It's All About The Photos!

What Works in Real Estate Marketing

---

SIHomeTours.com : It's All About The Photos!

Author:		Clubhause
Posted:		4/17/08; 1:49:23 PM
Topic:		SIHomeTours.com : It's All About The Photos!
Msg #:		1 (top msg in thread)
Prev/Next:		/2
Reads:		1431

You could be loosing tens of thousands of dollars when you sell your home,
and here's how...

Just a few years ago, a good real estate agent depended on the "3 P's of selling real estate."

Place an ad, Plant a sign, and Pray that someone notices.

That worked great in 1950,

...and today, it's a recipe for disaster! I just talked to someone who dropped the price of their house $30,000 to sell it. She didn't have professional marketing and there was very little of what advertising and marketing she did have. I'll show you how a couple of hundred dollars could have been well worth the investment.

Multiple studies including several from the National Association of Realtors (N.A.R.) have proven that real estate buyers have shifted to the Internet as their first stop in looking for a home. As many as 70% were looking online in 2006, do you think that number has grown or dropped? In reality, It's closer to 9 out of 10.

...and online, it's ALL about the photos!

In an eyetracking study conducted by usability expert Jakob Nielsen, he announced in 1997 that People do not read online, typically, they skim. 79% of test subjects always scanned any new page they came across while only 16% read word-by-word. Other studies have since supported this.

Today, we have Flickr & YouTube. Web sites are more graphical than ever. And we have high speed connections, if something is not interesting enough, we quickly click on to the next page. Yahoo & Google want their main web pages to load in less than ten seconds because they know that the faster they deliver what you want, the happier you'll be. But back to the photos because that's what buyers are looking at.

The National Association of Realtors survey learned that 83% of buyers cited pictures as,"Very Useful" and 60% cited Virtual Tours the same. They learned that buyers are using the pictures to weed out property that is not of interest to their lifestyle or tastes.

It really is all about the photos!

In large metro areas such as New York or L.A., agents using a professional photographer are common and can easily cost over $1,000 depending on whether you want prints, web images or high-resolution. Southern Illinois real estate agents to pay SIHomeTours anywhere from $100 to $250, depending on the size of the property. Full-time Professional real estate agents use a professional photographer.

Two agents were quoted Feburary 2007 in the New York Times

Good photos will grab people's attention and help you sell a home," said Jacky Teplitzky, an executive vice president of Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate in New York. "Bad pictures will absolutely give you trouble, because you won't have any calls on it, and nobody will come to see it."

It's so important to have photos that are professionally presented," said Rosalind Clarke, a senior sales associate with the Corcoran Group in Palm Beach, Fla. She added that she uses only pictures taken by professional photographers, because if things look shoddy or unprofessional, not only are buyers going to find the property unappealing, they're going to associate you with being shoddy and unprofessional."

Even the buyers are complaining about bad photos...

Somebody even went to the trouble to setup a whole web site - You'll not believe this link!

Broderick Perkins cautioned in Realty Times

Virtual Tour making takes skilled professionals... Produced unprofessionally, it can harm a listing."

...and here is the solid proof.

There are many factors in a successful real estate transaction, and many things that can affect both the number of "days on market" for a specific property and the final sale price. An analysis was done on the east coast which drew similar results but we'll look at the results from one years worth of data (all sales that closed between 1/1/2007 and 12/31/2007) using the MLS in the Santa Clarita Valley in Los Angeles County, CA.

Property that is marketed with professionally created photos sell roughly one month faster and for more money!

Conclusion: The homes with 10 or more photos received more calls, were visited more often, and consequently sold faster. As to the increase in selling price, the more combined interest there is in a property, the more likely it is to sell higher than a similar property.

One of the I.T. people who uncovered the data talks about the results...

All that being said, you might say 'Cool... so the agent gets a pocket camera & blazes away with more photos of their listings.' That, in my opinion, is where the "emotional attraction" comes into play.

When I look at some of the great interior shots displayed by members of this group and compare them to a typical real estate agent's efforts, there is no comparison. A shot of a kitchen is a great example. A typical agent's shot of a kitchen basically says "Yup, that's a kitchen all right." The same kitchen shot by [a professional photographer] creates a totally different feeling. It's more like "Wow, I can't wait to cook in this room!"

Example: Here's a real picture created by an agent. This property is located in Paducah and was advertised at SIHomeTours.com

I don't know about you but it looks like a small, dark depressed kitchen to me. I've shown this image to forty or fifty real estate agents and they use the same words to describe the image.

The homeowners were not happy with the agent images and we were called in. Here's how the kitchen really looks.

...and we went the extra mile and created a couple of reverse angle pictures so you can know the WHOLE kitchen. It took us less than five minutes to shoot the additional angles, I guess the agent didn't have the time. We understand that the kitchen is one of the most important rooms in any home. Here's one of our reverse angles.

If you don't think that a photo can give you an emotional impact, click on this agent provided picture of the staircase in this house. (don't worry, it opens in a new window.)

The National Association of REALTORS reports that just under 80% of homebuyers begin their search online. It just stands to reason that homes with no pictures are being passed over. It's also easy to suppose that homes with better pictures have a better chance of being selected by buyers for further consideration.

It should be pretty clear by now that...

It's ALL about the PHOTOS!

SIHomeTours.com has been providing quality professional photographic services to real estate agents since 2001. Nobody has more experience than we do at making property look good. Every property is no more than two clicks away from each other. Our photos are even iPhone and portable device friendly, try that with a Visual Tour slide show. You'll get a blank screen.

SIHomeTours.com provides an easy to use and an easy to find web site that is visited by hundreds of qualified buyers every day. We bring the buyers to look at your property. On average, more than 3,000 properties are viewed every day at SIHomeTours.com Third party web traffic experts report that area agency web sites rarely approach the volume of visitors and web pages viewed at SIHomeTours. Meanwhile, many agents spend their budget on a "monthly county-wide real estate book" of which only 3,000 to 5,000 copies are printed for the entire month.

SIHomeTours.com is the Authorized Virtual Tour Provider for Realtor.com and via your agent, can link your listing to Realtor.com and a large network of real estate web sites.

Why risk loosing ten's of thousands of dollars just because you had lousy photos?

Can you name any other industry where the sales agents will bring a hundred-thousand dollar item to market with anything LESS than professional imagery? I don't think so.

If you really want to sell your real estate, demand that your agent contact SIHomeTours.com TODAY!

Here's how.

Click this link print it out and HAND it to your real estate agent telling them you must have your property professionally photographed & listed online at SIHomeTours.com