HDR Effects: Adding that "Thomas Kinkade Look" To Your Agent Home Listing Photos!
Having just returned from RainCamp Houston 2010, there was much talk about professional listing online photos and how such photos, and plenty of them, help sell homes by gaining the attention of potential buyers. In fact, the graph below was shown by Ben Kinney, lead presenter at RainCamp Houston, showing online search habits of consumers and how their habits are leading them to search Google directly for homes for sale versus portals, such as Realtor.com. In other words, we generally search Google and find home listing portal sites through their backdoor via a listing link.
Source: SHIFT: Catch People in Your Web: Internet Lead Capture and Conversion PowerPoint by Ben Kinney
According to Ben, the challenge Agents are experiencing with listing their listings on such sites as Realtor.com is that you only have 25 homes on the first page of search results and then 400 pages of 25 more listings on each of the 400 pages. He says that searchers just are not going to sift through 400 pages or 10,000 listings to find their dream home. Those listings that make it on the few first pages of search results have the best shot at being viewed and purchased! What I thought Ben was saying is that "Search" is broke and I would certainly agree! Those that build such sites I don't think understand search behavior and the frustration involved. Ben very briefly stated that there is a way to game the system to get your listings to the top of such sites by adding more professional photos, professional videos and other features. I've been thinking about this ever since he brought this up on Monday! As real estate professionals marketing in an era where even the iPhone 4, as awe-inspiring as it is, will be obsolete in the next 2 years, we have the challenge to think outside the box. Creativity wins, which is why we think Apple Macs are superior to PC's for creative projects.
Thomas Kinkade is the famous "Painter of Light", see an example below.
Image Credit: Thomas Kinkade and Link. His paintings have a way of making the viewer feel like they are there in the moment. As I understand it from Wikipedia, the Thomas Kinkade brand earned $53,000,000 from 1997 to 2005 and for a good reason. It would make sense to me to follow a brand and marketer that produced $53 Million in sales.
HDR or "High Dynamic Range Imaging" Photography Effects isn't a new topic on Active Rain. But, it's a new topic and hobby now for me as of Monday. There may be 100 other posts about HDR, not really sure! Ideally, HDR would be achieved using software which combines 3 separate stationary photos, taken at different exposures, to produce a greatly enhanced look (see Flickr For some amazing HDR Photo Effects). However, I found an affordable software called "Dynamic-Photo HDR" that applies HDR Effects to a single photo, making the creation of such photos very simple and not at all complicated.
Question: Would such effects added to listing photos help sell homes and get your listings closer to the top of those 400 pages of search results? That I'm not sure of either. However, when I posted some of my photos on Facebook, some really liked them and wanted to know how I did this. So, below, I'm providing several examples of before and after photos and then a screen shot of the software that produces these effects.
The Software that applies such HDR Effects to a single photo is called "Dynamic-Photo HDR", version 4.8, for $55. There may be a cheaper version on Ebay, a version 4.4 under "HDR Software". Screen shot and resulting photo is below. There's also a 7 minute YouTube Video which highlights the features of this software.
Again, Would such effects added to listing photos help sell homes and get your listings closer to the top of those 400 pages of search results? What's your opinion?
NOTE: Please note that I'm merely sharing this information to help with marketing and am not an affiliate marketer for this software! Bill Cobb, Appraiser - Let's Connect On Facebook!
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