How Mäklarhuset Replaced Photoshop and Lightroom for Listing Photos

The Problem: A Photo Editor's Workflow Inside an Agent's Job

Samuel Hermansson is an agent at Mäklarhuset Norra Bohuslän, on Sweden's west coast in Strömstad — part of one of the country's established real estate chains.

Before Pedra, his listing workflow looked like a photographer's, not an agent's:

• Photoshop for anything that needed removing or fixing
• Lightroom for the colour and exposure pass
• Static images for social media, because producing anything else took too long

"Using Photoshop, Lightroom and static pictures for social media." — Samuel Hermansson, Agent, Mäklarhuset

That stack works. The problem is what it costs. Every listing meant opening a desktop editor, masking objects by hand, cloning and healing until a room looked clean, then exporting and starting again on the next photo.

For a professional retoucher that's the job. For an agent, it's hours a week spent not selling — and a queue that gets longer every time a new listing comes in.

And because video and virtual tours meant yet more tools to learn, they mostly didn't happen. Social media stayed static.

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The Solution: One Platform Instead of a Toolchain

Samuel moved the whole visual side of his listings into Pedra. Today he uses it for four jobs that used to be four separate problems:

✔ Photo editing and decluttering

The core of it. Instead of masking and cloning in Photoshop, he marks what he wants gone and it's gone — furniture, clutter, the owner's belongings.

✔ Virtual styling

Empty or sparse rooms get furnished with AI virtual staging, so buyers see a room they can live in rather than a blank space.

✔ Virtual tours

360º tours as part of the same listing, not a separate service to book and wait for.

✔ Video creation

Listing videos built from the photos he already has — which is what finally moved his social media off static images.

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The Result: 1–2 Hours Back Per Listing

Samuel's headline number is simple and it's the one that matters to a working agent:

"I would say I save 1–2 hours of editing in Photoshop using Pedra." — Samuel Hermansson, Agent, Mäklarhuset

Multiply 1–2 hours across a normal listing load and it stops being a convenience and starts being capacity — more listings handled without adding hours or hiring an editor.

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The Feature That Won Him Over

Asked what surprised him, Samuel didn't pick the flashiest tool. He picked the one that removed the worst part of his old week:

"The AI photo editing. Clearing rooms from furniture or clutter is the best." — Samuel Hermansson, Agent, Mäklarhuset

There's a reason decluttering is the feature agents name most often. It's the edit with the highest impact on a listing photo and the highest cost in manual work. A cluttered room reads as small and neglected no matter how good the property is. Clearing it by hand in Photoshop is slow, fiddly, and easy to do badly — a bad clone-stamp job is more damaging than the clutter was.

Doing it in seconds, reliably, changes which photos are worth fixing. When cleaning a room costs an hour, you fix the two worst photos. When it costs seconds, you fix all of them.

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Every Listing Gets a 360º Tour

The photo editing is where the hours come back. But the change that shows up on every single listing is the virtual tour:

"I've been using your 360º tours for all of our listings, and overall they work very well." — Samuel Hermansson, Agent, Mäklarhuset

All of them — not the premium listings, not the ones with budget. When a tour is a checkbox inside the tool you're already using rather than a separate service you book and wait for, it stops being a decision per property and becomes the default.

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The Part That Doesn't Usually Make a Case Study

Samuel isn't a passive user. He sends detailed, specific product feedback — and a lot of what he asked for is now in Pedra.

In June he sent two suggestions about the tours:

1. Labels on the navigation hotspots. Tours were hard to navigate on mobile because you couldn't tell where a hotspot led before tapping it.
2. Custom photo ordering without renaming files. He was naming files 001 Bedroom, 002 Living Room to force an order — and, in his words, that "doesn't look very professional."

Both shipped the next day.

"Awesome! You work really fast." — Samuel Hermansson, Agent, Mäklarhuset

Earlier, he asked for a location animation in videos — a scene showing where the property actually is. That shipped too, and it's now an option on any video.

And he's still asking. His latest request is landmark markers inside the tours — sea, restaurants, golf clubs, bus stops — with custom colours and text labels. That one is on the virtual tours roadmap, not built yet.

We're including this because it's the honest version of how Pedra gets better: agents like Samuel tell us what's missing, and we build it. The features he asked for are now used by everyone.

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What He'd Tell Another Agent

"An easy-to-use all-in-one platform for real estate video, photo and content creation." — Samuel Hermansson, Agent, Mäklarhuset

The word doing the work there is all-in-one. Samuel's gain wasn't only that each individual edit got faster. It's that four jobs that used to live in four places — retouching, staging, tours, video — now live in one, with no exporting, re-importing, or learning a new interface between them.

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Key Takeaways for Real Estate Agents

1. Your editing stack may be costing more than you think

Photoshop and Lightroom are excellent tools built for full-time retouchers. If you're an agent, you're paying for that power in hours.

2. Decluttering is the highest-leverage edit

It's the change buyers notice most and the one that takes longest by hand. Automating it first gives you the biggest return.

3. Static social media is usually a tooling problem, not a strategy one

Agents don't post static images because they think it works better. They post them because video was too much work. Remove the work and the content changes.

4. Consolidation compounds

Saving time on one edit is nice. Removing the switching cost between four tools is what turns hours saved into listings handled.

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Ready to Get Those Hours Back?

If you're still clearing rooms by hand in Photoshop, Pedra does it in seconds — along with virtual tours, listing videos, and photo enhancement, all in one place.

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About Mäklarhuset

Mäklarhuset is one of Sweden's established real estate chains. The Norra Bohuslän office covers Strömstad and the surrounding coast in the country's north-west.

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About Pedra

Pedra helps real estate professionals generate virtual staging, photo enhancements, object removal, 360º virtual tours, floor plans, and listing videos in seconds.

Over 2,000 real estate professionals worldwide use Pedra to produce every visual a listing needs — without a desktop editor.