“Sparks Media Group caters to residential real estate marketing needs. We do everything from photography, videography, 3D virtual tours, property websites, virtual staging. And, we cover a wide area: all of California, some of Nevada, some of Arizona and some of Texas.
Scan Your Space caters more towards the commercial hospitality market. We do a lot of business offices, hotels, warehouses, and similar services. But we also expanded into doing clear height, clear span measurements for warehouses. We do renderings. We get the data files to get the BIM and CAD files made.”
Tom Sparks Founder and CEO Sparks CEO
WGAN-TV | How to Use Matterport Property Report and Plug-ins: Compass, Mini-Map, Quick Link and Business Card | Guest: Scan Your Space (a Division of Sparks Media Group) Founder and CEO Tom Sparks | Thursday, 6 June 2024 | Episode: 218 www.ScanYourSpace.com | www.SparksMediaGroup.com
- Do you want to add a Compass or an interactive Mini-Map to your Matterport digital twin?
- How do you help a real estate agent get more leads from a Matterport virtual tour?
- Are you seeking a workflow for measuring a Matterport space so that you can invoice a client based on square footage?
Stay tuned.
Hi, all. I’m Dan Smigrod, Founder of the [www.WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com]. Today is Thursday, June 6th, 2024. You’re watching WGAN-TV Live at 5: a podcast for digital twin creators shaping the future of real estate today.
We have an awesome show for you. How to use Matterport Property Report and Plugins: Compass, Mini-Map, Quick Link and Business Card. Our subject matter expert is Tom Sparks, Founder and CEO of Scan Your Space, a division of Sparks Media Group. Tom, thanks for being back on the show.
- Thanks for having me. Again, the check is in the mail.
- I look forward to it, but I think we’ve gone to Venmo.
- Venmo, okay.
- Tom, before we jump into the topic for today’s show, tell us about Scan Your Space and Sparks Media Group.
- Sure. So I started Sparks Media Group to cater to residential real estate marketing needs. We do everything from photography, videography, 3D virtual tours, property websites, virtual staging. And we cover a wide area, all of California, some of Nevada, some of Arizona, some of Texas.
“Sparks Media Group caters to residential real estate marketing needs. We do everything from photography, videography, 3D virtual tours, property websites, virtual staging. And, we cover a wide area: all of California, some of Nevada, some of Arizona and some of Texas.
Scan Your Space caters more towards the commercial hospitality market. We do a lot of business offices, hotels, warehouses, and similar services. But we also expanded into doing clear height, clear span measurements for warehouses. We do renderings. We get the data files to get the BIM and CAD files made.”
Tom Sparks
Founder and CEO
Scan Your Space (a Division of Sparks Media Group) www.ScanYourSpace.com | www.SparksMediaGroup.com
I have a business model that allows me to expand into other areas quite quickly. So we do a lot of one-off shoots in other states, almost on demand.
So a client can get on the website and create an order and will pretty much show up at the date and time they want us there, which has been great for business. So I started Scan Your Space to cater more towards the commercial hospitality market.
So we do a lot of business offices, hotels, that sort of thing, warehouses, and similar services. But we also expanded into doing clear height, clear span measurements for warehouses. We do renderings. We get the data files to get the BIM files and CAD files made. And I have contacts that work in that sort of area where I’m not an expert at. So, anyway, yeah, that’s it, that’s how I got
WGAN-TV | How to Use Matterport Property Report and Plug-ins:Compass, Mini-Map, Quick Link and Business Card | Thursday, June 6, 2024 into it.
- And your websites?
- Residential is: www.SparksMediaGroup.com www.SparksMediaGroup.com And the commercial industrial hospitality is www. ScanYourSpace.com
- And tell us a little bit about the gear that you’re using to do, Matterport in particular.
- We’re pretty much exclusively using the Matterport Pro3. I have several Matterport Pro3s and I have a few Matterport Pro2s left. And we use the Pro2s, I don’t know, not too much. It’s starting to collect dust. And that’s it for Matterport. Sorry, just the Pro3s. We don’t offer the Ricoh Thetas or Insta360s, any of those.
- Okay, great. So how about taking us into the Matterport Property Report? Let’s take a look at what a Matterport Property Report looks like, and then perhaps you could take us through how it’s delivered and what you can make changes on. You want to go ahead and share your screen?
- Sure.
- And while Tom is setting up, again, his websites are www.SparksMediaGroup.com and www.ScanYourSpace.com. Okay, I’m looking at your screen.
So for context, for those that are perhaps not Matterport Service Providers; or thinking about getting Matterport, you’re actually in the backend of Matterport Workshop, which is at: my.matterport.com Only way to access that is to actually have a Matterport account.
- Correct. And once I’m in here, I click on a space and then there’s various tabs.
So I’m going to click on this Property Report tab, which you see right here. This particular space is the lobby level of a hotel, so it’s fairly big. It’s coming in at about 6,631 square feet. I haven’t really edited this too much. They just kind of spit this out using some sort of AI, I’m sure.
But if we want to finesse this and change room labels or even just adjust walls, we can do that. To do that, we’d click on Edit Layout.
- Even before you edit the layout though, if I could trouble you just to go back, and what else do you get in a Property Report?
- We can download this as a PNG. You get all the room measurements. You can download a CSV file, which looks like this. So it has room labels. And I haven’t labeled these rooms yet, so they say other things, but it has widths, lengths, dimensions, height. Height’s a good one. I didn’t notice that till just now. And then square footage, what floor it’s on, if it’s indoor or outdoor.
- Okay. And then for those in Europe, it comes in square meters as well. So if we go back to the Property Report, and how quickly is the Property Report delivered? Is it delivered with your Matterport space? And it’s instantly available?
- I believe it is. I haven’t run across the scenario where the space is ready to view, and I haven’t seen the Property Report. I know that older spaces that I’ve uploaded, you have to re-upload it in order to get the Property Report so you can’t go backwards.
And let’s say, try to click on a Property Report tab from an upload that you did eight months ago or a year ago.
- Okay. So for context, the Property Report was actually part of the Matterport Winter 2024 Release. That was on February 15th, 2024. So I could imagine that any Matterport spaces before February 15th were not being delivered with a Property Report.
And that 2024 Matterport Winter Release was all about automating the future, which was AI and automation. So this is actually an example of Matterport using AI and automation to automatically create this Property Report from a Matterport digital twin.
- Yeah. Great, great context. Why I find this useful, just to get into that really quickly, is that a lot of times we’re charging by the square foot, and we can talk about pricing structure later, but we charge by the square foot. And previously, we didn’t have a really good way of getting the overall scanned square footage quickly without ordering a floor plan.
And so a client would say, “well, I want to know how many square feet we have, our records show it’s 2,000 square feet.” And we come in and scan it and no it’s 4,500 or 1,500 SQFT. And so this is a nice way to give a pretty quick representation of what the actual square footage is.
And so what I’ve been using it for typically is if I get this back, I don’t necessarily care to have all these particular rooms drawn in. I’ll delete all the interior walls and just have an outline of what I scanned and give them that as the square footage. So there’s different ways to use this.
- I could imagine part of the reason you do that is if this is simply for billing purposes and if you gave the client the floor plan,
they might say, “Well, can I have the floor plan?” And that’s actually a different, probably a different add-on for you to offer separately from-
- Exactly.
- Yeah, okay.
- Exactly.
- So if we were looking at indoor dimensions, I know this is a hotel lobby, but this could easily be a residential house, three levels, and all those rooms could be labeled kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, living room, dining room, and so forth.
- Exactly, yep.
- Okay. All right. So this is what we see as a Property Report when it gets delivered. What is it that you can make changes to?
- So my general workflow is to click on edit layout, and then I’ll go through and delete any walls. I’ve pretty much done that here. I haven’t done all of them so I’ll click there. And I’m just left clicking on it with my mouse, and then I’m hitting the Delete button.
And I’m deleting all these little walls that I don’t necessarily care about. This is a doorway, so I’m going to delete that. And then there’s a few little nubs of walls, I guess, is the right way to call it.
But yeah, that’s pretty much it. You can see they did a good job of catching this angle right here. If we wanted to draw on this wall, for example, we would click here on the wall and then just draw it out, and let’s say there was a doorway there, we could put that there. There’s not a doorway in real life.
And then this square foot here, if you click on that, it’ll say, “do you want to include it in the area?” If there’s a utility room there, for example, it’s bigger than eight square feet, let’s say it’s 200 square feet, and I didn’t scan that, maybe I don’t want to bill them for that so I would uncheck the included area. If it was outdoors, you would mark that.
You can hide the dimensions, you can also label it. I’m not going to label this one because there’s nothing there.
But if we click here on this space, room type, they have some preselected options here. I’m going to select Other, and we’re going to call this a ballroom. And we’ll hit back and you can see it labeled it ballroom, and then call this whole area, lobby.
Get back and now this whole area is called lobby. So if we go back to our Property Report main window, you’ll see the ballroom label and the lobby label and then this wall that I added here.
“Sparks Media Group caters to residential real estate marketing needs. We do everything from photography, videography, 3D virtual tours, property websites, virtual staging. And, we cover a wide area: all of California, some of Nevada, some of Arizona and some of Texas.
Scan Your Space caters more towards the commercial hospitality market. We do a lot of business offices, hotels, warehouses, and similar services. But we also expanded into doing clear height, clear span measurements for warehouses. We do renderings. We get the data files to get the BIM and CAD files made.”
Tom Sparks Founder and CEOScan Your Space (a Division of Sparks Media Group) www.ScanYourSpace.com | www.SparksMediaGroup.com
- Yeah. I’m still confused. Could you perhaps change other... Maybe that’s just called hotel lobby. I think that might just-
- Oh, this space.
- Uh.
- Yeah, it was this.
- That’s the other. Okay.
- I’ll just delete that again and we don’t have to worry about it. There you go.
- Great. So now you can label the rooms with a name there. In this case, there’s no dimensions. Those are odd shapes. Could you add dimensions?
- We click here. It has the-
- It says dimensions, N/A.
- Oh, because of the unconventional shape.
- Unconventional shape. How about just maybe put a rectangle inside? So we can maybe say it’s a bedroom just for the purpose of... Yeah. So now we can see it instantly added to the room dimensions.
- Yeah. So if I go here-
- Yeah. And then when you go back...
- I’ll just label this. Whoops. Sorry Go back. You have the dimensions.
- Yes.
- And it actually made that more square, so it was able to calculate those dimensions.
- Yes. So if this was a house, for example, and you had a bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen, dining room, et cetera, where it might be helpful to see the measurements, and I would say if you went into the Matterport tour, you’d actually see the labels ballroom and lobby and the square footage and the room dimension in the Matterport tour if you’ve enabled that in the space.
- Correct.
- You want to show where you enable that to show up and then maybe we could look at the tour?
- Yeah. Well, if we click here, I usually click there so you can see the eyeball for the dimensions and it will show it. And then the same with the height.
- Okay. So if you’re showing the dimensions, height, and the measurements in the Matterport Property Report, then is the default it will show up in the Matterport tour?
- Let’s go take a look, shall we?
- Yeah.
- There you go.
- And then if you go into the Dollhouse view, yep. And then maybe... And we can see that it’s there. So if you wanted to disable this from being displayed, I guess what I’m unclear is, can I have it show up in the Property Report but not have it show up in the Matterport tour?
- It should show up here. Let’s test that theory out. So we’re going to click here. We’re going to hide the dimensions. We’re going to go back. And so, no, it removed it,
- So it still shows up in the Property Report, but it’s not being displayed. And so it was that little eyeball to the right to determine whether it showed up or not in the Matterport tour.
- So when we click the eyeball with the line through it, that hides it from the Property Report and from the tour. So it says the overall square footage, but it doesn’t show the actual dimensions.
- Mm-hmm. Okay, great. I’m going to ask you about pricing strategy later in the show. Is there anything else to show or tell us about... I presume if you downloaded the CSV file now, it would reflect that you’ve labeled the room names and that there’s measurements there as well.
- Yeah, let’s test that out. There you go.
- And so it stays current. Okay. Awesome. Is there anything else to show or tell us about the Property Report?
- Not that I can think of. Here’s where you can set US versus metric. Sorry, that’s something I can think of.
- I would just suggest one thing, is if you end up talking to somebody at Matterport, they’re going to actually call the Property Report. When you’re looking at it in this view, the Property Layout, you can see there it’s actually labeled in the top left.
- Yeah.
- It’s labeled. So if you’re in Matterport Workshop, a Property Report is called Property Layout. And then if you are in the public view of the report, it’s called the Matterport Property Report. Is this report available to anyone that’s looking at the Matterport space?
- Well, so no. You can see the measurements on the screen if you’re a viewer, but you can also hide it from this right here. So if we hide it there and then go to space... Did that work? Maybe it didn’t work, actually.
- Maybe need to refresh, that could be-
- Yeah. To answer your question, as a viewer looking to do URL, I cannot see this. And I’ve actually uploaded scans to other client’s accounts and I still cannot access this.
- Okay. So this is really for anyone that has access to the tour through Matterport Workshop.
- Through the account that it’s being uploaded to.
- Okay. I’ll probably make this super-confusing, but when you’re actually in the Matterport space and things have been toggled on, you can see the label for the room.
So ballroom, lobby in this case. You can see the square footage, and you can also see the room dimensions if that’s been enabled. But you don’t get this indoor dimensions chart in the public-facing tour.
- Correct.
- Okay. Awesome. Can we just come off screen share just for a moment? We spent some time talking about the use case. You’re doing this workflow so that you can invoice clients because you’re charged by the square foot.
- Right.
- How long does it typically take you to work on a space to do whatever cleanup you’re doing so that you can calculate the square footage?
- Oh, maybe 5 or 10 minutes. It depends on the space. I recently did a 300,000 square foot space, and it took maybe 20 minutes or so to kind of delete all the clutter that I didn’t like. But it doesn’t-
- For most everyday Matterport tours, residential under 10,000 square feet, it’s not all that complex. It’s going to be less than 10 minutes.
- Right. I would say so.
- And how did you previously invoice on square footage without having the benefit of Matterport Property Report?
- Well, there’s a couple ways I would send. There was a company that was providing square footage estimates. I don’t think that their Matterport approved or sanctioned. The main way that I was doing that was getting the actual floor plan, either from Matterport or from a third-party website, like Home3ds or one of the other ones.
“Sparks Media Group caters to residential real estate marketing needs. We do everything from photography, videography, 3D virtual tours, property websites, virtual staging. And, we cover a wide area: all of California, some of Nevada, some of Arizona and some of Texas.
Scan Your Space caters more towards the commercial hospitality market. We do a lot of business offices, hotels, warehouses, and similar services. But we also expanded into doing clear height, clear span measurements for warehouses. We do renderings. We get the data files to get the BIM and CAD files made.”
Tom Sparks Founder and CEOScan Your Space (a Division of Sparks Media Group) www.ScanYourSpace.com | www.SparksMediaGroup.com
- Mm-hmm. CAPTUR3D, MP2FP, for example. And how long did that generally take you?
- 24 hours usually. They’re all pretty quick these days, so about 24 hours.
- Okay. Or in fact, Matterport, you could order floor plans for Matterport. And they would put the calculations on it to say this is the bedroom, this much square footage, this is the dimensions of it, and then the total living space by floor and the total living space of the entire model.
So you’ve now gone from I need to wait 24 hours to I can do it in less than 10 minutes and have the measurements.
- Exactly, yep.
- And also trick out the tour. So if it’s important for the user of the Matterport digital twin to actually see measurements, room dimensions, square footage, that can be enabled in the model.
- Yeah. And I will say it’s really accurate. The other companies that I was sending the URL to to get floor plans have always been a little off.
And I don’t have a percentage to tell you, but they were a little off. I did a warehouse recently that was 100,000 square feet or so, and it was easily within like 600, 500 square feet of what I measured with my laser measure, my handheld laser measure.
So I’m happy with the results as far as billing because when I’m charging by the square foot, 10 square feet or 100 square feet, it’s more money in my pocket.
- So have you stopped using your handheld laser measurer now that you have the Matterport Property Report?
- No, I generally will take overall widths and lengths of a few spaces and ceiling heights of a few variations of different ceiling heights in the space just for my notes in case it ever comes up. Especially if I’m going to order a data file and we want to verify it for scalability, those handheld laser measurements are helpful.
- Okay. So that would probably be a different use case for the design and construction, as opposed to property marketing, where you needed the accuracy.
And I think the last thing before we move on, I want to say this is all done by AI. AI is pretty good. It’s not necessarily perfect. So have you found some times where you needed to move some walls to adjust and then that literally changed the square footage of the space?
- Yeah, it doesn’t happen frequently. It may happen, I don’t know, 2 or 3, 4% of the time. It’s not a huge amount. And it’s more just like...
As an example, if there’s a bookcase in a corner of a room, they may draw the line around that bookcase, not knowing that there’s an actual wall behind that bookcase.
And so I’ll go in and draw the space behind the bookcase because that bookcase is not staying with the property. And that’s come up a few times. But generally, it’s right on target.
- Okay, great. And so that simplifies, speeds up your billing. Takes you less than 10 minutes to clean it up for the purposes of doing your billing.
- Yeah.
- Cool. Matterport offers plugins that’s new as part of the release on February 15th, 2024. How about sharing your screen? Well, yeah, if you could share your screen and show us.
Before we show how to do Compass, Mini-Map, Quick Link and Business Card, show us what those look like within Matterport Showcase. Within the Matterport tour itself, a user would experience when they open up a Matterport space.
- Okay. So are you able to see the screen okay?
- Yes.
- All right. So we’re going to explore the same space. And there you go. Let me make this bigger, if I can. So on the top left, we have a Compass. And as you can see, if I pan around, it’s changing. So we got northeast, we got east.
- And let’s stay on that Compass just for a second because we’re looking at a restaurant. I wouldn’t typically think of a restaurant needing a Compass. When would you likely use a Compass?
- Well, let’s say it’s a school and it’s going to be used for emergency preparedness. And you have a public safety officer or somebody saying I’m in the northeast corner of the campus.
Or it could be a large property, maybe a resort that we’re scanning the entire property. And you could say, yeah, on the east side of the property, there’s the horse stalls, whatever it is.
- All right. So I’m guessing you’re not a gardener because it’s helpful to know where the sun is on what side of the property.
So that would be an example. Well, I would want to see it in residential. Are you doing anything different so that you know how to set the Compass, that you know where north is?
- No. I haven’t started really offering this to clients as a feature or an add-on, but I think if I was, I would definitely want to set north. And I’ll show you how to do that before I make this live. And to your point about being a gardener, I’m not a gardener.
But if you had a piece of land and you were going to design a house on it and somebody hired me to go out and scan that piece of land, maybe they want to have a view of the west. So at sunset, their bedroom window is looking at sunset, or maybe they want the house facing east to rise. So yeah.
- Bear with me one second. I’m just going to look at my iPhone for a second here. because this may not be obvious to everyone who’s using an iPhone is that it actually does have a Compass on it. It’s the Compass app. And if you just type in Compass, that will pop up.
And the other piece of it also acts as a level. So if you’re not carrying a bubble level and you need to know if something is level,
you can use it for that purpose.
But you’re carrying a Compass, so probably the easiest thing would be maybe take a picture of the Compass facing north rather than trying to write it down. Just make it a photo. For that matter, I suppose you could put it in one of your scans and then just hide the scan.
- Yeah.
- Yeah. Okay. In the top right, we see a Mini-Map. You want to tell us about that and show us?
- Yeah, so this is pretty cool. There’s Matterport competitors who have offered this and clients seem to like it. It’ll show the direction you’re facing here. And then if you click on the property...
Or I’m sorry, if you click on the scan points, you can see that it navigates through the property. And so that’s the Mini-Map.
- So a couple things about the Mini-Map. Does this particular Mini-Map let you click on a point within the Mini-Map in order to go there?
- No.
- So that would be an example. There are other Matterport authorized third parties that offer Mini-Map and their Mini-Map would actually show you all the scan points and you could actually just click on a scan point and go to it. So I would describe this particular Mini-Map as version 1.0.
It’s a good start, but it’s not as robust as I would’ve expected. What else? Could you put your Mini-Map in a circle, you put it up on the right? What else could you do in terms of where it goes or how it gets displayed?
- You can put it anywhere top right, top left, bottom left, bottom right. You can change the shape and make it a square, or you can even have a transparent background, I believe. And I can show you about those.
- Okay, great. I see something just on the right edge of your screen. It popped out initially when you opened the tour on the bottom.
- I was able to upload my mugshot.
- That’s the Matterport-
- Business Card. Yeah. So again, this is something you can move pretty much bottom right, bottom left, top left, top right. You can put various social media links. You can have a logo, you can have your mugshot and your contact information and this.
“Sparks Media Group caters to residential real estate marketing needs. We do everything from photography, videography, 3D virtual tours, property websites, virtual staging. And, we cover a wide area: all of California, some of Nevada, some of Arizona and some of Texas.
Scan Your Space caters more towards the commercial hospitality market. We do a lot of business offices, hotels, warehouses, and similar services. But we also expanded into doing clear height, clear span measurements for warehouses. We do renderings. We get the data files to get the BIM and CAD files made.”
Tom Sparks Founder and CEOScan Your Space (a Division of Sparks Media Group) www.ScanYourSpace.com | www.SparksMediaGroup.com
- Okay. I know the screen could be a little bit small for some. So we see your name, your company name, your phone number, your email address. The bottom right, obviously, is your logo and the photo. So was there anything else that you could have added to this card or is that it?
- I think there was a Twitter. I don’t use Twitter, but I think you could add that on there.
- Okay.
- And we’ll go into it.
- And then if you chose not to include any one of those items, could you have... Well, you obviously omitted Twitter or omitted X so I guess that answers the question. So that seems to pop up and down. When you first launched the tour that Business Card launched, is there any timing mechanism on that so that it displays at a certain time or in a certain place?
- No, I moved the mouse away and it went away. And I did date myself. I said Twitter. I did mean X. Thank you for catching that.
- And then in the bottom left, we see a photo and an oval button, Hotel Centro Sonoma Wine Country.
- This is called a Quick Link, and you can put text and a URL, which shows up as this hyperlink, and then you can add a photo. And so the link that I put was a link to the hotel’s main website. And I used an image I got off of Google of the hotel and just put it there.
- Okay. Can you click on that link just to show us what’s going to happen?
- It’s going to open a new tab in the browser and go right to it.
- Okay. And then if you go back to that Matterport tour.
- Hold on one second. I think my mouse froze here. Oh. Sorry about that.
- And so have you used this commercially for any of your clients?
- Not yet. This is pretty new, I guess. And I’m a slow adopter of new technology, so I haven’t started throwing this out there, but it’s something I will.
- Okay. So the examples Matterport uses for this is a restaurant and it might be a menu. Personally, I think the single biggest use case is a lead magnet for clients. For a real estate agent, that might simply go to the Contact Me page.
- Yeah, it would be nice if Matterport threw in a dedicated lead generator, lead capture that would store the contact information for potential clients and/or forward it to their favorite CRM.
- So we’ll call that Quick Link. It’s not quite a lead magnet in the sense of the way you’ve described it. So we probably call that Quick Link version 1.0 because it’s not a robust solution to do lead capture. But I suppose we could be fast and loose and say, hey, it’s a lead magnet for real estate agents.
It can point right to their Contact Us page. If they have something that’s unique for that particular property, maybe... Tom, are you building out single property websites that have Contact Us as part of that?
- I go through a different platform. Yeah.
- So that lead magnet could go point to the single property website for a particular property that includes a form to complete.
- Yep.
- And I suppose one of the advantages of tying it to a single property website is that the potential user looking at this, let’s say this restaurant was a house, they don’t write back.
Could you send me more information on the house? And the real estate agents got 10 listings currently and they don’t know which house.
- Sure.
- Send right to a single property website. Okay. Can you show and tell us about how to create these four plugins?
- Sure. So we’re going to click on Edit to go into the Editor Workshop. On the right side here, there’s a Plugins button.
- So if you could, let’s back out of this page just so that we know how we got here because you’re in the My Matterport Workshop. You’ve selected a particular tour. Now that you have this tour, now you’re going into edit. And then in edit on the right side with some menu items that you were using. Okay.
- Yep. So we got plugins. And you want to start with the first one, Compass.
- Sure.
- All right. So here, we haven’t enabled it already, but I can disable it. And actually let me disable all of them real quick just so that I can show you how they can move around.
- Yeah. And while Tom’s doing that, I think the thing I would point out is these are just the first four plugins by Matterport. I could imagine the direction that Matterport is going on plugins is to enable third parties to write their own plugins.
And so all of a sudden, you have what you think of an Apple App Store, except in this case, it’s the Matterport app store.
And then it’s refined once more. It’s the Matterport Plugin Store. And I could imagine that there will be plugins that are either free from other third-party companies or some way that Matterport with that third party company figures out how to charge for that plugin.
So when I think of some of the third parties that do the robust Mini-Map feature or the robust lead magnet as Tom, as you described, with capturing data ties into a CRM, I could imagine that could or should be a plugin that’s offered by a third-party company that’s really takes it to the next level.
And I suspect since Matterport just released these first four plugins on February 15th, 2024, I would imagine by the end of the year, we’ll see either more plugins from Matterport or more plugins or plugins from third party companies. And I think one of the things that comes to mind for me, Tom, that seems to come up in the We Get Around Network Forum almost monthly is the ability to have swimming pools have water look blue, the water to look blue rather than to look black. And perhaps that’ll be a plugin. Okay.
- And to that point real quick, one that I use actually on a regular basis is I use a third party kind of overlay TVs that are in houses or in public spaces. They’re usually black.
And so why can’t we just highlight this TV and then throw in a YouTube link or a Vimeo link or some sort of video file that plays maybe, I don’t know, highlights of this property or an agent introduction of a house?
- Yeah, I’ll ask an example. Again, I think that the challenge is, there are a number of Matterport third-party platforms that offer that exact solution you described.
- Yeah.
- But the challenge is they generate their own unique Matterport URL, it’s the third party’s URL. And therefore you can’t mix and match all these different things because it’s unique to that third-party.
So hopefully what happens is all these third party-apps get reimagined as plugins so that you could use a combination of a Matterport plugin and plugins from different third party companies all within the Matterport ecosystem.
Tom, to your point, it just seems obvious that you should be able to put a video up on that TV set rather than staring at that blank monitor.
- We can have a whole separate discussion of feature requests we’d like to see coming. And I’m sure we could fill up two hours of just that.
- Yes, I actually... Okay, so back to Compass. What were different things that you can do with your Compass in the top left as an example?
- Yeah, here I have it at the top left. I can change that to the top right. I can change the style so we can have analog. Let’s see. Arrow or minimal.
I kind of like the analog look. And then we can change the size of it so I can make it really small or pretty big. And if we know that this is north, we can hit set north and then we will recalibrate and set it north.
- Okay, great. Anything else on Compass?
- We can click here and it disables it when playing it in the Highlight Reel. That’s about it.
- Clarify that last point please.
- Well, clicking it disables it when playing it in the highlight reel on the tour.
“Sparks Media Group caters to residential real estate marketing needs. We do everything from photography, videography, 3D virtual tours, property websites, virtual staging. And, we cover a wide area: all of California, some of Nevada, some of Arizona and some of Texas.
Scan Your Space caters more towards the commercial hospitality market. We do a lot of business offices, hotels, warehouses, and similar services. But we also expanded into doing clear height, clear span measurements for warehouses. We do renderings. We get the data files to get the BIM and CAD files made.”
Tom Sparks Founder and CEOScan Your Space (a Division of Sparks Media Group) www.ScanYourSpace.com | www.SparksMediaGroup.com
- Okay. So for clarification, one of the options is to enable thumbnails to run across the bottom of the screens to make it easy for you to navigate from bedroom, living room, dining room, kitchen, and so forth. And while that Highlight Reel is being displayed, Tom doesn’t have one in this particular model. You could hide the Compass from the Highlight Reel. And for those from Matterport that are watching the show, please change the name from disable in tours to…
If you’re talking about the Highlight Reel, say disabled in the Highlight Reel. If you’re talking about disabling it in the tour, then call it that right now. I just find that confusing.
- Yeah, yeah.
- It’s confusing. Okay, next plugin.
- So I’m going to disable this and we’re going to look at the Mini-Map. So here we have it on the top right and I’ll leave it there, but let’s see. We can change it to top left, pretty much anywhere in the corners.
- Yep.
- Again, we can change the size and make it really small or really large. We can change from a circle to a square with no background. To me, this is a little hard to see.
- Yeah, I don’t even know if I’d offer that as an option.
- Yeah. I actually like the square, so I’ll keep it square and then you can zoom out.
- So the square remains the same size. It’s just how big the Matterport tour floor plan view is within the shape.
- Yeah. So if you had a smaller footprint house, you may want to zoom in more. If you have a large property or a large warehouse or something, you would want to zoom out more.
- Okay, get it. And then I think the same thing in terms of setting north, then again...
- There you go. So it rotates the map.
- So I think this is probably super important here, Tom, because if you don’t orient the Mini-Map correctly, would it just feel weird or no, it’s going to align with the space even if it doesn’t know which way north is?
- I don’t care so much about north and south when I’m touring a property, I care about what I can see versus what’s there in real time.
So if I’m coming in the front doors of this hotel, I would want to see what’s in front of me. So if I have a hotel staff say you go down this hall and make a left, I can say, okay, I’m going to go down this hall and make a left and then I’m right at the elevator.
- Okay. All right. And anything else to show us in Mini-Map, I think that’s actually it.
- Yep, that’s it.
- Okay.
- Disable that. Let’s do Quick Link next.
- Okay.
- We’ll get this card last. So with Quick Link, ironically enough, it shows an image and a link in a corner, but you can’t select where you want it to be. It’s just stuck here in the bottom left.
- Yeah.
- Maybe they could change that.
- Yes.
- I have a photo. I can delete the photo if I want and re-upload a new one, and I can change the URL, so on and so forth.
- Okay. Can you put so the text is just one line, so we can see what happens to that bubble?
- So the text is... Oh, one line. Yeah, yep.
- Okay, so the oval, the button will change shape.
- Correct.
- Accommodate the text. And then there’s the URL. So straightforward. Okay, great. And what else?
- So last but not least, I actually find this one probably the most useful, especially for residential sales. We have the Business Card.
So here we can put in, as an example, a real estate agent’s brokerage name, their name, their phone number, email. Ironically enough, they don’t have a button for the website or a space for the website. They have social media, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. I would like to see a website URL here. I guess you can use the Quick Link for that, but it’d be nice to have it here.
- Yes, because you may only want to use it in one place.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- And then again, photo and logo and you can select your photo and logo and upload those. And this also is limited to the bottom right. They don’t have a spot to put it anywhere else. I think previously all the contact information used to pop up in the top left.
- Yeah.
- Remember correctly.
- Okay. So just work with me on Twitter here. - Sure.
- Looking at where it says Twitter, which is obviously now X, I can’t tell whether you put in the URL. Why don’t you try this? Let’s put @DanSmigrod ... And then let’s save that and let’s just see... So I don’t know why they don’t show you that you need to have a URL there rather than having me stumble into that. That was really what my question was.
- Yeah. And kind of to that point, aside from maybe putting an example, having X.com/@DanSmigrod, whatever it is, maybe they could have...
There’s other platforms where if you type in: Facebook.com/SparksMediaGroup it’s going to put the Facebook logo. Or if in that same URL, I put in LinkedIn.com, it’s going to put in the LinkedIn logo. So they’re leaving out YouTube, they’re leaving out Vimeo. Those are things that agents like to share sometimes.
- Other platforms.
- Other platforms.
- Yeah. Again, I think this is... I’m going to take off screen share. I think that was actually version 1.0. Somebody might want to be putting in TikTok or-
- TikTok.
- Vimeo, whatever it might be or some other platform. So it’s interesting that it’s... I guess, your choice is simple, complex, simple.
Okay, they made the choice for us, but it would be nice to be able to... even if I put in a Vimeo link that it automatically said, oh, that’s a Vimeo link, I’ll put in a Vimeo icon; that’s a YouTube link, I’ll put in the YouTube link; that’s a TikTok link, I’ll put in a TikTok symbol.
“Sparks Media Group caters to residential real estate marketing needs. We do everything from photography, videography, 3D virtual tours, property websites, virtual staging. And, we cover a wide area: all of California, some of Nevada, some of Arizona and some of Texas.
Scan Your Space caters more towards the commercial hospitality market. We do a lot of business offices, hotels, warehouses, and similar services. But we also expanded into doing clear height, clear span measurements for warehouses. We do renderings. We get the data files to get the BIM and CAD files made.”
Tom Sparks Founder and CEOScan Your Space (a Division of Sparks Media Group) www.ScanYourSpace.com | www.SparksMediaGroup.com
- Then having them scalable. So if you just have Facebook, maybe that’s a little bigger than just the little small icon and then all this extra blank space next to it.
- Yeah. Okay. I wanted to ask you, do you have any thoughts on pricing strategies? I mean, here’s where I’m coming from, Tom, the good news is Matterport is enabling many, many, many new features.
There’s just new features to keep track of. I think when I started in 2014, there’s been a lot of progress in 10 years. Part of it’s good for a Matterport Service Provider because the more complex it is, perhaps the less likelihood that a real estate agent wants to do this for four or eight listings a year because it gets complex of how to use Matterport Workshop. That said, just because Matterport offers it probably doesn’t mean you go automatically implement it at no charge.
So I guess the question is, what’s your view on maybe pricing strategy? Is it not to charge and it becomes table stakes that differentiates you from other Matterport Service Providers? Do you charge it as an add-on? Is it too complex because it just makes your rate card so crazy? Do you automatically add it when it seems appropriate?
Do you automatically add it once and say to a client, “hey, I enabled that feature. I did it at no charge for this tour, but if you’d like that in the future, here’s what that add-on costs.” Can you give me your thoughts on pricing strategies for Matterport Property Report, Matterport plugins?
- Yeah. So I’m a little unique compared to even some peers and competitors that I know. I have a colleague who includes Highlight Reels with all his tours.
And I’ve never included one Highlight Reel with any of my tours. And I’ve done thousands of Matterport tours. I did have one
client request, a Highlight Reel and I did charge for that. But my colleague, he does it for free with all of his Matterport tours. I wouldn’t charge for these, I don’t think.
There’s a Matterport competitor where we set up a banner for the agent for every shoot that they do. And that competitor stores that banner information.
So every time that agent is ordering a 3D tour, we just plug the agent’s name in, and it automatically loads the banner. I would like to see that here with the Matterport tours where we can store business cards for real estate agents. And that way if we have an agent ordering 10 tours, we can easily update the banner information and it propagates it through all 10 tours.
If I was to offer this, I have a client who we’ve done 200 tours for that I’m hosting, and I would charge as part of my monthly hosting, support and maintenance to go in and update the banner if they change, I don’t know, website URLs or mailing addresses.
And on this competitor’s platform, it’s easy to do because I’d just go to one place, but on this it would be a nightmare and so I would have to charge a little extra to go into 200 tours and update that.
- So part of the challenge, like if you decide to implement something and then the client’s email changes or something changes on their business card, they might say, “Oh, Tom, could you go back to your 200 tours that I have with you and change that?” as opposed to being able to make that change in one place.
- Yeah. And it’s not on Matterport’s platform, but it’s happened where they’ve said, literally, “my email address has changed. I’d switched brokerages.
Can you go in and update these tours?” And it’s fairly easy for me or for my admin assistant to do that. But here it would be a little harder just because I have to go on each tour.
So I don’t see Compass and Mini-Map and... I see it being a, “hey, we can offer this now” and maybe this is more of a reason to select Matterport versus somebody else, but I don’t see it as “we offer this and I’m going to charge you $10 a tour to turn on a Mini-Map or even set up a business card.” I probably wouldn’t charge for that, but I could see some people maybe wanting to charge for that as a service.
- Do you think that a Business Card, for example, or the Quick Link might help you get clients that you haven’t gotten or nope, that’s not going to make a difference?
- I don’t think it would help me get clients. I think on the tours here... And I’ll show you if I can go back to the Details tab. Let’s see.
- You want to go ahead and share your-
- Oh, I’m not sharing, sorry. Though I was still, I would typically put my information here on this Details tab. And I think that used to show up in the top left.
On a tour, it would show contact information, where some of my competitors or some of my colleagues or peers, they would put the agent’s name here. So presented by Bill the REALTOR and Bill’s email address and here’s Bill’s name and bill’s phone number.
- Yes.
- Always just, by default, put my information here. And that may have captured me some extra business because if somebody’s looking at that tour, they see my information. I’ve never had an agent say, “Hey, your information here. Can it be my information instead?”
- Yeah. I think this is something that, as a community, we’ve been asking for, literally since August 2014, is please treat a photographer differently than a real estate agent.
Please have two different places so that a photographer’s information can be listed and the real estate agent’s information can be listed. And I don’t know why that has been such a hard concept to get across. There’s some hybrid compromise where you say, well, you were the photographer, you just put in your information and, thank heavens, a client hasn’t pushed back on it.
And then there’s some photographers that are putting the client’s information in it, but they’re not getting any props for the tour. It would be nice that there was a place to say “tour created by” and the “client’s information.” Were there any other wishlist stuff that came out as you were playing around with the four Matterport plugins?
- Well, as we’re talking right here, can I share my screen and show you one more thing?
- Sure.
- To your point about that, the nadir here, it’s blurred out.
- Yes.
- On a competitor and with some Matterport plug or Matterport overlays, you can replace this with a circular logo, for example.
So on a competitor, I actually have my logo and I have my website URL in text going around. And I could see this being a useful plugin that I would even charge for where I say by default, it’s going to have my information here.
- Yes.
- And even a clickable link, so if somebody clicks that, it opens up like a separate tab to my website. But for an additional, I don’t know, $10, one-time charge, we’ll put you, the REALTOR’s logo here, and have your URL here.
- Yeah.
- So I think that would be a super -seful plugin to have.
- Yeah. And in fact, you could have that nadir replacement, that tripod replacement. If you put enough fields in it, you could put a little circle in there. And the inside is the agent information and that outside thing is to where created by: name, mail.
There’s ways to do it. For clarification, you’re using a third-party company to create a nadir overlay in a Matterport tour, which would be a great plugin to be offered. And I think what you’re describing might be something that could even charge you as the photographer for, and you could turn around and charge a client for.
- Well, I don’t want them charging me, but I can certainly charge the client No, if they need to charge for it, yeah, I understand it, but it’s just another-
- Yeah, certainly, it would be nice if Matterport just did it, but I’m sure they have some tension between charging their Matterport-authorized partners who are creating features that Matterport sort of is kind of now competing with.
But let them figure it out. The important thing is how to help the customer, how to help whoever is paying for the tours. And that’s you, the photographer, that’s actually acting as essentially a Matterport Reseller.
So the only thing I think I’ve heard you say that you would charge for would be a nadir replacement, not the Compass, not the Business Card, not the Quick Link, not the Mini-Map.
“Sparks Media Group caters to residential real estate marketing needs. We do everything from photography, videography, 3D virtual tours, property websites, virtual staging. And, we cover a wide area: all of California, some of Nevada, some of Arizona and some of Texas.
Scan Your Space caters more towards the commercial hospitality market. We do a lot of business offices, hotels, warehouses, and similar services. But we also expanded into doing clear height, clear span measurements for warehouses. We do renderings. We get the data files to get the BIM and CAD files made.”
Tom Sparks Founder and CEOScan Your Space (a Division of Sparks Media Group) www.ScanYourSpace.com | www.SparksMediaGroup.com
Even though you see the value in that Business Card, you’re superreluctant to put it in unless Matterport had a global replacement feature so that you could say, hey, all the tours that belong to ABC Realty, to John Smith at ABC Realty, I want to be able to just enter that information once and have it globally replaced.
- Yeah. We need to have a whole, again, separate discussion on feature requests and we can sell that data to Matterport because I think we can come up with some gold for that.
- Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you what, we’ll make it free. So today is Thursday, June 6th, 2024. We’ll publish this show in the [www. WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com] next week.
We’ll add the captions, et cetera. When we do that, I’ll start some new discussions in the Forum for wishlist related to more plugins, wishlist in terms of modifying the four different plugins that exist. And then maybe start the wishlist for other plugins, giving you credit back for nadir, as an example. Just to start that one out.
- I’d be curious. I want to see how everybody else is using these plugins. I think they’re all useful in some way. I think the Compass is kind of like the Compass in my car. I don’t tend to look at the Compass in my car.
- Yeah. And you’re not a gardener. I’m telling you ... If you were a gardener, you would immediately... If you were a real estate agent, the first thing that the prospect for buying the home is where’s the sun?
- Sure.
- And they were going through the tour. I promise they care about that.
- Okay. My ignorance.
- Really, for all our viewers, if you go to the We Get Around Network Forum, www.WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com, I’ll start some discussions based on today’s show, including, Tom, your request of how are you using...
Show us examples of how you’re using Matterport Plugins and maybe even ask for a note, or are you just doing that for free or are you actually charging for that added service? Tom, before we say bye, anything else we should talk about?
- No, it’s always a pleasure when we’re able to get together and talk shop, so I appreciate the time and the opportunity. I love where Matterport’s going. I think the Property Report is a huge leap. And I’m excited to see some of the new features that they’re coming out with that I’m pretty sure we’re going to end up talking about on a future call.
- Yeah. In fact... Let’s see. As I mentioned, today is Thursday, June 6th, 2024. Matterport has talked about, in the second half of 2024, releasing Project Genesis. That’s a whole nother topic. But if you’re looking for predictions, I’m predicting that Matterport will launch Project Genesis: I normally would say on Monday, June 10th, 2024, but because there’s an Apple Developers Conference, they probably wouldn’t want to get snowed over by all the Apple-related media coverage.
So maybe they’ll delay it a day till Tuesday, June 11th, 2024. And that will be a great topic to come back and visit with you, Tom. Tom, thanks again for being on the show today.
- Thank you. Thanks for having me.
- We’ve been visiting with Tom Sparks, Founder and CEO of Scan Your Space, a division of Sparks Media Group. You can visit Tom’s website at www.ScanYourSpace.com, www.SparksMediaGroup.com.
And you can chat with him and then [ww.WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com] @ScanYourSpace, and he has an awesome YouTube channel @SparksMediaGroup on YouTube for Tom.
I’m Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum.
And you’ve been watching WGAN-TV Live at 5.
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