Staged listing photos have been an effective—and expensive—tool meant to pique the interest of inquiring home seekers. But given the ever-growing landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) in real estate, that hurdle could soon be a thing of the past.
At least, that is where things are headed for Palazzo, an AI-driven interior design platform that has been carving out its piece of the evolving generative AI space since launching in February. While this isn’t why Palazzo founders launched the platform, company officials are looking to lean more heavily into the expanding virtual staging sector of real estate tech.
“Virtual staging has been around for a while, and the data is pretty clear that staged listings convert better for homebuyers than the ones that are bare,” says Co-Founder Raffi Holzer. “With AI virtual staging, we bring the cost and turnaround time way down so it becomes not just a seller-side tool, but potentially a buyer-side tool as well.”
For the better part of a year, Holzer and partner Ed Lando say they have focused on providing tailored interior design solutions that can bring individual preferences and creative ideas to life for consumers.
“People want to see their own style, their own taste embodied in the home that they hope to inhabit one day,” Holzer says. “If the style that it’s staged in is not exactly theirs, they have a tough time seeing themselves living in that space.”
In doing so, he tells RISMedia that the duo has also hoped to uncover the potential benefits that Palazzo could offer to real estate practitioners as a virtual staging tool.
He claims that recent success among real estate practitioners is at least partially due to the platform’s ease of use and integration into the list of tools that most agents and brokers already use in their businesses.
“I’ve learned from my past experiences as an entrepreneur fitting into your end customer’s existing workflows is really critical,” Holzer says. “We built this service API first so that it could be integrated into those tools and into the workflows that brokers were already taking advantage of. So rather than reaching out directly to brokers, we’ve been working on partnerships with the companies that brokers are already familiar with.”
While he declined to name specific companies, Holzer tells RISMedia that Palazzo has already begun partnering with “several brokerages” that have signed up to use the platform as a virtual-staging tool.
He also claims that Palazzo has “thousands of registered users” and counting on the platform as the company looks to double down on its partnerships within the industry.
Since launching earlier this year, Palazzo has sought to evolve as Holzer and the company try to make the platform a hub for interior design and virtual staging options in the industry.
That includes eventually adding the ability for users to purchase the room design they create within the platform. With more than two dozen furniture and home decor brands on board for future partnerships, Holzer hopes to include the feature in Palazzo’s offering sometime in early 2025.
“We want that to be a seamless experience,” Holzer says. “We’re thinking not just about the real estate agents who are ultimately going to be benefiting from the technology, but also the software developers who might be integrating the API into their own products.”
Touting prior experience in tech, Holzer connected with Lando with a desire to get into the budding generative AI space after experiencing the pain points of renovating his home and struggling to understand and communicate with interior designers on what he wanted for his space.
Calling it an “imagination or visualization gap,” Holzier and Lando identified the problem they wanted their platform to solve for consumers.
With the tech background, the duo added the industry know-how—and some star power to boot—by launching the company alongside tennis champion and entrepreneur Venus Williams, who touts more than 20 years of experience in interior design (along with seven solo Grand Slam titles), running her firm V Starr Interiors.
According to a February statement from Williams, Palazzo is another extension of her passion for interior design.
“Our goal is to provide design enthusiasts, like myself, with a community that drives design, collaboration, connection and growth,” she said. “To create a more accessible platform where imagining designs is easy and communicating them is effortless.”
