By Sara Miller, NoCamels -
Renting or buying a new property is widely regarded as one of the most stressful things you can do, and is only exacerbated when confronted by a vast empty space without the furniture or trappings that make a house a home.
An Israeli startup has created an augmented reality (AR) app that allows prospective tenants or buyers to envision a fully furnished living space simply by holding up a smartphone or tablet while standing inside the property.
“Ninety nine percent of the new apartments for sale or for rent are without furniture in the US,” SparX founder and CEO Dan Lowenthal tells NoCamels.
“In augmented reality, you add another layer on top of the reality,” he explains. “So we add the layer of furniture on top of the unfurnished apartment.”
Lowenthal, a veteran real estate entrepreneur, wanted to improve the way in which vacant properties are shown after his own frustrating experience looking for a house for his family in the United States.
In 2017, he moved with his wife and daughter to the US from Israel for his real estate business, and – ironically – found it difficult to pick out their own new home from a range of unfurnished options.
“We were shown a bunch of empty apartments and it was very hard for us to envision our life in these empty spaces,” he says.
So Lowenthal and his team in Israel and the US came up with their platform – using a proprietary algorithm to allow potential home renters and buyers to furnish the property they were standing in, in real time and in front of their eyes.
The startup received investment from the Israel Innovation Authority, the branch of the government dedicated to supporting industrial R&D, as well as Jerusalem-based Terra Venture Partners and various real estate investors.
Many people became aware of augmented reality in 2016, with the release of the Nintendo mobile video game Pokémon Go, which let players scan their surroundings using GPS to search for virtual characters that would appear on their screens. m
The game became a global sensation with more than a billion downloads worldwide in less than three years.
Cost Cutting
According to Lowenthal, the AR platform is also a boon for those looking to sell or rent, as staging a home can be a costly affair.
Furnishing an empty home on a temporary basis involves renting the contents of a house – everything from dining table and sofas to bed linen and towels – to give it that homely feel.
According to international website HomeAdvisor, staging could cost a private seller up to $2,800, while US real estate professionals say that realtors could pay that sum every month for their listed properties.
And skipping staging – particularly in the US, where Lowenthal says such a process is standard in real estate – could be even more costly.
Indeed, in a 2023 survey of American realtors by the National Association of Realtors, 81 percent said staging made it easier for clients to visualize a property as their home, while 52 percent of the realtors said staging affected how most buyers saw a home on the market.
Furthermore, according to Forbes, a staged home will on average sell for 17 percent more and 87 percent faster than equivalent non-staged homes.
Home Making
The SparX system consists of three stages. First, the agent scans the empty property and places it on the company platform. Then a range of furnishings and design choices are layered onto the scanned property.
And finally, the prospective buyer or tenant logs onto the system inside the apartment, using the variety of preset furnishing choices to create an image of what the property looks like as an actual home.
The platform has already been adopted by leading real estate companies in the US, where around five million homes are sold each year.
SparX also has teamed up with several home furnishing companies to provide the interiors of empty homes for rent or sale on their platform, and clients can even purchase the furnishing seen on the app.
“Thanks to SparX patented technology, users can immersively visualize a space’s potential and change the design by functionality, style and budget,” Lowenthal says.
While other companies do offer technology used to show house listings, including digital imagery to furnish an empty home, none use AR to recreate a fully furnished apartment or house while actually standing inside the property, he explains.
“The future of home visualization,” he says, “is here.”
