Technology expert Craig C. Rowe reviews Guest House, a company that offers a fast, lightweight solution to the friction that happens after a listing agreement is signed.
Guest House is a marketing services company that provides listing preparation[1] for agents and their sellers. The company’s core value proposition is its vertically integrated model that carries out staging, cleaning, furniture removal, photography and other services in just a few days.
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Its web-based scheduling and administration experience includes full management of the process, including which rooms to prepare, decor choices, scheduling functionality, fully transparent costs and in-app purchasing.
Other prominent features include automated staging recommendations, full messaging and project updates, mood boards for design inspiration and a sharp, mature user experience.
Product highlights
- Single experience to execute all home-prep essentials
- Use of contemporary furnishings, designs
- Reduction in time-to-market
- Comprehensive collaboration on progress and design
- Easy online payments
Company summary
Guest House offers its services in six markets: Denver and Boulder, Colorado; San Diego and Orange County, California; Phoenix and Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s a nimble, efficient company but will likely need to acquire talent as it enters new markets.
Growth will be deliberate because of the due diligence required to onboard new vendors in each market. Guest House is about higher-end furnishings and establishing specific looks bespoke to each home.
Plus, mid-market homes tend to eschew physical staging, so the market for services is intrinsically smaller.
To counter that, Guest House has a line of more broadly applicable offerings, such as facilitating MLS-compliant photography and visual content creation, moving coordination and cleaning.
Full-service listing prep, simplified
The easy play here would be to build up and out from an AI virtual staging solution, like so many other new companies I’ve seen of late. Guest House offers the option, but I view it as merely an easy bolt-on to round out customer expectations.
Its ICP (ideal customer profile) isn’t in the virtual market. Guest House, like its founder, is about the tactile experience, the actual environment that manifests when a home is complemented by its furnishings.
It’s why boutique hotels carefully choose their lobby coffee and have private drivers pick you up at the airport. There is still a wide swath of consumers who appreciate such things, and even more so when the process is executed with little friction and transparent pricing.
I first learned of Guest House when I reported on its $3 million funding round[3] four years ago. Co-founder Alex Ryden told me back then that his goal was to make people feel at home in what could very well become their home. This was before virtual staging was widespread.
“Virtual staging doesn’t elicit that same feeling we are after in buyers,” Ryden said in 2021. “That said, our shopping can be done virtually through our marketplace. Buyers can scan branded QR codes in our homes and see the shopping list of products offered in the home, or browse hundreds of premium brands and artisanal makers online.”
In an email this week, Ryden told me that it was only recently that he realized how big a gap had formed between listing agreement and market readiness, prompting him to enter the listing services space.
“We started with solving for staging and retail in residential real estate as we saw a big market opportunity in 2019,” he said. “We grew into ‘the easy button for listing prep’ in 2024 as we learned about the broken process between agents and homeowners with other home service providers.”
The best listing agents are those who always at least appear in control of the deal. If they’re scrambling beneath the surface, the client never sees a ripple. This is Guest House’s value proposition to the market; it doesn’t let the wheels spin off the line.
It solves the time lag problem between listing agreement and market debut, and it sands away the friction-rich tradition of scheduling a train of vendors who each require unique access to a seller’s home, or at least makes it much more transparent to them. It alleviates jumbled calendars, tangled email threads and worse, multiple invoices.
The user experience here is super sharp. Lightweight. Fast. It feels very mobile and accessible. Ordering is made easy, and nothing is hidden behind clunky menus or content blocks.
Other benefits for the agent to consider is how quickly an open house can be held, how having a showroom-ready listing can reduce days on market and the possibility of fewer price reductions, if any. Granted, every market is unique.
Guest House isn’t technically a software company, but it very much deploys technology to soothe an everyday listing frustration. It helps agents prove to clients that they acknowledge the inconvenience of selling.
I don’t see many agents promoting the concept that selling a home is bumpy and irritating, a rutted, washboard road with countless opportunities to end up in the culvert. I get it — that’s not the type of thing that looks good on a listing presentation.
But at least there are some companies out there offering solutions for it.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe[4]
Craig C. Rowe has been writing software reviews for Inman since 2015. He started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He consults with residential brokerages and agents on technology decisions and marketing and helps Inman readers understand the ever-evolving landscape of proptech.
References
- ^ listing preparation (www.inman.com)
- ^ TAKE THE INMAN INTEL SURVEY FOR OCTOBER (www.research.net)
- ^ on its $3 million funding round (www.inman.com)
- ^ Email Craig Rowe (www.inman.com)