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Chad Davies on Just Make It Pretty podcast

September 3, 2026 · Chad Davies

Chad Davies on Sarah Haynes' Just Make It Pretty podcast

Almost every homebuilder has the same gap: significant investment goes into the model home, and the hundreds of specs behind it are photographed on a shoestring budget. But buyers find the specs first, in a grid on a listing platform, and compare them to resale listings that agents have photographed like a priority. Builder brand guidelines do not fix consistency across markets, cheap photography moves its cost into carry, and virtual staging from generic libraries gets rejected for good reason.

The alternative is to put your own model home merchandising to work in your specs with a breakthrough new process.

Sarah Haynes invited me on Just Make It Pretty to talk about homebuilder photography, and the conversation went somewhere I did not expect. We spent most of it on a gap that almost every builder has and almost nobody has named: the distance between what you spend on your model home and what you spend on the hundreds of houses behind it.

The full episode runs about thirty minutes. Below are the parts worth your time, with timestamps if you want to jump around.

Listen to the full episode here:
https://shareddrive.com/podcast/the-most-overlooked-part-of-builder-marketing-with-chad-davies/

Why photography matters more now than it did a few years ago

Around the 5 minute mark

When the market is hot, you barely have to take pictures. Put up a rendering, mark it coming soon, and it sells in two weeks. That was not a marketing strategy, it was a market condition, and it’s gone.

With fewer buyers choosing from more available properties than ever, you have to win them online before they will consider showing up in person. That shifts photography from a listing requirement to the thing that determines whether a buyer ever shows up.

Sarah pushed on this and I think the honest answer is uncomfortable: most builders have not revisited their photography approach since the market changed underneath them.

Your competition is not the builder down the street

Around the 6 minute mark

Buyers are not comparing you to other builders. They are comparing you to resale.

The agent listing that twenty-year-old house down the road is putting real money into marketing one home. Professional photography, often video, sometimes staging. Most builders are spending a fraction of that per listing, and hoping that the house being new does the rest of the work.

It does not. A brand new home can and does lose the scroll to an older one that was simply photographed like it was a priority.

We also talked about a subtler version of this problem: most builders are using the exact same photographic approach resale agents use. Same wide lens, same flat light, same handful of images. Do that and your new construction reads as just another listing.

The point of discovery is the Spec listing, not the model

Around the 16 minute mark

This is the part of the conversation I keep coming back to.

Model homes are the pinnacle of a Builder’s brand experience. That is where a buyer can touch what you build, and the biggest builders spend real money there because it works. I would not advise them to change a dollar of that spend.

But almost nobody sees the model home first. Buyers search for houses, and what they find are specs, in a grid, on a listing platform. The model home is closer to mid-funnel. It is what they experience after they have already decided you are worth an in-person visit.

Someone on their couch will scroll through twenty or forty houses before picking one to visit. Every one of those is asking for the same time from their weekend. Your spec photography is a critical argument for why your community is worth a visit.

Which means the photography many builders treat as an item on a checklist is the only version of their company most buyers will ever evaluate.

I explore this concept in more detail here: [PILLAR A]

What cheap photography actually costs

Around the 17 minute mark

Nobody gets in trouble for minimizing marketing spend. In the short term, it’s incentivized, and your team applauds you for it.

But the savings move. What is the carry cost on a home sitting unsold for ninety days? Interest, taxes, insurance, maintenance, and eventually the incentive you offer to move it. That number dwarfs anything you saved on photography. The carry math is available here.

This is an incentive problem more than a math problem. The person who cut the photo budget gets credit this quarter, and the carry cost shows up on a different line, in a different department, months later. That is why the pattern survives inside well-run companies.

Why brand photography guidelines do not fix brand consistency

Around the 10 minute mark

Sarah asked about brand guidelines, and I had to be honest: most of them are well written, well intended, and not solving the problem they were built for.

If you operate in multiple markets, you use multiple photographers. What guidelines are really trying to do is get all of those photographers to shoot the same way. But almost every photographer thinks of themselves as an artist and will make creative decisions along the way. The photographer in Nashville is not going to shoot like the one in Austin, or Charlotte, or Phoenix. Handing over a thirty-page glossy PDF does not change anyone's behavior.

A brand photography guide is a good start. But it isn’t a consistency solution on it’s own, and treating it like one is why so many builders have a beautiful document and inconsistent photography at the same time.

Knowing what good looks like is a different skill than making it

Around the 13 minute mark

I want to be clear that none of this is a criticism of builder marketing teams.

Every marketing manager, director, and VP I work with has a genuinely great sense of design. Consider model merchandising. They know what looks right, they have built that instinct over decades, and their intuition is excellent.

What most of them cannot do is design a furniture floor plan from scratch and merchandise a model home top to bottom. That is why you hire an interior designer. You are the quality filter that knows what great looks like. You were never meant to be the factory.

The same applies to every other piece of the marketing pie. Knowing what great looks like is exactly the qualification you need to hire the right specialist.

Why virtual staging gets rejected, and what to do instead

Around the 19 minute mark

We spent the back half of the episode on staging, and I shared some inside baseball that surprised Sarah.

Builder marketing teams reject virtual staging constantly, and not because they are difficult. They are experts in design and sales and psychology, and they know their buyers. When staging does not match buyer expectations, they send it back. Four rounds of revisions later, the house has been on market for weeks without staged photos.

Here is what nobody has addressed until now: the furniture libraries provided by virtual staging providers are effectively all the same. Everyone pulls from the same catalogs of generic furniture and accessories, much of it styled to a moment that passed years ago. You are trying to sell a house today with furniture that reads as seven years old.

There is a branding cost too. Stage with the same library everyone else uses and your homes look like everyone else's homes, which defeats the point of building a distinctive brand in the first place.

The alternative we discussed is straightforward. The design work in your model home is a real asset that currently produces value in exactly one building. If that furniture and styling can be extracted and placed into your vacant specs, you stop paying for it once and confining it to one address. It also solves the problem of the four other floor plans that never get merchandised at all.

Frequently asked questions

Who is a homebuilder's real competition online? Resale listings, not other builders. Buyers compare a new spec against the twenty-year-old house down the road, and the agent on that house has usually spent more per listing on photography and staging.

Do buyers see the model home or the spec home first? The spec. Buyers search for houses on listing platforms and land on a spec in a grid. The model home is a mid-funnel visit that only happens if the spec listing earned it.

Why do brand photography guidelines fail to produce consistent results? Because different photographers in different markets make their own creative decisions, and a PDF does not change that. Guidelines set a standard. They do not enforce one, or provide sufficient technical detail for the photographers.

Why do builder marketing teams reject virtual staging? Because shared furniture libraries do not meet the standard set by professionally merchandised model homes. The rejection is professional judgment working, not obstruction.

Listen to the full conversation

Sarah and I covered more than fits here, including what builders are getting right, where photography sits relative to the rest of the marketing budget, and why social media works differently than product photography.