We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jeff Smith a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jeff, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – walk us through the story?

I grew up in a far-from-perfect home.

At one point, things got so bad my mom left my dad. But eventually, she came back. She didn’t have a college degree or a work history, and in her mind, the best way she could take care of me and my two brothers was to go back — even though going back meant returning to a situation that was painful and unhealthy.

That choice shaped me. I was seven years old, and I didn’t have the words for it at the time, but something settled deep in me that day. A sense of helplessness. A question about worth. And a quiet vow that I would find a way to help people like her — people stuck in impossible choices because they didn’t have other options.

Fast forward nearly 35 years.

I had made my way into the real estate world — first on the lending side, and then later into real estate media and listing marketing. I noticed something. The real estate industry, especially on the agent side, employs a lot of single moms. It’s one of the few career paths where you don’t need a degree or even a resume. Just a car, a phone, and the will to work.

Quietly, I started helping the ones I came across who reminded me of my mom. I’d sponsor their open houses. I’d waive media fees until their listing sold. I didn’t talk about it — I just did it. I saw them. And I knew what they were fighting for.

Outside of work, I also volunteered with kids impacted by domestic violence. I led groups for men recovering from addiction, PTSD, or past trauma — especially those dealing with violent behavior. That work was hard, sometimes uncomfortable, but meaningful. I connected most deeply with the men who were struggling with violence, because I knew firsthand what that looked like in a home.

Still, even with all that volunteering, I never really thought of it as part of my business story. It was just what I did.

The Day It All Clicked
In the Spring of 2025, I was accepted into the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program. I didn’t expect it to be emotional — but it was.

During one of the sessions, we were challenged to define our “why” — our purpose, our social impact. And when I started to put it into words… I broke down. Right there in class. In front of 24 other business owners and the Goldman Sachs team, I shared my story — about my mom, about that seven-year-old version of me, about the people I’d quietly tried to help over the years. I couldn’t stop crying. It hit me that this wasn’t just a company I was building. It was a calling.

Shortly after graduation, I was invited to a roundtable with several state dignitaries and two Goldman Sachs partners — Asahi Pompey and John F. W. Rogers. I was asked the very first question of the session:
“What had the most impact on you from the Goldman Sachs program?”

I took a breath and said, “The program had incredible impact on me. I’ll try not to choke up when I tell it.”

And I told them everything.

I shared that I had come into the program thinking like a founder — and left thinking like someone on a mission. That moment in class clarified something I didn’t even realize I’d been building toward all along.

What I’m Really Building
I told them:
“When I started Home Tours Pro, I committed to three things.”

First: I said, “I’m going to build a business in real estate — because this is a space where single moms can actually earn a living and provide for their families.”

Second: “I’m going to build a deskilling technology that allows people with no formal training or background to do high-quality work.” Like GPS deskilled driving and made ride-share jobs possible, I want our platform to open the door for a whole new category of gig workers — people who need work and are willing to work, but just need access and a little support.

Third: “I’m going to address the domestic violence crisis — both by helping families directly and by working with the men who are struggling, because that’s where healing starts. And I’ll do it not just as a volunteer, but through a business that funds real solutions.”

Because the way I see it, you’ve got two paths:
You can start a nonprofit and go around asking for money.
Or… you can build a business. Grow it. And be the funding.

I’m doing the second. This is personal. I’m committed. I will accomplish this — or die trying.

The Heart Beneath the Tech
On the surface, Home Tours Pro is a real estate media company powered by AI and AR — and yeah, we’re proud of the tech. We’ve built tools that make property photography faster, more consistent, and accessible for just about anyone with a phone.

But underneath all that? It’s a job engine. A lifeline. A platform that opens doors for people who’ve had too many doors slammed in their faces.

At the end of the day, I’m not trying to change the world with code. I’m just trying to love my neighbor — using the best tools I have.

That’s what drives me.
That’s what drives Home Tours Pro.
And that’s our why.

Jeff, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is Jeff Smith, and I’m the founder of Home Tours Pro, a real estate media company built to solve some of the most frustrating — and costly — problems in the industry.

Before launching this business, I spent years working on both sides of the real estate transaction. I worked in lending, where I saw the pressure buyers and agents face to move quickly. Then I shifted to real estate marketing, where I worked closely with agents and builders trying to get their listings online — only to be slowed down by inconsistent service, delays, or media that didn’t meet their standards.

I kept seeing the same pain points repeat themselves:

Waiting days for photos or videos to be edited.

Struggling to find reliable photographers in every market.

Inconsistent quality and branding from region to region.

Sales cycles held up because media wasn’t ready.

Tight budgets that made it hard to scale or experiment with new content.

I saw people doing their best, but the system was too slow, too fragmented, and too dependent on individuals instead of scalable processes.

So I built Home Tours Pro to fix that.

What We Offer — and Why It Matters
At its core, Home Tours Pro is a media tech platform designed for builders, brokerages, and agents who need fast, high-quality listing media — and need it to work at scale.

Here’s how we solve the most common pain points:

Speed: Our AI-guided capture tools make it possible to go from shoot to delivery in minutes, not days.

Consistency: Every photo, video, and virtual tour aligns with your brand, regardless of who captures it or where.

Simplicity: Our technology guides users step-by-step, eliminating the need to source, manage, and wait on photographers.

Scalability: Whether you’re a national builder with hundreds of communities or an agent juggling multiple listings, our system grows with you.

Affordability: By removing inefficiencies and automating workflows, we deliver professional results at a fraction of the cost of traditional media services.

We’ve essentially taken the guesswork and friction out of real estate media — and replaced it with a system that works every time.

What Sets Us Apart
There are a lot of media vendors out there, but Home Tours Pro isn’t a vendor — it’s a solution.

We don’t just “take pictures.” We solve for speed, standardization, and scale. We replace broken workflows with automation. We integrate into your existing systems. And we keep your brand front and center — across every property, every region, and every listing.

If you’re a builder or brokerage, you’ve likely dealt with the stress of rolling out a new community without a consistent media process. If you’re an agent, you’ve likely lost precious time waiting on someone else to finish their edits. Our platform puts control back in your hands.

And because our system is intuitive and AI-guided, you don’t need to train a team of creatives or hire outside vendors to get high-quality results.

Why I Care So Much
While I do have a personal story that fuels my passion — and I’ll never lose sight of that — my day-to-day focus is on our customers.

We exist to make your life easier. To help you get listings up faster. To ensure your sales and marketing teams never have to chase down assets again. To eliminate the chaos so you can focus on results.

I’m most proud when I hear things like:

“We used to wait three days for photos. Now it’s 30 minutes.”
“Your system made it possible to standardize across 12 regions.”
“Our agents love that they can finally control the process.”

That’s the impact we’re here to make. And we’re just getting started.

What I Want You to Know
If you’re a potential client — a builder, brokerage, or growing real estate team — here’s what I want you to know:

We built this for you.

We understand your pain points — because we lived them.

We are relentlessly focused on solving the process problems that slow your growth and waste your time.

We’re not here to add another vendor to your list. We’re here to remove the bottlenecks from your business and help you scale without sacrificing speed or quality.

Home Tours Pro is not just a better way to collect media.
It’s a better way to run your business.

How’d you meet your business partner?

I met Mark Davis during my time at a previous real estate media company. I was running business development, and over the course of 18 months, I helped grow that business by 9x. We were scaling quickly, and one of the biggest bottlenecks we faced was in video — quality, consistency, and turnaround times were all over the place.

We brought in Mark as a contractor to help stabilize that side of the business.

At the time, Mark was working full-time at Nissan as an engineer, but he was moonlighting as a professional videographer on nights and weekends. And not just your typical side hustle — he was incredibly talented. One of his personal films had been juried at the Cannes Film Festival. That’s no small feat, and it told me a lot about his eye, his discipline, and his creativity.

We clicked immediately — me coming from a business systems and growth background, Mark from a technical and artistic discipline. We had different strengths, but a shared standard for excellence and a shared frustration with inefficiency.

The Netflix Deal That Almost Was
Mark’s video career was really starting to take off. He landed a documentary deal with NETFLIX to film the story of Demario Davis, linebacker for the New Orleans Saints. It was a huge opportunity, and Mark made the leap. He quit his job at Nissan, invested in a ton of pro-level gear, and started gearing up for the shoot.

And then… COVID hit.

Almost overnight, the entire industry froze. NETFLIX shut down production across the board. The documentary was shelved indefinitely. And Mark, like a lot of creative professionals during that time, found himself in a really tough spot — fully committed, fully invested, and suddenly without income.

That’s when he and I started our first business together.

We saw an opportunity to lean on our combined experience — my background in real estate and business development, his in film and process engineering — to help real estate teams solve their media problems faster, better, and more affordably. We started small, took on projects ourselves, and just focused on delivering excellent results and cleaning up broken workflows.

That business laid the groundwork for what would become our next venture — Home Tours Pro.

The Start of Something Bigger
Mark brought a creative vision and technical depth that perfectly complemented my systems-first, customer-focused approach. Together, we didn’t just want to make media — we wanted to make media better. Faster. Scalable. Repeatable. Accessible to more people, without sacrificing quality.

What started as a pandemic pivot — just two guys trying to keep things moving — eventually evolved into a real solution to a growing industry-wide problem.

And that solution became Home Tours Pro.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

We started Home Tours Pro as a lifestyle business.

I had already grown a previous company in this space by 9x, so I knew the market, the rhythm, and the pain points of the real estate media industry. I understood what customers wanted — and what was consistently letting them down.

My co-founder, Mark, is a Six Sigma Master Black Belt — a process guy to the core. Where I saw creative problems, he saw inefficiencies. Together, we set out to tighten operations and build something lean, clean, and scalable.

At first, we thought the key to growth was just tightening up the systems — which we did. But pretty quickly, we ran into a deeper problem: everything bottlenecked around the employee/operator side of the business.

The status quo in real estate media required highly skilled creatives — people with a sharp eye, technical camera knowledge, editing chops, and a strong sense of aesthetics. That talent pool was both limited and expensive. If you could find someone good, great — but training them took months. Scaling beyond a handful of markets? Nearly impossible.

So we did what most operators do — we tried to document better, train better, and standardize better. But it was while building training tools — trying to make the work teachable — that something unexpected happened.

We started seeing ways to move the knowledge and talent out of the operator… and into the equipment.

From Teaching to Deskilling
It was a breakthrough moment.

Instead of training people to become creative professionals, we started building tools that could act like creative professionals — guiding users with AI and AR in real time.

What had once required artistic talent and technical skill could now be done by someone with no background — just a phone, a tripod, and a willingness to follow simple instructions.

We had effectively deskilled the process, without compromising quality. It reminded us of how GPS deskilled driving — which later unlocked an entire ride-share economy. Lyft and Uber didn’t succeed because they built better drivers; they succeeded because they removed the need for professional drivers altogether.

We were doing the same thing, but for real estate media.

From Days to Minutes
Using our system, what used to take days — photo and video capture, uploading, editing, branding, delivery — now takes minutes. But it wasn’t just about speed. We also gained consistency, quality control, and scalability.

This wasn’t just a better training program.

It was a whole new platform.

Slowly but Surely, We Bootstrapped Forward
We didn’t jump to raise capital. We didn’t run out and hire a big dev team. We started with what we knew: the customer pain points, the process mechanics, and the standards required to scale.

We built the system manually first, then slowly moved toward automation. Every step was tested in the field, used in live jobs, and tweaked based on real feedback. We built this from the inside out, not from a whiteboard down.

Then, in March of 2024, everything shifted.

Our head of development moved to Nashville to join us full time. After seeing what we had built — working prototypes, process infrastructure, and early client traction — he said:

“Guys… this is incredible. I’ve built and exited companies before, and you need to plug into an incubator or accelerator. You need funding. You’re sitting on a scalable tech platform.”

So we did.

From Back Office to the Big Stage
That spring and summer, we entered our first business plan competitions — and we started winning.

We were accepted into the CoBuilders Accelerator (sponsored by Microsoft), and from there, momentum built quickly. We joined Idea Village in New Orleans, then 3CVS, Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses, and gener8tor’s gBETA program.

Through these programs, we earned pre-seed funding, hired our first dev team, and built out our backend infrastructure and MVP.

We started testing in multiple markets, learning what worked, where it broke, and how to make it better. Every week brought progress — and proof that we weren’t just solving a problem… we were building a platform with national potential.

And That Brings Us to Today
What began as a simple, owner-operator business has evolved — almost unintentionally — into a full-fledged tech startup.

We still operate with the same mindset: listen to customers, solve real problems, and don’t overcomplicate things. But now, we have the tools, the team, and the traction to bring this to a much bigger stage.

We’re not building for the sake of technology. We’re building for builders, for agents, and for anyone who’s tired of wasting time and losing listings because their media process is too slow, too expensive, or too unpredictable.

We started as a lifestyle company.
Now, we’re building something that can change the way real estate media works — everywhere.

And we’re just getting started.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.hometourspro.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hometours_pro
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hometourspro/

Image Credits

Those are our images.