Two people in Johannesburg staging listing photos

I studied electrical and information engineering at Wits and I am there now doing my MSc in electrical engineering. I have always liked building things, and I like the kind of problem where the same annoyance keeps happening to everyone and nobody has sat down to fix it properly.

ProperPics started in a conversation. Someone mentioned what agents were being charged to have listing photos staged, and I went and checked the numbers. They were high enough that most agents simply went without, which meant the listings that needed the most help were the ones that never got any. The technology to do it properly had just become cheap enough to change that, so I built the pipeline that does it: staging, photo enhancement, a written description, and a check on every finished image to confirm that nothing structural in the photograph has been altered.

Riané runs Prins Design Studios and works with estate agents every day, which is how ProperPics found its first user. She shapes how the finished photos look, and she is the reason the outputs match what an agent actually wants to post rather than what an engineer thinks looks impressive.

She is also the person who answers when you WhatsApp us.