With the recovering of the residential real estate market in the United States in full swing, it’s a great time to learn what it takes be a successful real estate photographer and generate some income from this very active market. These 6 insiders’ secrets should give you an advantage to maximize your penetration of the local market for real estate photos.

1. Know What Photos Generate the Most Interest Among Buyers

Real estate brokers and agents are very busy people, working 60 to 80 hours per week or more. Many might think that they can take the photos they need of their listings with a compact camera or smartphone. You can prove them wrong and make yourself a real estate photography expert in their eyes when you share some important statistics with them.

• Redfin Corporation, a real estate brokerage in Seattle, discovered during extensive research that better photos of homes for sale shot with a DSLR camera resulted in a buyer paying a higher price for those homes—from $934 to $116,076. Potential buyers searching online for homes were also likely to spend more time viewing photos from professional-grade equipment. At the time of the study (2010), Redfin calculated that only 15% of all homes listed for sale were photographed with high-end cameras and lenses.

 

Home listed at $300,000 or less and photographed with a DSLR did not generate as much interest online or a higher selling price than compared to homes shot with compact cameras or smartphones. Armed with this knowledge, you want to focus your marketing on real estate brokers and agents who typically list homes with selling prices of $500,000+.

• In another study, 95% of people searching online home listings spent more time, 20 seconds, viewing the first photo of a home than any other photos or information. That’s 60% of all the time prospective homebuyers spent viewing a single listing.

Time Spent Viewing Online Real Estate Listings and Eye Fixations

Content	Total Time	Eye Fixations
All photos	56.49 seconds	156.59
Exterior home photo	20.05 seconds	60.74
Kitchen	7.92 seconds	24.4
Living room	8.06 seconds	24.39
Master bedroom	7.82 seconds	24.05
Master bathroom	7.9 seconds	24.53
Backyard	8.23 seconds	24.77

Professor Michael Seiler, Old Dominion University, March 2013

2. Devote More Time Selecting and Shooting the Exterior Photo

With the exterior image of a home grabbing most of the attention of online homebuyers, it’s essential that you put the most time into preparing shooting that photo. The best times of day to shoot are dawn, dusk and twilight. These are the magic hours when the light is soft and subtle, which will help to make any property more attractive. You’ll also want to know which direction the home faces, so you shoot during the time of day when the light falls on the front of the property. A model home with all the interior lights illuminated often portrays the property better than full daylight on the exterior. If possible, wet the pavement of the street, driveway and sidewalks to add a slight reflective quality to your real estate images.

3. The Right Tools Can Make a Big Difference

As indicated above, you need a DSLR camera and the appropriate lens or lenses to penetrate the real estate photography market successfully. Your images’ composition and quality must be clearly superior to what agents could shoot with a compact camera or smartphone.

The other important takeaway from the chart above is that photos of the interior of a home are also critical. Totaling all four rooms listed above reveals online homebuyers spent 31.7 seconds and had 97.37 eye fixations while looking at interior photos. You can offer real estate agents much better interior images when you shoot with the Pre-View Ebot Starter Kit. It’s a must-have tool for anyone who wants to succeed as a real estate photographer. The Kit includes the 185-degree Mega Fisheye Lens and Ebot software that is available either online or offline. Either a Nikon or Canon DSLR will accept the lens, which mounts to a tripod for stability. You record an image at each of the lens’ three preset angles, and then use the software to stitch them together to create a seamless spherical photo that is also interactive.

4. How to Make a Room Appear Larger

For most real estate shoots, you’re likely to capture some wide-angle images as well as panoramic, spherical photos with the Pre-View Ebot Starter Kit. You can make a big room, such as a living room or great room, or even a master bedroom, look even larger by placing a moderate-sized area rug in the foreground of your composition. The wide-angle lens will distort the rug more acutely since it is so close to the camera, making it look like the rug extends far into the room.

5. Avoid Ugly Distortions When Shooting Interiors

When composing an image of a large room, don’t frame the photo with the vertical wall and ceiling because they will appear quite distorted being at the edge of the frame.

6. Be Very Service-Oriented

Real estate brokers and agents are more likely to hire you for photography work if you are available to shoot a property within a short period of time and are able to shoot more properties during a shorter period of time than they could. You’ll truly prove the benefit of your real estate photography services if you also offer to upload images to the appropriate Websites and social media platforms, so agents don’t have to take time from their busy schedules to upload photos.

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