Alan's Real Estate Technology and Marketing Blog

Another Message from the Future of Real Estate Video

Alan Pinstein (Neybor) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 17:25:53 -0500

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!

Updates: More AutoPano Pro Screencast Tutorials and a new PTGui!

Alan Pinstein (Neybor) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:58:15 -0500

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.

The future of Real Estate Video?

Alan Pinstein (Neybor) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 01:37:35 -0500

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:

Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene from pro on Vimeo.

(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

Autopano Pro Stitching Tutorial

Alan Pinstein (Neybor) — Mon, 26 May 2008 20:46:22 -0500

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.

Enjoy!

Alan

A Picture is Worth Thousands of Dollars

Alan Pinstein (Neybor) — Sun, 04 May 2008 13:13:37 -0500

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

Your Next Customer: Report on Internet Buyers vs. Traditional Buyers

Alan Pinstein (Neybor) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 18:18:58 -0500

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%.

This is a great presentation you can read in its entirety in about 15 minutes.

Virtual Tour Background Music: Cheezy or Cheez-a-licous?

Alan Pinstein (Neybor) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 17:39:46 -0500

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!

Great Photography and Virtual Tour Resources

Alan Pinstein (Neybor) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 10:13:48 -0500

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.

Convert Web Site Visitors to Leads

Alan Pinstein (Neybor) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 23:06:46 -0600

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!

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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.

Enjoy!

Simplify your online marketing strategy

Alan Pinstein (Neybor) — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 20:43:27 -0600

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:

Get visitors
Convert visitors to leads
Close

Getting Visitors

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!

What do you hate most about online marketing?

Alan Pinstein (Neybor) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 10:02:47 -0600

This first post in a series on the current state of marketing real estate online hopes to spark a discussion about what hurts so bad about online marketing. Is it the cost? Difficulty in learning the tools? Confused by new products? Overwhelmed by choice? Worried about getting scammed? Come on over and vent so we can share each other's pain.

Why do I want to talk about this?

ActiveRain agents, from what I see so far, are definitely curious and adventurous in trying out all kinds of online marketing opportunities. Since my company creates tools for online marketing specifically for real estate agents, I hope to build a good relationship with the ActiveRain community so we can learn from each other. We've been in business for over 4 years and know that there is a huge difference between the top 10% of agents and the average agent.

My experience tells me that to succeed, you need a combination of a motivated agent, a reasonable budget, and tools to get the job done. Take any one away, and it's a recipe for failure. I can't control the first two, but I can help with the latter, by making the product we build as good as possible.

I spend a lot of time researching every new company, software, web site, tip, and opinion on real estate marketing. It can get really confusing! But I try to simplify things down to what they are really doing. When it comes down to it, there are only so many different marketing techniques. And there is no "easy button" for business success. If there were, everyone would use it, and then it wouldn't be an advantage!

I plan to share useful information and opinions about marketing techniques, and statistics from real customers trying out various marketing opportunities. For instance, my first post was on virtual tours, and how to select a virtual tour platform that will deliver the best experience for viewers (and thus lead to a sale!).

At the same time, I hope to get feedback from you as well as to what you're seeing succeed and fail. We are constantly developing new features and products (including a couple of really exciting new ones I can't talk about yet). In the end, our goal is to make it easy and cost-effective to do online marketing that delivers results.

I am looking forward to your comments.

What makes a good virtual tour?

Alan Pinstein (Neybor) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:15:36 -0600

Over the last two years, I've worked with several virtual tour photographers in the Atlanta area. I was always amazed at how bad most virtual tour experiences were, and so in partnership with these photographers, I built a Virtual Tour Hosting Platform for real estate called TourBuzz.

I wanted to share with you some of my observations and thoughts about what makes a virtual tour good or bad, according to my research and thinking. I hope that you find it educational, and I am looking forward to feedback on the ideas as well.

Picture Quality

The pictures themselves are of course the most important part of any virtual tour.

Everyone knows "a picture is worth 1000 words", but I always add, "which 1000 words?". If you are marketing a $1M+ house, and your pictures are small, pixelated, and overexposed, it's not going to give a favorable impression of the property.

In today's world, there is just no excuse for not having lots of full-screen, high-quality images, even if you take your own pictures. A good professional photographer can always do a better job, as he/she will have better cameras, wide-angle lenses, experience, and software to ensure that your pictures are properly well composed and well exposed.
Fast Loading Time

The tour itself should load quickly. Remember that many people will be looking at virtual tours while browsing the MLS or other property search engines, and may be checking out dozens of properties at a time. If your virtual tour takes a while to load, the viewer might simply close the window and move on to the next property.

Related to fast loading time is to load the tour right away. I am shocked into sadness every time I load a virtual tour, only to see a relatively blank page with a "Click here to view tour" link. What? I already "clicked here" to view the tour, just show it to me already!

Fast loading time also applies to navigating between pictures. It should feel instant to the viewer, or you're not doing something right.
Don't Resize the Browser Window

Some virtual tours automatically resize your browser so that the tour "fills up" the browser window. This is done because the tour has only one size, and it's small. So they shrink your window to make it look a little better. This is a trick that violates rule #1 and also is really annoying as it resizes your browser window. This can be a nuisance to fix when you go "back" or switch to another "tab" in your browser.

The right way to deal with this is to have your tour adjust to the browser window size. Although tricky, it is possible, and the result is a seamless experience for the viewer, where the tour automatically uses as much available space as the browser has. This ensures the highest picture quality that the person's computer can handle.
Tour Navigation

I've always felt that if someone is viewing a virtual tour, they're doing so to get a good look at the property. However, most tours don't have thumbnail galleries, or have them hidden. So all you see is one image, and you have to click "next" a bunch of times to get a feel for the house. With many tours having 10, 20, or 30+ photos, this also often leads viewers confused as to how much there is to look at. It also makes it difficult for them to see the things they care about quickly, instead forcing people to look at every picture.

We spent quite a lot of time trying to create a tour layout that optimizes the ability to see lots of images quickly. Our thumbnail area is always visible, shows 2 thumbnails per row and goes all the way down the left side of the image. On most tours, you can see thumbnails of nearly all images without scrolling at all. This allows viewers to quickly view the images that they care most about.

Creating thumbnails is also a bit of an art. Simply shrinking down a photo typically results in an image that's low in contrast, and it's often difficult to tell what the picture is even of. By digitally enhancing thumbnails with higher contrast and unsharp masks, the thumbnails are much more useful.
Digital Enhancement

There are a lot of great new software techniques available to improve photographic quality.

Automatic stitching is great for producing panoramas, and enabled the 360 revolution.

There's also a new class of exposure blenders that is producing amazing results. These contrast blenders allow you to get deep blue skies on exterior photos, and preserve shadow detail and prevent burn-out on interior shots. When properly done, you can see right through the windows just like you're standing in the room.

These techniques take time, experience, and specialized (and often bleeding-edge) software. Hard core DIY photographers might be up for the challenge, but for everyone else, it's best to leave this to the professionals.
No Music, Please!

Maybe it's just me, but I can't stand it when web sites make noise without my permission. I have watched lots of people use tours, and the first thing most people do when a web page makes noise is reach for the volume knob.

Narrated animation I can live with I suppose, but not if it means I can't be in control of the tour navigation.
Panoramas

Panoramas are either your best friend or your worst enemy. Done right, a panorama can provide an amazing 360 degree view of a room. Done wrong, they load slowly, make people dizzy, and distort the image so that straight lines are curved! You'll know your panorama is a good one if it "seems like a normal picture, but just all the way around." Anything else that distracts from the tour-viewing experience and it does more harm than good.

Panoramas should also be viewed right along with photos. It is annoying to the user to have to "switch" to the 360 pictures from the regular pictures. With creative design and software, you can make the two image types work together seamlessly.
Video

I am not yet on the video bandwagon. I agree that there are pros and cons, and in some cases, if done right, they can be great. Here's the tradeoffs I see in video, and it's up to you to decide if it's worth it:

Pros:
- People like watching TV.
- Since not too many people are doing real estate video yet, it offers opportunities for generating leads since you'll be a big fish in a small pond.
Cons:
- More expensive equipment is required compared to video.
- It is more time consuming to shoot video than pictures.
- It is more time consuming to edit video than to edit picture.
- It is more time consuming to insert video clips into your online tours.
- Videos are linear... viewers can't jump to the parts they want to see. Do you really think people will sit through 20 3-minute videos of houses when browsing the MLS?
- It's hard to light a video correctly. This means that most of the time, your video will be under- or over- exposed, and you'll be showing off your video in low-quality compared to a photo.
- Quality is lower - a full-screen picture is much higher quality than a YouTube video.
So if you've got a $5M house and HGTV shoots the video, obviously this will be great. Or if you have a $1000+ budget to shoot the video. Other than that, I see video as a "fad" right now that won't ever gain widespread adoption. Even advances in technology can't fix many of the problems associated with a video tour. I think even if done perfect, it's not a replacement for pictures. But used to augment pictures, it has its place.

Well, I think that's going to do it for my first blog post on ActiveRain. I hope that you found it useful and am looking forward to your comments!

In the meantime, check out a sample tour from our platform that attempts to take heed of the advice mentioned in the post.

Click here for a sample tour.