How Captions turned busy real estate agents into AI video creators

For many real estate agents, creating polished video content once required expensive equipment, editing expertise or hiring outside production teams. But Mirage, an AI-driven, on-demand video production company, is helping to make these hurdles a relic of the past.

CEO and co-founder Gaurav Misra sat down with HousingWire to detail the significant popularity gained in the More recently, we launched this product around Misra: Yep, nobody wants to do that. People don’t want to actively misrepresent anything, and we don’t want to accidentally enable that for anybody either.

We had make a lot of effort to figure out, how do we make a video that’s very representative of what the property actually is while also elevating the production, so it looks better than what you might be able to record on your iPhone? And it needs to look professionally produced with amazing camera movement, great transitions and stuff like that.

Delozier: When did you really start to gain traction in real estate?

Misra: (Real estate was) our biggest audience from the beginning, when we started the app. The first feature we had on making it easy to create videos was adding captions. That’s why the app is called Captions. That in itself was pretty popular for real estate from the beginning.

We have other large segments — things like faith, for example, and fitness — but real estate is the largest one. I think it’s because a lot of Delozier: Say you’re an agent, you have 10 or 15 minutes between showings, and you’re by no means any sort of editing expert. What’s the creation process like with Captions?

Misra: The whole premise of our application is, we don’t want you to edit the video. We don’t want you to spend the time pressing buttons on a small screen with your thumbs and trying to figure it out. Almost all editing software apps that are out there focus on giving you a lot of control — a lot of buttons and a lot of stuff to learn. For real estate agents, this is a means to an end. They’re not trying to become an editing expert. They want to market. They want to get in front of people.

More recently, we were thinking, how do we make this even more accessible to everybody, where you’re really on the go and you don’t have the time to download apps and stuff like that? How can you do it then?

We came up with this idea of a texting-based version of the application, where we have a number and you can just text the number a bunch of pictures and the prompt, and it will respond back with the video put together for you. It responds just like a person who will make jokes and say normal things. So you can talk to it.

One thing that’s really taking off right now are more generative effects. Say you’re selling a