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What All New Realtors Need to Know About Real Estate Photography and Marketing

What All New Realtors Need to Know About Real Estate Photography. Starting a new career in real estate can be exciting and overwhelming. One of the most important tasks as a realtor is marketing. In order to sell a home, you need to be ready to market that property in the best way possible, using tools that will enable you to stand out above your competition. 

Where Photography Fits In

One common denominator in all real estate listings is the photographs. You may have the most beautiful and perfectly priced home to show, but if you have mediocre photographs, you’re going to lose the bulk of your potential homebuyers immediately. Homebuyers have been starting their home searches online for several years now, but that online activity has increased even more with the recent pandemic and guidelines around staying safe and socially distant. This means that people that once may have been more inclined to pick up the phone and call a realtor are now also starting their searches online and using photographs as their first impression. 

Clearly, you’re going to consider costs involved in hiring a professional real estate photographer, and you may feel compelled to cut corners where you can with advertising and marketing costs, however the photography should not be an area where you focus on cutting these costs. It is tempting to take advantage of the iPhone features and do-it-yourself, or even purchase an inexpensive DSLR, but you’re still not going to get the result that you need to maximize the number of offers and the amount of the offer.

Not Just Any Professional Photographer

If you’re brand new to real estate, you may also think that any professional photographer would work to get the pictures you need. The skills needed to do portrait photography or wedding photography differ vastly from the skills used in real estate photography. 

Real estate photographers have received training specifically to make a photograph of a home, and the rooms inside it appear spacious, bright, and overall more appealing. They have specific equipment that they use to capture angles that a standard photographer may not. Real estate photographers have also mastered light and how it moves in a room to create shadows that could make a room look less appealing. They’re able to overcome these challenges using lighting tools and maximizing their photo shoots based on the time of day and the sun angles when possible. All of these considerations provide you with photographs that make your seller’s property stand out.

Not Just Still Photography

Other advantages to using a real estate photographer include having access to the other tools that are necessary for realtors in this marketplace. 

These tools include:

• Drone Photography – Using drones to take aerial photographs of the property and video tours of the outside of properties.
• 360 VR Virtual Tours – Tours using a hi-tech video camera that provides the feel of walking through the property with the ability to look up and around each part of the property. 
• Video Walkthroughs – Walking through the home or property with a standard video to give viewers an idea of how the property flows going from room to room.
• Custom Floor Plans – Helps provide potential homebuyers with specifics on how the home is laid out, how each part of the home flows, where windows and doors are located in the home and measurements of each room. This is a really valuable tool for those that are moving into the area from another location. 
• Twilight Photo Shoots – Provide a magazine-worthy photo with the home lit up at twilight. This is a dramatic effect that can help elevate a listing.

How to Find the Right Photographer

When you start searching for the right real estate photographer to work with, you want to find one that has several years of experience in the industry and is very tech savvy. Find out what other services they offer and make sure it lines up with the list above. If they don’t offer these services, you may want to find someone that does, so that you’re ready to use those services as your business grows. Northern Virginia Real Estate Photography is proud to offer all of these services to our clients, as well as additional marketing tools. 

When you’re reviewing potential photographers, be sure to ask them to see their portfolio. You want to see examples of the real estate photography services that they offer with a wide variety of property types included in their samples. 

Another way to find the perfect photographer for your business, is to talk to other realtors. The team you work with will probably have a photographer that they recommend. You can ask around your network of fellow realtors to get feedback on their experience with different real estate photographers. 

Another step you can take to evaluate any photographer that you’re considering is to review the listings that they worked on. How long did the property stay on the market? How much did the property list for, and how much did it sell for? If it sat on the market for a longer than normal amount of time, dig deeper and see when they were brought in to the account. It’s possible it sat on the market for a while with poor photography, and then the real estate photographer came in and helped finally move the listing to be sold. 

Standing out Among Other Real Estate Agents

Another important factor that all new Realtors need to know about Real Estate Photography when you’re just starting your real estate career is being able to compete with other realtors in your area. It can be hard to stand out, let alone just be able to appear as if you can offer just as much as other, more experienced realtors can offer to your clients. In order to keep up with what other realtors are doing, you need to do a bare minimum of the same type of marketing that they’re doing. Doing a bare minimum means providing professional real estate photography and including what used to be considered extras, like 360 VR Tours of each listing, that almost all real estate agents are utilizing during this time. 

As you determine how to market yourself to be on par with the other realtors in your area, you may also consider what you can do to set yourself apart from them by offering other benefits to your clients. If the standard for realtors in your areas is to offer virtual tours, then offer virtual tours AND twilight shoots of all properties. Or virtual tours AND customized floor plans to every customer. Add something of value that will set you apart from your competition. It could be as simple as offering a free website for every listing. 

If you’d like to learn more about what to look for in a real estate photographer or how we can help you start your new career off strong, connect with Northern Virginia Real Estate Photography today.