff to learn. For real estate agents, this is a means to an end. They’re not trying to become an editing expert. They want to market. They want to get in front of people.
More recently, we were thinking, how do we make this even more accessible to everybody, where you’re really on the go and you don’t have the time to download apps and stuff like that? How can you do it then?
We came up with this idea of a texting-based version of the application, where we have a number and you can just text the number a bunch of pictures and the prompt, and it will respond back with the video put together for you. It responds just like a person who will make jokes and say normal things. So you can talk to it.
One thing that’s really taking off right now are more generative effects. Say you’re selling a plot of land but also want to help people imagine what you could possibly build on it, or what you could do with it, how you could utilize it.
If we have a bunch of photos of the property, can we kind of virtually reconstruct it and allow people to film within this virtual environment, where they can take the camera different places and take different types of footage of the property without actually being there? Those are some of the things we’re thinking about.
