If you’ve ever booked a real estate photographer, you know the pain points: scheduling delays, inconsistent results, and long turnaround times for media delivery. Home Tours Pro, a Mississippi-based startup founded by Jeff Smith and Mark Davis, is tackling all that head-on with an ambitious vision to automate and de-skill real estate photography and videography. Their goal? To empower non-experts—think Uber drivers or local franchisees—to capture high-quality real estate media with the help of their proprietary hardware and AI-driven software platform.
Jeff and Mark didn’t initially set out to build a tech company. They met while exploring synergies between their respective photo and video production backgrounds. As they built a manually-run media business, they realized the real opportunity lay in the tools they were developing to train and support their team. What began as a workaround for managing inexperienced photographers turned into a robust platform that could guide an untrained user to capture real estate photos and video with the quality of a seasoned pro. Their tech is smart enough to control the camera, framing, gimbal movements, and even cloud uploads—all in real-time.
Mississippi’s startup ecosystem turbocharged the team’s transformation from media producers to tech founders. In 2024, the team applied to numerous pitch competitions throughout the state, winning in Hattiesburg and placing second on the Gulf Coast. As a result, Innovate Mississippi invited them to the CoBuilders program, where they learned the basics of the startup process. CoBuilders also provided an initial $25,000 in funding to build their “minimum viable product” and helped them get another $50,000 in funding from the Mississippi Seed Fund and Microsoft for Startups. In 2025, Goldman Sachs accepted them into the prestigious 10KSB program—additional validation of the potential scale and sophistication of what they’re building.
The team’s tech stack includes custom camera kits, gimbal stabilizers, and a control app that automates shot setup, composition, and post-processing workflows. Their system dramatically reduces time spent on-site (30 minutes versus the industry average of 45-120) and enables real-time uploading and editing. That means a single operator can deliver professional-quality media within minutes, not days. And because the system doesn’t rely on human photography and videography skills, quality stays consistent—no matter who’s behind the lens.
Home Tours Pro’s go-to-market strategy is to work with select national home builders eager for scalable, affordable, high-quality media solutions. Once embedded in those regions, Home Tours Pro plans to expand outward into local real estate markets via a franchise or gig-economy model. Their vision is to fully realize a platform where anyone, anywhere, can run a real estate media business with minimal overhead and maximum consistency.
Jeff and Mark aren’t just building a better camera kit. They’re rethinking how real estate media is made—and who gets to make it. Using machine learning to turn complex creative processes into repeatable systems opens the door to entrepreneurship for people who have never touched a professional camera before. With proper funding, they believe they can scale their solution nationally—and maybe even globally. With defensible intellectual property and an increase in investor interest, they may just make that happen.
