As a follow-up to my recent "The Future of Real Estate Video?" post, I have another amazing piece of technology prototype eye-candy that is sure to have a future in real estate videos.

It's called VideoTrace, and it's a research project out of Australia.

Given a video of the inside and outside of a property, one could construct a complete interactive 3D model of the property and make the virtual tour of the future an actual 3D environment that you can walk through like a video game. This also has implications for staging. You will be able to completely stage a house digitally at a fraction of the cost of the real thing.

Enjoy!

We've been recommending that people use one of two panorama stitchers for some time now, PTGui and AutoPano Pro. 

AutoPano Pro works great if you shoot with a very wide-angle or fisheye lens, but if you're shooting with a 10-shot or 12-shot rotator head, sometimes AutoPano (or for that matter, most stitchers) have trouble stitching some images. This is really common if you're shooting a scene with large sections of solid-color wall or have the camera too close to the wall. With AutoPano when this happens, it can be really tough to fix these issues. We set out to find a solution and did publish a screencast on adding manual control points with AutoPano Pro.

In related news, PTGui has launched version 8.0, with many great improvements, including bug fixes, increased speed, and a much easier-to-use control point editor. I had pretty much given up on PTGui for stitching problem panoramas, especially after I had figured out the workflow in the above screencast with AutoPano. However, I just tried re-stitching a problem pano in PTGui 8 and the new control points editor made it MUCH easier. Also, a lot of annoying bugs have been fixed. So I will be giving the new PTGui another fresh look and consider recommending it again to customers.

While I have been previously critical of broad use of real estate video, I saw something today that totally amazed me, and if it becomes integrated with video software, might change my mind about real estate video.

What I saw was an amazing new piece of software. It's a research project at this point, but I assure you it'll be the coolest thing you see today.

Check out the demo below:

(or click here if the embedded video doesn't work)

This technology is likely a year or more away from a practical application, but we can only hope that it lives up to its hype.

Enjoy!

Alan

Just wanted to share this great article & review I found on Autopano Pro, which is a promising stitching tool. 

Autopano Pro runs on Mac, PC, and Linux and has some pretty neat features:

• Automatically detect one or more panorama scenes from a folder full of images.
• Ability to stitch any overlapping images, not just ones done perfectly from a tripod.
• Great leveling and perspective correction features.
• Some HDR / bracketing support.

I ran across an article filled with great stats on how pictures affect the sale of a listing.

Quick Summary:

• Listings with more pictures generate more leads
• More pictures = quicker sale (1 photo = 70 DOM, 20 photos = 32 DOM)
  
• More pictures = higher list-to-sale price (1 photo = 91.2%, 6+ photos = 95%)

For the full article, see The Successful Combination of Photography and Real Estate.

The statistics didn't even attempt to deal with photographic quality, but I would think that the numbers would be even better if they tried to take photo quality into account. 

Enjoy!
Alan

I came across an amazing presentation put together by the California Association of Realtors called Realtor 2.0: The Next Big Thing.

The report, published in October 2007, details the changing nature of today's real estate customer -- more connected and more self-sufficient. Understanding the findings in this report will help you attract more customers that require less effort and learn about the changing dynamics of the real estate market.

Highlights:

• 72% of all real estate customers are now "Internet Customers"
• Internet Buyers look on their own for a while, then use an agent. They look at half as many homes with an agent as a traditional buyer (9 vs 20)
  
• In 2007, 49% of agents got at least half of their business from the internet. In 2003, that number was just 5%.

Ok, this question is going out to agents, home buyers, and home sellers...

When you open a virtual tour and the cheezy music starts playing, do you:

• Think it adds "panache" to the listing and makes you feel better about it
  
  OR
  
  
• Immediately reach for the mute button

We got a lot of requests to add background music capabilities to our TourBuzz virtual tour platform, and I resisted for a long time. But so many people asked for it I finally gave in and added the feature -- click here for a demo tour.

But I still want to get feedback from the community:

Agents - do you always use music on your listings? Do the sellers like it? Do buyers?

Buyers - you look at dozens of tours a day, does the music drive you crazy or make you love the house?

Thanks!

Just a quick blog post to share some notable real estate photography resources I've come across recently.

Blogs, tips, and tricks:

• Photography for Real Estate Blog - Great blog about RE photography and tools, and an awesome Flickr pool & group to get constructive criticism on your technique
• HDR Blog & Galleries - Great examples of "natural" HDR results, and a blog and book to explain how to do it yourself.
• Panotools Wiki and Mailing List - A well-maintained wiki on all things panorama related (hardware, software, etc) and a fantastic mailing list community. Lots of great people as well as representatives from many companies can help answer your questions quickly.

 Notable new software:

• Autopano 1.4.2 - Now includes built-in HDR support and automatic panorama detection. Mac & PC.
• PTGui Pro 7.8 - The latest release includes built-in Enfuse support in addition to HDR support. Talk about an automated virtualtour workflow! Mac & PC.
• Photomatix 3.0 - The latest release also has added Enfuse support to existing HDR capabilities. Mac only.
  
• Bracketeer - A great tool for doing Enfuse exposure fusion technique. Mac only.

Enfuse is really an amazing technique for maximizing image quality without the need for timely and expensive lighting. 

In this episode of Simplify your online marketing strategy, I'll talk about how to convert a web site visitor into a lead.

From the moment a new visitor arrives on your web site, he will be evaluating whether or not to stay on that web site. And of course, as soon as he decides to leave, you've wasted all the money it took to get him there and squandered a chance to get a lead.

Before we discuss specific tactics, I want to cover a few statistics that you can use to see how well you're doing. 

• Time on site - The amount of time a visitor stays on your site is a great indicator of how useful an average visitor finds your site.
  
  
  The statistics from the site above are very good. The average visitor stays for 7 minutes, and only 37% of people leave in less than 30 seconds. If more than 50% of your visitors leave in under 30 seconds, something about your site makes them want to leave very quickly.
  
  
• Percent visitors that become leads - This metric is another good "total" figure of web site quality. The higher the better! If you get 1000 visitors and get 50 leads, that's a 5% conversion rate, and is pretty good. Under 1% is bad; 2-4% is good, 4-8% is really good, and if you can do 8%+ that's quite impressive. You can use your own site statistics or a tool like Google Analytics to accurately calculate this information.

Now, here are a few tips on keeping visitors on your site long enough to become leads!

1. BE RELEVANT -  This doesn't mean include ANYTHING that someone might consider useful; it means matching the content you have on your site to the visitors that you try to attract. Pretend that you are a potential customer that's seen one of your ads leading to your web site; go to your site and think, "does this site look like it'd be useful to someone that responded to my ad?" Being relevant is as much about what you don't have as what you do.
   
2. DO NOT REQUIRE REGISTRATION - People assume information on the internet is free. The earlier you "require" information, the quicker you'll drive away customers. You might get lots of leads but they will not be high-quality leads. If your site lets people access all of the information easily, they stay a while and come back often. Statistics show that 90% of customers use the first agent they contact, so you want to "be there" when they are finally ready to contact someone. And for goodness sakes follow up on leads immediately.
3. PROPERTY SEARCH GENERATES LEADS - As an agent, you have the right to put IDX property search on your web site. Do it! Make sure that the site is easy to use, allows people to register to save a property search and get notified of new properties. This is an ideal way to generate a quality lead, and provides automatic "fresh" content to keep people coming back.
   
4. HAVE FRESH CONTENT - People will only come back so often to look at the same thing. Make sure your site has fresh content in the form of blog posts, market info, featured deals, listings, rates, or other timely info to keep people happy with repeat visits.
5. SIMPLIFY NAVIGATION -Cluttered sites confuse visitors and make them search for other sources of info. Life is confusing enough, keep it simple for your users!
6. DIFFERENTIATE YOURSELF - Most people see agents as all the same. This goes along with #1; make sure that people see why your services are most relevant for their real estate needs, whether your skills, experience, or personality.

Real estate agents face a dizzying array of choices when it comes to online marketing strategy. Vendors confusing things even more by trying to differentiate their offerings, which makes it hard to compare the alternatives.

Follow these tips to un-tangle the mess and simplify your online marketing strategy!

Purpose of Online Marketing 

At its simplest, all online marketing attempts to achieve the following goals:

1. Get visitors
2. Convert visitors to leads
   
3. Close

All online marketing boils down to only a few categories:

• Buy visitors one at a time
  
  Examples: Banner Ads, Search Engine Ads, etc. Payment models vary (PPC, CPM), but effectively you are paying for each visitor.
  
  
• Spend time/money up front, get free traffic over a long period of time.
  
  Examples: SEO, PR, Craigslist posts, Word of Mouth all create inbound links that once established last a very long time and deliver free traffic.
  
  
• Drip Email / Blog Subscribers
  
  Convert one-time visitors to repeat visitors by luring them back with content.

So next time you're evaluating a marketing idea, just remember, it fits into one of these categories. Once you get it into one of these categories, it's much easier to understand, and much easier to compare.

I'll talk more about converting visitors to leads and measuring online marketing efforts in upcoming posts. Subscribe to my blog to make sure you don't miss out!