In today's web-centric world, real estate photos are more important than ever. Many home buyers will "shop" homes online for weeks or even months before actually calling their agent to set up showings of their favorites. If your home isn't presented well online, the number of in-person visits can suffer.
While there are many different levels of photography equipment, lighting, and software editing techniques available, the broad emphasis is to use at least one of the newer technologies to enhance your photos. Interior photos just don't show up well on an old digital camera. The user can only get a small portion of the room into a shot, and the colors look less than real-life.
By using a wide-angle lens, you can really start to show the online buyer what a room actually looks and feels like in person. Your eye is basically a wide angle lens itself, so recreating the in-person view of the home is the goal.
Case in point, this interior kitchen photo:
It's taken with a simple digital camera. This is a large kitchen with lots of counter space, but you can't tell because the flat lens only allows for a small portion of the room to be photographed. What's more, the lighting reflects off some surfaces and the dark-colored cherry cabinets almost disappear.
Stepping up to a middle-of-the-road wide-angle lens, you can begin to see more of the kitchen. The sink and counter space come into view, more windows are seen, and the lighting make the colors more vivid. The lighting has been edited slightly in this photo to remove the yellowing effect of the ceiling lights.
On to the big guns:
This photo was taken with high-end, wide-angle photography equipment. You can see almost the entire kitchen, with a new section of cabinetry and counter space, as well as the ceiling with box beams and lighting. This is what the kitchen truly looks like when a visitor walks into the room.
The folks at HD Estates create these beautiful photos by taking the same shot multiple times at different levels of light, laying them on top of each other, and then running some digital filters to clean up the lighting. This allows the clean dark wood color to come out as well as the natural light and light-colored box beams and counters.
Even exterior photos can really benefit from some high quality photo equipment:
vs.
It's not a necessity to have professional photography done in a real estate listing. Many homes sell without it. However, there's a clear trend in the market towards more online browsing and less in-person visits before a purchase. Professional photography can definitely give a home an edge, or at least entice a buyer in for more evaluation. Sam DeBord is a licensed real estate broker with SeattleHome.com, a division of Washington State Realty, LLC. He is a member of the Seattle-King County Association of Realtors and a Green-Certified Pro.
The Northwest Alabama cities of Florence and Muscle Shoals made a good list put together by Yahoo Finance recently. It's a list of ten housing markets with appreciating prices. This is something that you sort of know if you're local to the area, but it's still nice to see it verified.
Of course this doesn't mean values are skyrocketing, but they weren't going up that fast before the bust either. All in all it's good news for the Tennessee Valley.
8 Ways To Use Photos To Promote Your Business - and best of all, most of them are FREE or LOW COST!
I didn't start out as a photographer, and I still wouldn't consider my photos "professional quality" although I see marked improvement each day. Since I've been in real estate, and especially since I started blogging, I have found that I really enjoy taking pictures of my community, events, and of course, of our listings. And, over the past two years, I have accumulated quite a collection of local photos on my computer which have been extremely useful for our marketing.
I take my camera everywhere I go and even have a small digital camera that I carry in my purse so I'm always ready when the "right shot" presents itself. Our whole family enjoys photography so it's become a great family activity.
Here's some of the ways we use photos in promoting our business:
1.) Help Sell Your Listings - The most obvious of course, is to help sell our listings. Most buyers are starting their search on the Internet and they want to see photos and virtual tours of your listings - the more the better. They say a good photo is worth a thousand words, and that is definitely the case in real estate. One thing that made a big difference for us was investing in a wide-angle lens which helps photograph small spaces.
2.) Improve Your Blog Posts - Blog posts are more interesting to readers when they have appropriate photos. Developing your own collection of photos will help improve your blog and can save you money if you don't have to buy stock photos or clip art.
I subscribe to Gerry Khatchikian from Red Lodge, MT on ActiveRain, he is able to use his photography skills to create a lot of interest in his area and his blog! He even has some photo quizzes that are fun. Check out Gerry's blog for some great examples of using photos for blogging.
3.) Get Into Video - You can create a local video with your digital still photos in a matter of minutes. We like Real Estate Shows but there are other great sites out there that will help turn your photos into a short video. We also use a Flip video camera for some videos but still like to use digital stills. Once you create a local video, Real Estate Shows will upload it directly to your You Tube account, or you can save the video to your computer and create CD's or upload to other websites or blog posts.
4.) Create a Photo Blog of your local area and post a new photo on a regular interval. We started the photo blog I Love Missoulaa few months ago and have seen a huge increase in traffic to the site, which also links to our real estate site. If you tag your photos and use key-word rich titles, it will help optimize your search engine results.
We allow people in the community to submit their photos to us by email for possible use on the website. We are starting to get community photos and always give the sender credit, thanking them on the site.
5.) Post to Facebook - it's easy to create a photo album on your Facebook profile, so how about creating one of your local area? We have a photo album on Missoula, Missoula Nightlife, and Montana Living.
Another creative way to use your photos on Facebook is to create a Fan Page for your local area. You can post local photos and videos to your Fan Page OR submit a link to a great photo on your photo blog or regular blog. Fan Pages are easy to set up, and the best part - they're FREE!
Here's one of our Facebook Fan Pages - we have over 4500 fans in a short amount of time:
6.) Set up a Flickr Account - Flickr does an amazing job with search engines, and is a great way to showcase your photos. One important note however is to make sure you understand Flickr's Terms of Service - before you create an account - or you may end up disappointed. Flickr does not like the use of its site for commercial purposes. Make sure to read Matt's post, and understand what is and is not allowed on Flickr:
On Flickr, you are able to Geo Tag your photos so they will be even more likely to show up on Google when someone searches for that area or location. Groups are also helpful to join for networking and to gain exposure for your photos.
We have contacted local photographers on Flickr and asked for their permission to include one of their photos on our Photo Blog with a link back to them and have had success. Many times, people are flatttered by the request and it also helps to build community for your photo blog.
7.) Upload Photos of Local Businesses & Food to rating sites such as Yelp.com. We use this as an opportunity to try new restaurants and just take a few quick snapshots on our visit. You can rate your experience at the restaurant or business and upload your photos to help people in the community get a feel for the location.
The photos can also make a great blog post down the road - I love photos that I can multi-purpose! We've turned this into a bit of a game and use it as an excuse to order a great dessert occasionally or a special drink.
8.) Twitpic your photos or post them to Posterous - People love to look at photos and I'm still amazed at how many people click on photos when I send them across Twitter. Kevin uses Twitpic but I use a Posterous site that I set up - Missoula Real Estate.
Posterous tracks how many people view your photos and allows you to set it up so you can email a photo from your phone or computer to the site. Posterous can then automatically post your photo to your Posterous Blog, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr accounts - I told you, I LOVE TO MULTI-PURPOSE MY PICTURES! :) Posterous is a great way to automate posting to some of your sites.
It's fun to be creative in your marketing with the use of photos, and there are so many possibilities!
How do you use photos to promote your business? I'd love to hear what others are doing as well!
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Kevin and Monica Ray are Missoula Real Estate sales and marketing professionals for Access Realty in beautiful Western Montana. We provide services in, but not limited to: Missoula, Superior, Alberton, Saint Regis, Lolo, Clinton, Turah, Potomac, Florence, Corvallis, and Hamilton.
For more information on Missoula Real Estate or surrounding areas, they can be reached at 406-207-1185 or online at www.AccessRealty.net.
I was on Twitter the other day and noticed that Problogger Darren Rowse (@problogger) was taking suggestions for Twitter tip articles for his site TwiTip.com. So I wrote in and proposed a review of TweetLister. Darren's contentent manager, Lara, wrote back and told me they liked the proposal so I wrote the review and sent it in.
They must have received several guest articles, because it was a few days before I heard back from Lara. Much to my delight, I got another email from Lara yesterday letting me know that my post had been published! You can see my TweetLister review here.
I consider it an honor to be a guest poster on a Darren Rowse site. In case you don't know about Darren, he's been blogging way before blogging was cool. You can learn a lot from his sites Problogger.net and Digital Photography School.
Since I posted 4 Must Have tools to Automate Twitter, I've had several comments which tells me that Twitter news is hot and agents are looking for ways to stand out in a cold market.
As far as I know TweetLister is the first Twitter application specifically for Real Estate. With it you can:
Create well formatted Tweets for your listings.
Automatically re-post those Tweets at a schedule you set (right down to the time of day).
Monitor the performance of the ads.
Search for real estate listings on Twitter based on criteria you set.
You can do all of the above very easily with TweetLister by logging in with your existing Twitter account credentials.
I heard a statistic this week that over 60% of new Twitter accounts are abandoned. The ease of entry into Twitter evidently makes it easy to leave behind, especially since the usefulness of Twitter is not readily apparent the first time you see it.
If you're one of the 60% still wondering what to do with your new Twitter account, I suggest you read my full review of TweetLister which includes an easy two-step plan to turn your Twitter stream into a resource that any home seeker would be glad to follow.
Real Estate Marketing on Twitter now has an Easy Button. It's called TweetLister. Check it out!
Much has been written on the effectiveness of Twitter as a marketing tool. I won't elaborate except to encourage you to investigate it for yourself. Here's my take on it and a peek into how I'm using it.
I'm going to be throwing around the term "Feed" a lot. I'm referring to web feeds. If that's Greek to you, click here to get up to speed and then come back for the rest.
The advantage to Twitter is that it's almost a universal application to Social networking and all the other sites have applications or widgets that let you syndicate your Twitter feed easily. As an example, check out the sidebar on the right side of this page. That's basically a widget pulling my Twitter feed.
I consider Twitter the "atomic level of social networking". Your Tweets are the basic building blocks of your social content, just like atoms are the basic building blocks of matter. . .if I remember correctly from Mr Augustin's Freshman science class.
Anyway, so what I've done is automate a lot of my Twitter activity and then syndicate it to my other accounts and sites. This is going to start sounding like the leg bone is connected to the hip bone and the hip bone is connected to the. . .well you get the drift.
WordPress plugin. I use Twitter Tools for WordPress for my Madison County Virtual Tours site and my personal blog. The plugin will send a Tweet automatically when I publish my article. Not the only plugin available that does this but it works great.
Twitter Feed. Very cool. Take ANY RSS feed (just make sure it's from a trusted source if it's not your own) and feed it into Twitter. It's easy to get busy and forget to Tweet. With Twitter Feed, you can add people to your virtual "Twitter staff" so to speak so your Twitter feed is never stagnant.
Tweet Later. This lets you automate replies to followers and some other cool stuff. I get a digest of Tweets from Tweet Later that match certain keywords that I'm interested in (like virtual tours for instance). Now I don't have to scan through my stream on the Twitter site. A time saver. Also as the name implies you can schedule Tweets to go out at a later time.
Tweet Deck and/or Twhirl. The Twitter site is very utilitarian. These two applications run on your computer and connect to Twitter. So far I prefer Tweet Deck to Twhirl. I have to keep them both shut down when I really have work to do because they notify you every time somebody that you're following posts a Tweet. Both are a productive way to use Twitter though.
Now that you've got your content funneled into Twitter you can use the Facebook Twitter application to syndicate all your content to your Wall. Same goes for other social networking sites. You can connect your content to all the people in your network. This does take some time to get set up, but once it's going it really carries a lot of leverage.
We generate a lot of data every day. Some of it is content we create and some of it gets sent to us. share a list of online utility tools that I use to manage all this data.
I come from a manufacturing engineering background so I'm still in the habit of looking for ways to systematize and save time. I've also lost a hard drive before and have gone through the pain of changing computers. These tools take advantage of "cloud computing" for the most part. In some ways each of these tools allow me to work more efficiently.
Note: This post got really long so I have decided to publish it in two parts. Tomorrow I'll publish part two about social networking automation. Here goes:
Five online utility tools:
Browser: Firefox and/or Flock. I may have to jump into Internet Explorer from time to time when a site requires it, but either Firefox or Flock (which is based on Firefox, see my article on Flock here) is running on my PC at all times. Two words: Tabbed browsing. Make sure you have Firefox set up to open new windows as a new tab and your task bar will stay much neater. Check out this article on fifteen other ways to get the most from Firefox.
Email: Gmail. Even if you use a local email client like Outlook, you owe it to yourself to set up a free Gmail account. Instead of retrieving your mail directly from your ISP, let Gmail fetch it and then set Outlook to fetch it from Google. Gmail also has virtually unlimited storage too.
I really like Gmail's interface and the label system (as opposed to a folder system), but even if you like Outlook better you can use Gmail for its spam filtering. I just don't get spam. Every once in a while a new rash of spam gets through for a few days, but the filter is constantly "learning" and before long it starts to catch the newest wave successfully. One less thing to take up my time.
Gmail backup. I only found this program recently. If you are like me and don't use a local email client such as Outlook, you really must back up Gmail. They don't call it "Beta" for nothing. I've never lost any data from Gmail, but they have been known to lose email from time to time. Gmail Backup does what it says. You pick a folder to put it in and it will pull down all your messages into a format that can be read locally. It even gets put in year and month folders. If you're using a local client you have a backup already.
FoxMarks. There are lots of account logins and passwords to keep up with in the world of social networking. Foxmarks is a Firefox add-on that syncs the bookmarks and passwords that you collect in Firefox to a secure spot in the cloud. Really handy if you have more than one PC in the house or a home PC and a work PC.
Create bookmarks and passwords on one machine and Foxmarks can be set to sync on shutdown. When you get to the other machine you have the same set of bookmarks and passwords. There are other alternatives to this utility, but Foxmarks has served me well so far.
Google Notebook. Yes, another Google product. I've used Google Notebook, the Firefox add-on for a couple of years to keep up with web clippings and info that I collect doing research on this or that. If you already use Google Notebook, heads up! They are stopping development so we will probably have to be looking for an alternative.
Rocket Dock. This one will not appeal to everybody and it's technically not an "online tool", but it's just too cool to leave out. If you use a Windows PC check out Rocket Dock. It's a configurable program launcher that has some similarity to the Mac OS. I used to have a bunch of program icons cluttering my desktop along with documents. Now I keep the programs in Rocket Dock and everything on my desktop is some type of document or folder.
Most of these are fairly main stream, but maybe at least one of those was news to you.
Feel free to share the tools that make your life easier in the comments.
In order to be an effective property marketing resource for my clients, my goal is to always be aware of the latest on line tools for marketing properties for my clients. Early last year I recognized that social media (networking and bookmarking) was no longer something to be ignored, so I started creating accounts at some of the major social sites. It didn't take long to for me to realize that I couldn't keep up with it and still do the actual work of my business (and life for that matter!).
Along the way I found that spending just a couple of hours a week consistently went a long way to keeping my social marketing efforts from stagnating. Then I found a tool that makes the most of my social networking time. It's a browser called Flock. The Flock developers took the same code engine that powers Firefox and built a whole bunch of cool tools on to it so that you can keep up with your Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr. . .accounts all from within the browser. It really leverages the new integrated social networking tool now in RTV tours.
You can even connect it with your blog, even self-hosted WordPress sites, so that you can post directly from Flock. Now they also have an add-on that stores your OpenID, if you have one and seamlessly logs you in to the sites that support OpenID. I really like that feature.
Flock hasn't become a total Firefox replacement for me. Instead my strategy is to use it when I'm dedicating time to social networking. Besides shooting interactive virtual tours in Tennessee and Alabama, I do web development, mainly WordPress design services. Firefox is just better for that and the extra buttons and features of Flock actually start to get in the way when I'm in that mode.
I'm planning on publishing a post that lists all the tools I'm currently using to streamline my on line work so stay tuned.
I recently ran across a cool little tool that monitors your website (or any site or sites for that matter). It's mainly for web developers who manage multiple sites, but even if you only have one site it is handy. Best of all it's free! That seems to be the norm with web tools today. So many talented people recognize the fact that it's good to give away something with the expectation that something (probably even better) will come back to them.
Ok, so head over to Are My Sites Up? and create an account. Then just enter in the site or sites that you want to monitor. If the site goes down for a significant amount of time you'll get an email. Then you'll receive another email when it comes back up. It's that simple and that is all the tool does. Oh, and you can also have it send a text message to your phone!
I have sites on a couple of different hosts and one in particular has gone down for ten or fifteen minutes at a time (mostly during the night). The others have yet to go down in the six weeks or so that I've been using this tool. That tells me that I may want to change hosts or contact support at the host. If you do contact support you also have a record to prove that you're having a problem. A recent upgrade to the service gives you the error code that the site is returning.
Since we depend so much on our websites to market our businesses these days, making sure it stays up is important. Now you have an easy tool to keep an eye on it.
One Lawrence County TN builder and Realtor specializes in quality-built homes with highly efficient floor plans. David Gulley of Century 21 Kelso Realty & Auction, Inc is currently developing subdivisions in Loretto and Summertown. I recently shot a virtual tour of one of David's homes in Coldwater Springs Estates, Summertown. It's a 2700+ square foot home with lots of bonus space. Here's a shot of it. Click the picture to see the virtual tour:
Another home just listed in Loretto by David Gulley is on Dave'O Lane. It's about 2100 square feet and is also in a new subdivision. Click the picture below to take the tour.
SpotLight Virtual Tours offers full-featured virtual tours and architectural photography featuring Real Tour Vision technology. Give me a call to set up your tour today.
Disclaimer: ActiveRain Corp. does not necessarily endorse the real estate agents, loan officers and brokers listed on this site. These real estate profiles, blogs and blog entries are provided here as a courtesy to our visitors to help them make an informed decision when buying or selling a house. ActiveRain Corp. takes no responsibility for the content in these profiles, that are written by the members of this community.
8 Ways To Use Photos To Promote Your Business - and best of all, most of them are FREE or LOW COST!
3.) Get Into Video - You can create a local video with your digital still photos in a matter of minutes. We like Real Estate Shows but there are other great sites out there that will help turn your photos into a short video. We also use a Flip video camera for some videos but still like to use digital stills. Once you create a local video, Real Estate Shows will upload it directly to your You Tube account, or you can save the video to your computer and create CD's or upload to other websites or blog posts.
5.) Post to Facebook - it's easy to create a photo album on your Facebook profile, so how about creating one of your local area? We have a photo album on Missoula, Missoula Nightlife, and Montana Living.
7.) Upload Photos of Local Businesses & Food to rating sites such as 
8.) Twitpic your photos or post them to Posterous - People love to look at photos and I'm still amazed at how many people click on photos when I send them across Twitter. Kevin uses Twitpic but I use a Posterous site that I set up - 
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