VHT Studios CEO Brian Balduf, one of two founders of the firm, said that he and the company’s 65 headquarters employees will remain based in Rosemont but work for the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based buyer, Matterport.

“Everybody is moving over to Matterport,” Balduf said. “No jobs lost.”

VHT Studios also has about 100 photographers in the Chicago area, as well as corps of photographers in other parts of the country.

In the sale, terms of which were not disclosed, Balduf will become vice president of service for Matterport.

Matterport is a technology firm that specializes in what it calls “digital twins,” or virtual replicas of objects in the built world. In the residential real estate realm, Matterport is known for its 3D tours of properties that are included in a listing along with listing photos.

The two businesses “are complementary,” Balduf said. Together, VHT Studios’ still images, video and drone footage of properties and Matterport’s virtual recreations are “a great combination for the marketing of properties,” Balduf said.

RJ Pittman, CEO of Matterport, said in prepared comments in a press release announcing the purchase that “it was a natural fit to unite our efforts to reimagine the fragmented process that was in place for brokers and agents to list properties and prospective buyers to view them.”

That is essentially the idea that in the late 1990s prompted Balduf, who was in marketing with AT&T and Ameritech, and real estate developer Brannon Lambert to launch a company that was then called Video Home Tours.

In the pre-internet 1990s, Balduf said, real estate listings generally included a single photo, a black-and-white of the home’s exterior. “You had to drive around to each house and find out this one has dark wood,” and the next one had some other unattractive attributes, he said.

The firm began making video tours of properties so that buyers could take a first look before wasting time visiting houses they wouldn’t like. The tours were offered on compact discs or could be viewed online at one of two video platforms. “It was one small window and it was blurry and jerky, but it was a video walkthrough of the house,” Balduf recalls.

One of the first real estate executives to grasp the concept was Steve Baird, president and CEO of Chicago-based brokerage Baird & Warner. In the 1990s, his firm was producing a Sunday morning television show that featured some listings, Baird said today, but when he learned what VHT was going to do, “we shifted our resources there. We knew real estate listing photos were going to be come a thing, but we didn’t know how.”

With VHT, Baird said, the brokerage was able to get good-quality listing photos for all of its clients’ properties, not only the 30 it could fit into a television show, “for about the same cost, or less,” he said.

VHT Studios landed some big national clients early, including New York market leaders Corcoran and Douglas Elliman, as well as a then-fledgling Chicago firm, @properties, which grew to become the volume leader in the Chicago market and, with an acquisition last year, became a global player called @properties Christie’s International Real Estate.

In 2021, VHT was the nation’s largest real estate listing photo company, and it bought the second-largest, TourFactory. At the time, Balduf told Crain’s that the acquisition grew its reach in the U.S. residential real estate market from 60% to “90%-plus.”

Balduf and Lambert sold a stake in the firm to Chicago private-equity firm Hopewell Ventures in 2007. By the time of the sale, Hopewell was the majority owner and there were about 30 other investors, Balduf said. A privately held firm, VHT Studios does not disclose revenue figures. Matterport, with about 485 employees, is a Nasdaq-listed firm with $27.1 million in revenue in fourth-quarter 2021.

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