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This AI Makes Listing Videos 50x Cheaper (Every Agent Needs This) | Ori Harel
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Foreign.
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Sales and marketing podcast on a mission to help you close more deals, keep more clients, build the life of freedom you're working towards. But that can only happen if you're willing to take action. Today, my name is Josh Dyke, Chief marketing officer at Reminder Media, joined as always by Luke Acrey, president of Reminder Media. And our guest today is Orey Harrell. Orey is the founder of Real E, AI Realy AI and Lumara Media. And over the past decade, his team has captured more than 50 billion in real estate across luxury estates, global resorts and institutional portfolios for clients including Blackstone, graystar and Marriott International, as well as leading agents like Oppenheimer Group. Welcome, Orey.
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Thanks for having me, guys.
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Ori man, excited to have you here, man. I want to talk about obviously all things AI, especially AI Video, because we have so many agents watching this that are using video to advertise their listings and bunch of stuff like that. But before we get into any of that, I want to start with the yogurt shop story because I know you got fired at 17 years old and, you know, then you bought this cheap drone and the rest is history. But take me back to 17 year old. Orey, why'd you get fired? What did you learn from that moment?
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Yeah, coming out of high school, I was really lost in my career. You know, I was a complete tech nerd. Always loved, you know, companies like Apple, built my own gaming computers. I was like really into the tech scene, but I didn't know where to go with that. I built computers on the side and kind of dabbled with a few different technical ideas, but I didn't really go anywhere. My parents were in the construction industry and they had bought and sold a lot of real estate. So I knew that real estate was a very lucrative industry and I kind of want to figure out my place in it. I didn't feel like being a real estate agent would be the right fit. That's the direction that my brother took. He went right into residential real estate and I ended up going really left field. I went into music and I didn't just stop it. Like, I DJed a lot of parties and I wanted to kind of go deeper into music production. So I went to music school. It was an audio engineering school. Learned a lot about technical workflows, really kind of flourished in the technical sense. But as you guys know, music is not the most lucrative industry. It's probably the polar opposite of real estate. And, and I found myself, you know, having a couple successful projects, but financially it didn't Go anywhere. It was really a crappy feeling. In order to keep my time occupied, I ended up just working at a yogurt shop really close to my parents house. This is a yogurt shop that I had loved. I was very passionate about this yogurt shop. And it didn't, it didn't.
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The actual shop or just the yogurt?
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Just the yogurt. I didn't care so much for the shop, but I don't know, I went there growing up and I just, it was like a very weird phase in my life where I just didn't know what to do. I had to make some money. My parents were like kind of had the, had the fire under my butt to get out of the house and do something and somehow I got fired from a yogurt shop. They were not happy with my service. I don't think I was quite passionate about the work as much as I was about the actual yogurt. And when I left the yogurt shop, I had contacted my longtime friend who had started a green screen business in the corporate world. So he did kind of start out with events and then he grew to do companies like Red Bull, l', Oreal, pretty big logos in the corporate world. And I told him, hey, you know, we have a lot of family and friends in real estate. I think there's a lot of room for some sort of a business here. We like drones. You know, we've, we've built like the Phantom ones which were the original DJI drones. We were just kind of hobbyist. I was always into RC cars and planes and I was just kind of a nerd hobbyist at the time. And I still am a nerd hobbyist by the way. But we decided to start a company just servicing real estate agents in our area. We were in the San Frano Valley in Los Angeles. It was a flourishing market. There was a lot of new development happening there in the sub like $3 million range. And we didn't know much about the ultra luxury market. I mean when we got started we had no idea that there was 50 or $100 million houses out there. But very quickly as we started doing free work for our family and friends, just kind of putting up a drone in the air, capturing some photos of the house. Very basic stuff we had. It was very early on in the Instagram reels. It was before Instagram reels. Video was just coming up and it feels that we caught a really strong tailwind from the industry of like there was unmet demand for video. So we Ended up going really deep into it. Worked with a lot of celebrity realtors, I think guys like the Altman Brothers, Madison Hildebrandt. A lot of the million dollar listing guys we got in with because they were local to us. And very quickly we learned that our ceiling for what we thought a luxury listing was, it just blew the roof off of it. I mean, within a year, we were doing 50 $100 million houses. Casually. This is a 2016.
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C
What makes a good, like, listing video? And I know there's spectrums, right, of luxury all the way down to, you know, 250,000, $150,000 houses. But what makes a good listing video or what makes a crappy one, if that's an easier way to think about it.
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Yeah, there's a few different ways to look at real estate video and there's. For us, there was two primary paths that you could take for real estate video. One was the clean property B roll video, which is just showing off the space. The other one is more of like a skit or like a story with the actor on camera. We were really inexperienced in the beginning, and we wanted to just do what was easiest with the least amount of logistics. So we went the property B roll direction and we took that really far. So we built out these really nice edits for clients where it would just take you through the property. Really clean, really fun music, nice transitions. And then looking back on it, it's very basic, but at time it was pretty cool. I think what makes a really good listening video is one. And this is going to sound stupid, but a really cool listing, I think was for us, like we were just
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getting a good open house too, is you have a house that people want to see.
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Yeah, like you want a house that people want to see. And we were lucky enough to be in the Los Angeles market where there was this explosion in development. And we were able to get into these, like, these are like architectural sculptures. These are. These were really, really specialist things, one of a kind. I mean, there. There was not many places in the world that houses were getting built like this. And I think in many ways we got really lucky in our timing and positioning that we ended up filming these houses. Another thing is I think that when you're working with property B roll and not actors is really conveying a feeling of living at the house, kind of building this emotional journey in between the. You know, you're working with visuals and music, which there's a million different ways to combine it. But I think that we really trusted our gut and our creative, like soul to create an emotion. Right. And I. We really quickly noticed when we were filming houses and editing them, when we felt really pumped about was like that, that emotion was conveyed very quickly on. On camera. So we let our kind of creative mind drive the direction of the video. And do you think, like, if I'm
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listening to this and I'm curious for myself what agents are doing listing videos well right now that I could go watch. Do you have any recommendations of agents?
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Yeah.
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What comes to mind for me is always Shannon Gillette. I shout her out all the time for videos. I think she does a phenomenal job. But Marie Boatsman's another one we've had on the podcast. She does a great job. But is anybody else that you think of that's really doing well with listing videos?
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Yeah, I think Enes nailed the format. I don't know if you guys are familiar familiar with ns. He's an influencer on. He's an influencer realtor. He had a huge uprising on YouTube where he went from being like completely off everyone's radar to just through video building out like a 5 or 6 million subscriber platform. And I think what he did really well in his innovation was that he combined this clean property B roll that we were doing that conveyed this cool emotion. And he combined that with like a person on camera, like a. Like a tour guide, which was. That was his personal brand. I think he's probably, for me, one of the top guys doing real estate video. And I think he really changed the landscape of the industry. And I don't know if it was intentional, but he definitely had guys that really loved what they were doing and were good at it behind him. And then he was a really good personality for walking through houses. I think a couple other people that do really good stuff in the realtor, in the. In the real estate space for video. People like Ryan Sirhant I think is an obvious, you know, he's just absolutely crushing it. And that doesn't just come down to this, like, super high quality output on each listing. I think the guy just has such a strong infrastructure and really, really good people as well behind him producing this content regularly.
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Well, that gets into the main thing about your story, which is interesting to me is here you have a media company that's essentially filming for the Altman brothers, Jason Oppenheimer, a lot of these top guys like Sirhant, but yet you started another company called really AI that is essentially replacing that company. Like AI is going to do your video can you walk us through like that transition and really the difference in Can AI do a Ryan Serhant level video today or is it not quite there?
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Yeah, I wouldn't say it's quite there. On the level of like a high end videographer. I think that when you still have people deploying resources and like several hours of their life, they could probably get a better output. And really what this product was built for was for the other 98% of people. You know, we were working with the top 2% of realtors. And I think the real epiphany, the point, the real inflection point that I realized at least that this needed to be done was during COVID everything shut down 2019. You know, like you couldn't film houses, people were buying houses without actually seeing them sight unseen. They were relying on virtual tours, things like Matterport. I think it was, there was another platform. I think it was Pano Panoreal. I forgot there's a couple of, couple of platforms that were doing a really good job there. And I think at that point I realized like, hey, this is like, we're definitely deep in the digital era. Video is obviously an important component of selling a home, but there's major logistical constraints, financial constraints around hiring a team like us. We were only in LA at the time, we charged thousands of dollars. It wasn't an ideal situation for the rest of the industry. And at that time I had spent like $50,000 with my partner building out a digital twin software which completely flopped. We hired an Eastern European developer, great guy, but was really tough to work with someone completely remote like that. And everything was just so early on. This was 2019 and it completely flopped. It was just a complete waste of money. It didn't help anybody. But I think that it was a real stepping stone in this direction going towards this kind of, this goal of getting properties documented digitally, whether that was video, photos or 3D.
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When did you realize that? Were you kind of forced into having to replace the way that you did work or were you more driven to come up with like a new way to serve this group of people that couldn't maybe afford to do the type of filming that you were doing? Like, where did your motivation for really come from?
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It was actually a combination of both. I think it was one survival instinct instinct when, you know, we had a really good run with, with the company that filmed traditional media, but we were very spoiled by the fact that there was only a couple people doing in the industry starting the business in 2017. By 2019, there was already everybody. Every 15 year old with a camera and a gimbal could get to, let's say, 90% of the level that we were at with our editing, with the filming. There was definitely a hit to our business at the time. Just because the space became so saturated, you don't need to pay Ori to go film a house a couple grand. You could pay Joe, who just came out of high school, 200 bucks and he'll do a really good job. And I think that that was a real slap in the face. And it was kind of a tough thing to come to terms with because we felt special. And then overnight it was like everyone had access to the same camera technology gimbals got really good, the equipment stack got really easy to work with and we just weren't, we weren't able to separate, separate us all from the market very much. That was one of the reasons that we moved into enterprise and kind of took on more difficult projects. So we worked on, you know, companies like Blackstone, Gravestar. These were companies that had needs beyond just a nice visual. They needed someone who understood the asset class, someone who knew how to actually document these buildings. We just kind of evolved the business a little bit. But it definitely made me realize, like, hey, the technology is getting really good. Not just on the equipment stack, but the software stack. The editing on the back end got really, really intuitive to work with really fast. And it was definitely survival as well as just ambition. I think I really wanted to. I had always been a technical mind. I never was good at software. I never got good at coding. Had a couple of friends who got really good at it on the side and made a lot of money and help, like had not just money, but had a big impact on the industry they were working in. So I realized, you know, this is something that's, it's, it's a worthy thing to go for and fail, fail at if it, if it doesn't work out, you know, at least I won't regret it. And I think that that was a big thing with my decision framework is just. I would, I knew that I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn't go and do it.
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What does really do? Kind of to walk the audience through, like, what is the software? What does it do?
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Yeah, so what really does is it takes in real estate photos, it process them, turns them into video, it takes a song, and then it puts that video to the beat of the song. This was a really big thing with our video production company was people really liked the way that the music and footage were being paired together. They liked the order of it. There was kind of like skill that we had built of how to showcase the house. It was a decision framework on how we actually walk through the house. How did we do the timing for the cuts, what did we show off, what did we omit? We try to really bake that decision framework into the product of really. Rather than just making like a slideshow maker or something that's really boring, where it just doesn't have a time to the music, we wanted to build some kind of an automated system that can convey that emotion that we were doing manually. That took us 10, 15 hours of editing to get to. So in a nutshell, really takes property listing photos that are already existing, turns them into really nice video cinematic. And it's really. It's really tailored to real estate agents. So it's not a complicated product to use. It's not like a video editor. You know, there's a plenty of really good video editors out there. There's plenty of really good tools. This is meant to be like a turnkey solution. Almost as easy as calling a video production guy to just come film your house or a video crew.
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It is really easy. I tested it out and like, what it does is it basically kind of takes your images and kind of creates like a 3D space. Like you're actually moving, like the camera's moving through the image. So I actually took like the old listing photos from when we bought our house and put them all in there. And if you order them right, it'll even like turn the corner, you know, if you put them in like the right order, it'll turn the corner and actually look like you're moving through. Through the house.
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What's the difference between like a good AI listing video or versus one that kind of just looks like a slideshow?
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Yeah. I definitely think that music is a big component that drives a good video. That was something that we kind of understood early on. With my music background, I had just understood that just, you know, through music production and working on a couple successful projects was that music can convey a lot of emotion. So I think that part of a really good listening video as well as I think this applies to AI or in person filming is having a really good song, kind of anchoring it that fits the brand.
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Software provide the music. Like, is AI making like Suno, you know?
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Yeah. Yeah.
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Actually, Josh made us a awesome. Or maybe it was your marketing team. Josh made us an awesome reminder media song. I think it was or whatever.
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I love it. I had a friend that made me a song about not making him a cappuccino. So we make. So I like make songs for everything. Like once I figured out AI Music, I was just like going crazy and it's only gotten better.
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What app do you usually use? Do you use the Suno or whatever it is?
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So I use Google Lyra 3, which is a model that was acquired from a company called Refusion. Very small company based out of the Bay Area. They had extremely high quality music generation and we actually use a lot of their music in the really platform. So uh, you know, you, you guys know that music is. Is extremely license sensitive.
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Yeah.
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If you don't have a royalty free track, you will get sued. It's almost like guaranteed. Especially if you're getting a lot of
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views, they'll block it. Facebook will take it down.
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Yeah. The great part about AI music is that it's immediately licensed to you for use and you have like no complication around like a label or you know, it's just immediately royalty free. So the really platform was built with AI Music as a backbone and what we did was we fine tuned music models to basically be able to decipher what would be the right track to use for this house. So every time you upload photos it recommends four different song options and we're
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what does it do? Does it analyze the pictures of the house and basically by the theme of the picture?
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Exactly.
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It gives. So then tell me this. Like if I'm an agent and I want to go create a listing video with AI today, not using really. Right. But just the things that are available to me, what would I do? Where would you direct me?
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Yeah. So the first place to go is probably Suno or Gemini. Right. You want to get a really good track. You already know what the house looks like. If it's a farmhouse, you're probably going to have some acoustic elements. Right. If it's a modern, it's probably going to be a little bit more electronic. That's kind of the. For me, that's always the first place I go with an edit.
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So I go to Suno, I upload the photos essentially. Or go to Gemini. Upload the photos and go based upon these photos, please select me a perfect music track. Create for me a perfect music track that would help me advertise this listing in a listing video.
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Exactly.
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I have the track. What do I do next?
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So the next thing you would do is you'd have to open up an editor like final cut Pro DaVinci resolve or premiere and put that music in there. Now what you'd want to do is to actually put beat markers on the music so that you can plan your cuts correctly. Because a good real estate listing video should be cut to the beat of the music. I mean that's like an essential item for me at least. When we were doing these projects it was like you can't just have randomly timed clips even if they're in the right order. The next thing you would do is you'd probably reach for a photo to video model, right? Something like VO3 cling. There's a lot of photo to video models out there that are really good. They are pricier per clip. You'd probably be paying somewhere in the order of a couple bucks per clip. But what you do is you drag your photos into there, you generate a clip and then you bring them back to that timeline where the music is to do the right cuts and the ordering of it. That's kind of roughly how you do it.
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Can you throw into. I'm assuming but like if I go to via, right, I go to Google, I Google veo, which is the AI video for Google or whatever. I throw. I then upload my pictures and I upload the track and I say take this music in these pictures and create me a listing video. Would it pump out something? I haven't tested this, but would it pump out something that's usable or. No, from your experience?
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Unfortunately it won't. I mean, maybe fortunately, because really relies on that, you know, on that gap in the market. That's why, that's why we built, that's why it was built. And I think that it's heading in that direction. I think that these, these chat interfaces are getting much, much better now. You have things like Remotion and Hyperframes, which is a connector to a chatbot that can edit video, it can analyze the pictures, it can listen to the music. It's not perfect, but it's definitely trending in that direction. But if you're just Talking about vanilla ChatGPT or Gemini, it absolutely cannot edit video. Like in the chat web interface, should
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every agent use video? And what is like a lot of times they not really promoting well, I guess.
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Yeah.
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The way to say it, should every agent be using video and what have you seen the ones who are doing good at the promotion aspect?
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Yeah, I think every today I definitely. Maybe if you asked me like a year or two ago, it would be no, I don't think every agent can do video. And I don't think it makes sense for them to spend the money on it today. It's definitely essential and it's definitely possible. I think that with a product like really, they're able to just drop in listing photos. Everybody has listing photos. If you're able to drop in photos, get a clean property tour of the site. Even if it doesn't go viral, if it just makes your seller happier and it gives buyers a different perspective, I think that that alone is enough value. But today you see like there's real estate porn on Instagram that crushes it. It gets a ton of views. I, I built our, our media company up to 150,000, 50,000 followers just with property B roll, nobody on camera. So it's a very big segment on Instagram and TikTok. People are going there that aren't necessarily buyers. There is some buyers in that pool, but they're just going there to vision stretch. They're going to enjoy a nice real estate video, see some properties that maybe they didn't know existed. It is a segment on social media that works really well in terms of realtors promoting themselves well. I think that the guys that are doing the best are the guys that are able to balance that property B roll and documentation as well as like mixing personality into it. I know that me personally, if I was a real estate agent, I would definitely be on camera a lot. I'm just not good at it. I don't like filming myself and being on reels. There's some people that are very, very good at it. You know, think of guys like Ryan Serhant, the Altman brothers. These are, these are larger than life personalities that do perform really well on camera and really was kind of built for this segment of, of Realtors that maybe don't want to be on camera or, but still want to have some sort of a video presence. And with property videos doing so well, at least it gives them access to this untapped kind of traffic that they could be producing. While it might not be the entire solution for their video platform, it takes care of at least I would say 70% of the issue, which is like not putting out any video at all. At least you get something on the feed.
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What's just for comparison to hire your team? I think you said you had five people. You would take a crew of five people to hire a team to come do a video versus what they could
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do with AI in terms of cost.
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Yeah.
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So when we were doing real estate videos, our starting rate was around $2500. That was just for one videographer to come for the day. Our average rate was around $4,000. You got to remember this wasn't like your average listings. I would not recommend anyone with like a sub million dollar listing to ever spend that much. It bites way too much in your community, a commission. But on a 50 million dollar house it's like a drop in the bucket, a drop in the ocean. And in the commercial space we were charging easily 10 to $40,000. I mean the costs are huge. And if there's a solution that can address even 50 or 60% bite off a big chunk of the, of the issues that they have in these markets, there's definitely a big opportunity to provide a lot of value. So if you look back at our original videos from 2017 when we were just getting started, the really videos that are produced today are looking better than those. And yeah, and I was like a big, like it was really threw me off because after building really and kind of having some early outputs, the first thing was like hey, let's look at how our stuff looked from 2017 when we started out. And it was pretty eye opening to see that our footage was shaky. Then the, the colors and lighting were off. We missed a lot of important areas and yet we still got millions of views on our content. We still locked in celebrity real estate agents off of weak work. Maybe at the time it wasn't so weak, but now we have a much higher standard for video. And it was pretty eye opening to see AI kind of run laps around 2017, me and my crew and I think that it's really quickly catching up to your modern day videographer, except it's 50 to 100 times cheaper.
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C
Do you see a world where essentially AI will replace all video?
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A
I think that for my experiences in real estate and enterprise video, there's definitely a tailwind that's really pushing the market to replace at least the more recipe driven video. So like a property video, like what really produces. Every house has a front, every house has a kitchen, every house has bedrooms. These are very programmatic type of videos. Even when we're editing them. When we were editing them manually, you knew hey, we got to start near the front door, we got to show off the common areas, we got to show off the bedrooms. There's definitely a framework that's already existing and people expect and that's what makes real estate video a very ripe area to go in and arbitrage with these new video models. Because I could teach an AI like Gemini or ChatGPT, hey look at this set of 40 clips and based on this recipe which we've done for a very long time, you know, show the front first common areas, bedrooms. I need you to go in and reorder the clips into that order. So real estate video is one of those areas where I do think video will end up taking like obviously manual video will be an option but it'll be like when the cars came out and you have the option to take a horse carriage. It's cool because it's a horse and there's a driver and it has, it's a different experience and you know I think that there's definitely a market for that but I think most people are going to want something that's just turnkey they're able to do from the beach. Right. They don't have to meet on site with a videographer and deal with everyone's emotions because there is definitely. Videographers are very close to their work. I'm one of them. I, I used to get very upset when someone didn't like my work and I think that AI is just, you could just beat it up and it'll just keep working hard for you. It'll do, it'll just.
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B
Yeah, now we deliver AIs instead of,
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C
you know, robots get better.
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A
I'm not thinking that far ahead but if the AI become robots and I'm in big trouble. Yeah, I mean they are becoming robots but if they remember, if they remember the conversations we've had, I'm in big trouble.
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C
Why I continue to say please and thank you and thank you Bill for chat GPT that's right, absolutely.
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A
My wife tells me to watch my mouth. I cuss out Siri because our home automation isn't perfect and she deserves it. Yeah, I know she sucks. She's aware. I hope she's not listening to this but she sucks.
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C
She does suck. Orey how can people. Thanks for coming on. How can people learn about really how can they go check you out so
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A
you can go to really AI it's right here on my hat and you can get three free videos just to try out the platform. There's not really any strings attached and I'm very close to the product. If you want to reach out to me directly you can email me Oriely AI I'm happy to demo it to anybody and yeah it's a very easy product to use fully self serve. You could use it at three in the morning if you get the itch to create a real estate video. Or you can hit me up and we'll do a demo directly with you.
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B
That's awesome. Thank you man. Thank you all so much for listening. We'll include all of the links there that Orey mentioned on how you can check out really on our on our website with the show notes. StayPayPodcast.com can also follow us on Instagram. We are at Staypay Podcast and if you enjoy this episode, do us a favor. Give the YouTube video a thumbs up. Make sure you go to YouTube.com reminder media, subscribe to the channel and like this episode, leave a comment for us as well. We will read those here on the show. If you want to get hold of me Luke, you could email us podcastmindermedia.com for this episode of Stay Paid. I'm Josh Dyke guys.
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C
I'm Luke Acre Ory man. Thanks so much for coming on everybody. Go check out really AI. Your action item from this podcast is you need to be using AI. You probably already are. But go and actually test out creating a music track for your next listing video with AI. You will get addicted when you start creating this AI music. But go check that out. You can reference one of the ones that Orey used here but and also maybe we'll link to the music track that we created for Reminder Media's Memorial Day sale so you guys can check that out. Remember, the difference between top producers and mediocre producers in every business is top producers take action. Take action on that today. Sa.