Send us Fan Mail Before you blame the market, look at how your homes show up online. Chad Davies - founder of Davies Imaging Group (DIG), serving builders doing 500+ units a year across 28 markets - joins Anya Chrisanthon fresh off the Jeff Shore Sales and Marketing Leadership Summit, where his team captured the entire event from behind the camera. The view from the Summit Every conversation - on stage and at the bar - came back to the same theme: stop negotiating. Selling homes is no longer a price battle. Builders have cut as much as they can, and the differentiator now is how you capture buyer attention. The DIG story Chad photographed his first $2 million home at 17. Sixteen years later, DIG is a specialized team - photographers who only photograph, dedicated editors in Guadalajara ripping through post-production, virtual staging artists, and a separate video production discipline. Why? Because one person can't carry the whole weight, and the friction in builder photography lives at the front and back end: scheduling, communication, and turnaround time. What 28 markets reveal Some regions are ripping, others are slow - and the trends are shifting. California, which invented the twilight photography craze, now wants daytime shots. Lifestyle and amenity video is surging while standalone model video fades. And in competitive markets like Texas, builders are suddenly finding photography budget - because when you can't compete on price, location, or product, presentation is the only lever left. The spec home rant If your home exists, it needs real professional photos - not a rendering, not construction team phone pics. And if it's not selling within a month, stage the pictures. Chad's team is seeing homes that sat for a year sell in weeks after virtual staging. Buyers aren't buying a shell - they're buying a new lifestyle, and you can't show them that with an empty room. Your job as a marketer is to remove the imagination, not demand it. The virtual staging surprise The biggest fans of virtual staging aren't marketing teams - they're sales teams. When a stale listing gets staged, it renews the sales team's excitement to sell it. If you want to empower your salespeople, stage the sitting inventory. Where AI fits AI-generated video is a variation of a photo, not a replacement for video production. Use it to fill social channels and supplement your media strategy - but it's an "and," not an "or." The biggest untapped opportunity in builder content Mic up your construction team. The first big builder that embraces behind-the-scenes content from their superintendents - showing culture and quality instead of talking about it - is going to have a great year. As Chad puts it: you're not telling people your culture, you're showing them. Connect with Chad on LinkedIn or on Instagram (Chad Davies), and learn more at daviesimaging.com. About Anewgo Anewgo is an all-in-one new home sales and marketing platform. We equip builders with AI-ready homebuilder websites, interactive design tools, floorplans, sitemaps, AI Sales Assistants, and data analytics to create personalized buyer journeys. Learn more at anewgo.com or find every episode at anewgo.com/podcast. Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/anewgo-of-new-home-sales/id1602564768
