Real Estate Photography Services You Should Offer
Photo by Evan Dvorkin on Unsplash
Real estate photography means real estate marketing.
Your job isn’t just to take a few nice photos of the property and leave it at that.
Instead, to get the most exposure for the properties you photograph, you need to create a diverse portfolio of marketing materials for your clients.
Let’s take a look at a few steps you can take to ensure you’re providing your clients with the best resources for marketing their properties.
Add Drone Photography/Videography to Your Portfolio of Services
photo by RyanKing999 via iStock
The best advice I can give about how to market real estate is to provide a lot of content.
This means going above and beyond traditional property images and providing a portfolio of content that highlights the property.
Many real estate photographers have added a drone to their kit to get aerial views of the property. Whether it’s a bird’s eye view of the backyard, a flight from the street to the front door, or a still shot of the property with the view in the background, drone footage allows potential buyers to see the property in the context of its surroundings.
photo by PBFloyd via iStock
Today’s drones are so sophisticated that they can be flown inside the house, too, through doorways, down hallways, and so forth. There is little better way to give a comprehensive tour of a home than by creating smooth, stable video footage with a drone.
And if you’re gun shy about flying a drone, don’t be! Check our tutorial on drone photography for real estate to get started.
Create a 3D Virtual Tour
With investors relying more heavily on real estate, real estate marketing is getting more technically advanced - and rapidly.
That means that you need to keep up with the competition and ad learn how to use virtual reality to make 3D tours of properties.
Like photos and videos from drones, 3D virtual tours help potential buyers develop a better understanding of the layout of the home’s interior and exterior spaces.
What’s more, virtual tours can be used as fodder for social media posts to reach a broader range of clients, specifically, people that might be too busy to attend traditional open houses or walkthroughs with their Realtors.
It’s easy to embed links to virtual tours on websites like Zillow and Realtor.com, so it gives real estate agents just one more method of making homes attractive to potential buyers.
Plus, as Ben Claremont demonstrates in the video above, the process seems pretty easy!
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Work With the House
photo by Sisojevia iStock
The name of the game in real estate marketing is selling the product you’re photographing. To do so, find the aspects of each room that are most interesting and highlight them in your marketing materials.
Whether it’s a fireplace in the living room, a balcony off the master bedroom, the outdoor kitchen on the back deck, or something in between, honing in on the special features a property has to offer will go a long way in making it more attractive to potential buyers.
Of course, not every home has spectacular features like the ones listed above, so you’ll need to work with the house to make it as appealing as possible.
One of the best things you can do to improve the look and feel of a home is to use HDR techniques to create images that are beautifully exposed.
Often, you’ll find that taking traditional photos of a property results in images that are either well-exposed for the bright areas or well-exposed for the dark areas, but not both.
But as you can see in the video above, by bracketing your exposures and merging them together in a program like Photomatix Essentials RE, you can present potential buyers with images that are well-exposed throughout.
Not only do HDR photos look more pleasing and more professional, but they also give buyers a detailed view of each area of the property
Don’t Forget About Video
While taking video of a house isn’t necessarily as good as shooting the house in virtual, it’s still pretty good. Parker Walbeck gives you a complete tutorial about how to shoot walkthrough real estate videos above.
Most tips about how to market real estate focus on video, and if your client knows that and you don’t, you’re going to look unprofessional.
Make sure while you’re taking videos inside the house that you shoot a complete walkthrough so potential buyers know what it feels like to walk from their potential new kitchen to their potential new garden.
As Parker explains, video helps us focus. It keeps us engaged. It’s an excellent supplement to real estate photos.
photo by Sergey Peterman via iStock
Of course, just like real estate photos, videos have to be done well to maximize their impact.
This means using a tripod to stabilize the camera to reduce camera shake, or even better, use a gimbal (as shown above) so you can walk through the property and get smooth, cinematic footage.
Additionally, avoid panning or zooming too fast or too much. In fact, there aren’t many reasons to zoom at all - just use a wide-angle lens to give a broad view of each room and outdoor area to buyers.
Between videos, HDR techniques, 3D tours, and the use of drones, you have plenty of tools at your disposal for improving marketing for the properties you photograph.
Remember that it’s about quality, not quantity, so don’t use these techniques just for the sake of doing so. Practice and get comfortable creating these different types of materials, and once you’ve mastered them, then, and only then, begin offering them as part of your services.
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