Photography For Real Estate

My friend Charles Mackenzie-Hill in Marbella, Spain recently pointed out that I should point out PhilipBloom.net to everyone.

Yes, Charles, you’re right. I’m remise for not pointing out Philips site to readers before this. As a student of Cinematography Philip’s DVDs from Fstopacademy.com were one of the first things I purchased after purchasing my 5DMkII.

If you have a Canon DSLR that shoots video Philip’s site is a very useful resource to learn about all the addons to make your DSLR more effective shooting video.

Thanks Charles for your suggestion! What other video training resources do you suggest?

You can listen to the podcast by clicking above or click here to subscribe in iTunes. In this Q & A Podcast Mike and I discuss the following questions:

1. From Ted: What product do you deliver to the customer and how do you deliver it?
2. From Chris: How do I approach a shoot when shooting RAW?
3. From Alice: How do I compete with photographers that contract with brokers to shoot for the whole office? And what do I need to consider for licensing terms of my photographs?
4. From Cassie: Should I be incorporating video in to my real estate photography business?

Mike Miriello and I recorded another Q&A Podcast a few days ago. One of the questions that Mike and I talked about was the old question about how to deliver photos to your client and whether or not to deliver a physical CD.

I think there are two distinct phases of a real estate photography business:

1. Building your business and trying to increase your exposure to real estate agents.
2. You have built your business so you have a level of work you want.

While you are in the “building your business” mode there are huge benefits to delivering a CD personally to your client at their office. You see them face-to-face and you have opportunities to meet other agents in the office. The whole personal delivery thing is a huge customer service and marketing opportunity. However, once you get to the point in your business where you are shooting 2 or 3 or more properties a day there just isn’t time to be running around delivering physical CDs. So my advice is use this personal customer service delivery opportunity when you need it and it works in your life but also have a good electronic delivery mechanism. There are even benefits to doing electronic delivery and popping a CD in the snail mail.

Here are eight popular alternatives for real estate photo delivery:

1. Physical delivery of a CD: Don’t underestimate the customer service impact of personally delivering a CD into the hands of your client. Giving your client a CD with your product on it has a nice professional touch and it gives you chance to make personal contact with your client. CD delivery can also be coupled with any of the online techniques. That is, deliver photos electronically and later on a CD for the clients files. Remember, most agents are not that technically adept so having a CD with the photos on it is a big benefit (a CD is harder to loose for some people than a download link). As your business grows there’s going to be less and less time for this approach.
2. Client logon to your site then download: This approach is the most professional for online delivery because delivery is via your personal branded site. However, this means you have to have a site that has this capability and you client has another account and password to remember. One example of a template website hosting service that has a client logon feature is bigblackbag.com ($14.99/mo).
3. PFREtour.com: PFREtour.com is a tour hosting site for real estate photographers that has a delivery feature built into it. After you are finished building a tour you simply go the the dashboard and click “Share” and an e-mail message is constructed (for you to send to your agent customer) that has the URL of the tour (branded and unbranded), as well as button for the agent to click to post the tour on FaceBook or Twitter AND all the photos in the tour in a form that can be downloaded individually or all zipped together in a single file for download.
4. Box.net: This is a great site that allows photo delivery very smoothly. It has a 2 gig free version so you can try it out but the pay version has better delivery options than the free version.
5. Dropbox.com: Dropbox is designed more for online backup and online syncing between computers but it has a publicly accessible folder and a photo sharing feature that can be easily be used for photo delivery. You can send clients a download link via e-mail. The 2 Gig free version is even usable this way. The lowest level of fullservice is $9.99/mo for 50 Gig of online storage.
6. YouSendIt.com: This is a very popular delivery with real estate photographers. It has a 14 day trial. The lowest level of service is $9.99/mo. It has tracking features, security features and a return receipt feature as well as plug-ins to make it work smoothly with Photoshop, FinalCut Pro, Aperture, iPhoto, Outlook and CorelDraw.
7. Pixoasis.com: Pixoasis is a professional looking delivery service available for $11.95/month.
8. PogoPlug: See my post earlier this year on PogoPlug. The benefit of PogoPlug is that you purchase a one time piece of equipment and you get a very similar service to DropBox without a monthly charge.

Think of photo delivery as a marketing and customer service opportunity. Use delivery to keep in contact with your client and present yourself professionally. It’s an opportunity to talk to you client and make sure they got your delivery.

Update 8/30/2010: Malia in the comments below raises an important issue that may effect your decision to deliver a CD to your client. In states that collect sales tax you may be required to charge sales tax if you deliver a physical product whereas you may avoid collecting sales tax if you deliver your product (photos) electronically. Be sure you check with your local department of revenue to verify their policy in this area, it varies from state to state.

I’m amazed by the number of people I talk to that are mixing flash with the bracketing shots they are shooting for Exposure Fusion (Blending in Photomatix) and HDR. Plus I’ve gotten a number of questions asking how to to shoot brackets with flash.

The first question is why? What’s the point of using flash when you are shooting brackets? You thought the reason you shot bracketed exposures was so you didn’t have to use flash, right. Well the fact is that when you use HDR or EF for interiors you tend to get low contrast results (more so with HDR than EF). That is, the blacks are not as black as you’d like and the whites are not as bright and crisp as you’d like. The term that comes to mind is muddy colors and dirty whites. You also have issues with white balance. It turns out that if you add a kiss of fill light from a single flash makes these problems much better. If you add a little fill flash to your brackets you don’t have to spend as much time and effort in postprocessing to get rid of the muddy colors and dirty whites.

Also, adding a touch of fill flash to bracketed shots can be done without having to “climb to the top of the learning curve” for full blown multi-off camera flash technique. There is a discussion in the PFRE HDR & Blending discussion group on this subject. I’ve been doing some experimentation with this technique so here’s my summary of how to bracket with flash:

1. Setup your bracketing as normal (on a tripod, aperture priority and exposure bracketing -2,0,+2) except add a manual off camera flash. For the shot above I used a Nikon SB-80dx triggered by a Cactus V2 Wireless flash trigger. The transmitter end of the Cactus trigger was in the hot shoe of my Canon 5D MkII with it’s trigger cord plugged into the 5D’s PC connector. The SB-80dx had a Cactus receiver connected to it.
2. Set the drive mode to single shot so that you have to release the shutter for each of the three bracket shots. This is to make sure that the flash has time to recycle between each bracket shot.
3. Use a remote shutter release so you don’t have to touch the camera body. I used the Canon TC-80N3 although you could probably get by just touching the shutter release button if you are careful and your tripod is sturdy.
4. Aim the flash either towards the ceiling, a blank wall or the joint between the ceiling and the wall so that the light from the flash creates a large, soft fill light. On my example above I had the SB-80dx sitting on the top of a media cabinet, camera right, pointing at the ceiling. The ceiling is diffusing the light out in all directions so their aren’t many shadows.
5. Adjust the power on the flash manually (some where between 1/8 and 1/1 – same power for all three bracketed shots) so that you get a good set of 3 histograms (you want the histograms high but not clipped histograms together to fill up the available histogram space. -2 will be left, 0 will be center and +2 will be right). See Dan Achatz’s description in the PFRE HDR & Blending discussion group.

To summarize: this technique adds the same constant level of fill flash with a single flash, to each of the three brackets you shot. This fill flash is improving the quality of the light so that the whites are whiter and the blacks are blacker. This same technique works similarly with either brackets used for HDR processing or brackets processed as Exposure Fusion (EF).

For those that are already shooting brackets with flash I’m sure you’ll be able to add refinements or variations to this technique.

A couple of weeks ago I promised not to do screen grabs of Google maps for land listings any more. Turns out you can do almost anything you want by building your own custom Google map. Here’s how it works.

In the comments of this previous post Neil from Missouri pointed out that you can use the My Maps feature of maps.google.com to create overlays that can be used to show property boundaries on a parcel of land for use in a land listing. Here is Neil’s example. Very cool. Agents that do land listings will love to have this feature. You could probably even put photos of various parts of the property on the map.

Today Mike Martin showed me another way to use My Maps. Mike is mapping all the listings that he’s shot in the last year or two. He’s still in the process of building the map. This is a great way to show all your shoots and the tours from each one. You could even draw the boundaries for your standard, no travel charge area.

In the last few weeks I’ve had several questions relating to the basics of optically triggering flashes while shooting real estate.

Scott Hargis did a post on PFRE  three years ago that is a concise summary of how to approach off camera flash when shooting real estate. However this post doesn’t mention the miracle of optical triggering (frequently referred to as optical slaves). So I thought it might be useful to go over some of the basics of this subject.

Here are the triggering basics (note this works the same if you use Canon or Nikon bodies because everything is manual):

1. Flashes and camera are all in manual mode: Forget about Nikon CLS or Canon E-TTL automatic modes where the camera talks to the flashes and controls flash power etc. We are not doing that. Everything is in MANUAL.
2. Optical triggering is built into many flashes: For real estate shooting purposes the most desirable flash is the Nikon SB-80dx. See Scott’s blog for the story on why the SB-80dx is so desirable for real estate shooting. Here are some others:
   • Nikon SB-26 – This is similar to SB-80dx but has only 1 stop power settings instead of 1/3 of a stop settings.
   • Nikon SB-800, 900 – These can be set to trigger optically but these are more expensive than you need be cause they have the electronics for Nikon CLS which you don’t need for real estate.
   • Yongnuo YN460 – This is a relatively new entry to the low price manual optically triggered flash market.
   • LumoPro LP160
   • There are many other alternatives: Here is a site that has more details on other alternatives.
3. A built-in flash can be used to trigger external flashes optically: For example those little pop up flashes that can be used to trigger a bunch of SB-80dxs. The idea is that the camera body can “tell” optically triggered flashes when the shutter is open. A flash of light is a perfectly good way to do that.
4. You can mix radio triggers and optical triggered flashes: If you have a DSLR body that has no built-in flash you can use a Cactus trigger to trigger on flash which, in turn can trigger other optical flash triggers. This means you don’t have to purchase a radio trigger for each external flash you have if they can be optically triggered.
5. Canon flashes don’t have built-in optical triggers: So you’ll have to either use them on camera to trigger other flashes with optical triggers or you can use a Cactus trigger to fire them off camera.
6. There are many options for alternatives to Cactus triggers: Cactus triggers are just the cheapest alternative. You could use Pocket wizards or many other alternatives instead.

The big benefit of using flashes that have built-in optical triggers is that the triggering device doesn’t have a separate set of batteries to run down and you don’t have to purchase a triggering device for each flash. Simple and inexpensive.

Oh, by the way optical triggering outside is not as effective as it is inside.

Update 8/25: Jake in the comments makes an excellent point. When you are triggering flashes optically from the little built-in pop up flashes or from on camera flashes you have to be careful the triggering flash isn’t pre-flashing. Pre-flashing is a little flash pulse just before the main flash firing to trick people’s retinas into contracting before the main flash fires so the finished photo won’t have “red eye”. You’ll need to either turn off pre-flash (possible on some cameras) or the some flashes with optical triggering (like the SB-26) have a delay setting so they aren’t prematurely triggered by pre-flash.

Every once in a while Brett Clements shoots me links to show off what he and his team at Propvid Queensland are up to.

As a student of video I love analyzing and studying the work the Propvid folks do.  I am continually impressed with their ingenuity.

In this most recent video they take on the challenge of promoting the small urban apartment life style which because it is not visually spectacular, is significantly more difficult than doing propvids of dazzling high rise properties the Queensland gold coast is famous for.

In 1:53 minutes they manage to distill a, charming, very personal little vignette that illustrates why people like the urban life style. Simple, well designed and effective. This is not your standard property video but this is a great example of “selling the neighborhood”.

Nice job Brett! Keep these examples coming.

This series of Bad MLS Photos is brought to you by John Cummins of HoustonHomeImages.com.

This series demonstrates that the real estate photographer must always be aware of what’s going on both inside and outside when images are composed.

Thanks John you made my day!

Update Aug 24, 2010: This is a good lesson in copyright. Most of the gazillions of bad MLS photos shown on various sites are copyright violations. In this case John took down the video because of copyright violations.

Yesterday I noticed that Kris Bjarne Haug over at Papilios Real Estate Photography in the New Orleans-Baton Rouge area has some fantastic statistics that he is using in his marketing.

With the help of  Latter & Blum, Inc (a broker site in the New Orleans- Baton Rouge area) Kris has compiled a months worth of traffic statistics for listings he has photographed compared to statistics for comparable listings in the same zip code all from the Latter & Blum site. The Latter & Blum site carries all listings in the Baton Rouge Area and gets roughly 500,000 unique visitors per month (home buyers).

The message from these stats that stands out loud and clear is that the listings that Papilios Real Estate Photography (Kris’s company) photographs get a average of 134% more traffic than comparable homes in the same Zip and a average of 145% more traffic than comparable listings in the same MLS area.

I know what some of you are going to say, “…just because the listings Kris photographs get more traffic on a broker site doesn’t mean they sell faster.” I think it does mean the listings sell faster! After 10 years of tracking traffic on our broker site, showings and sales of our own listings, more traffic on our broker site always means more showings and more showings always means a faster sale. I would go so far as to assert that if you could do this kind of study and include listing market time (the number of days a listing is on the market before selling) you would find that increased traffic on the the broker site has a high correlation to reduced market time. Unfortunately, days-on-the-market is typically not a stat that MLSs feed to broker sites so it may be a challenge to correlate professional photography directly to decreased market time.

This data is the closest thing to “proof” that great photography sells homes that I’ve seen. Anecdotal evidence and intuition strongly suggest that photography is a huge factor in marketing homes but I’ve been looking for a more scientific way to demonstrate that relationship for a long time. I think this is it!

Thanks to Kris for coming up with this technique and being willing to share it with everyone . Hopefully others will be able to do similar studies and confirm this statistical relationship between great real estate photography and faster sales.

Mac users starting out in real estate photography are faced with a choice of whether to go with Lightroom or Aperture for photo management/editing. Back in February I did a comparison of of Lightroom and Aperture just after Aperture 3 was released. Now that both Aperture 3 and Lightroom 3 have been out for a while it’s a good time to revisit the comparison of these two photo management applications.

I use both Lightroom 3 and Aperture 3 on a MacBook Pro (a 2 year old  2.53 GHz MacBook Pro with 4 Gig of RAM) Here is my impression of the pros and cons for these two applications. This comparison is by no means intended to be exhaustive. These are just some of my favorite features and issues.

Aperture Pros

1. Aperture brushes: I am totally in love with this feature. If it weren’t for the lens correction features in Lightroom I would move completely to Aperture just for this feature.
2. Aperture video editing: This is compelling feature but you get the same features on every Mac for free in iMovie.
3. Aperture GPS mapping: This is another feature I love. I can just snap a iPhone shot while shooting with my 5D  when I import the iPhone photos with the 5D photos and Aperture will automatically put  the iPhone GPS data on the 5D shots taken around the same time. Very cool!

Aperture Cons

1. Aperture feels slow to me on my MacBook Pro: It always seems to be doing stuff in the background and just doesn’t feel as snappy as Lightroom 3.
2. Slide shows: Aperture 3 will create slideshows on me.com but I just don’t find these useable for real estate use.
3. Aperture updates: Historically new versions of Aperture seem to be few an far between and Apple does not let the user community participate in betas like Adobe does. There have been many long waits for RAW conversion compatibility in Aperture’s past.

Lightroom Pros

1. The Lens correction features: for real estate photographers this is a huge time saver not to have to round trip out to another an application like PTlens or Photoshop to just  fix verticals or horizontals.
2. Lightroom feels snappy on my MacBook Pro.
3. The ability to create slide shows on any website you can access

Lightroom Cons

1. Costs $100 more: A new license cost $100 more than Aperture.
2. Interface: Lightroom 3 doesn’t feel as “Apple like” as Aperture 3 does.

In summary, my opinion is that having great lens correction features built into Lightroom 3 makes it the obvious choice for real estate photographers. This feature doesn’t make much difference to other areas of photography but having your verticals, vertical  your horizontals, horizontal and not having barrel distortion from your wide angel lens is super important in real estate photography and the time a real estate photographer saves buy having these features built into Lightroom 3 is worth the extra $100 over Aperture 3.

Larry Andrew of Kansas City, Missouri posted a comment recently on a post I did back in Feb of this year titled “What Should I Charge for a Shoot?“. I the story that Larry relates is important enough I think it needs to be raised from the level of a comment on a 6 month old post to a post of it’s own.

Larry says:

I started shooting real estate images in 1995. At that time as a Commercial photographer my day rate was $1650.00 per day for a 10 hour day. I could and did shoot 10 interior views per day/house via set up, light, tear down, move on etc., etc. This was all digital as I discontinued shooting film in 1990. The cost of not shooting film, Polaroid, and processing helped the profit margin. I also charged for travel mileage and drive time. I settled into shooting for one local publication here in Kansas City Missouri, but to get all their work I needed to lower my fee to $125.00 per view plus travel fee of $60.00 per location average. I would average 15 views per month for that publication. We had 900 builders in KC Missouri western metro area of Kansas and all surrounding communities. 2009 economy tanked. There are probably a total of 100 builders now. During the high economy page count stood at 60-80 pages. The present issue was page count of 16 pages.
Last week the editor requested that I not charge a travel fee and reduce my imaging fee. I asked what she thought a fair fee would be…..she said XXXX photographer could shoot for $75 per view/shot and not charge a travel. I suggested that she should schedule her next assignment with XXXX photographer because I could not afford work for her any longer.

My point is, do not treat your work as a hobby but as a business. What are your expenses? Fuel, drive time, equipment, replacement cost, business insurance, medical insurance, office expenses, etc., etc. and do not forget paying yourself. Pencil to paper, you may find you are working for pennies per hour. If you undercut your peers you are really not hurting anyone but yourself. The best thing that happened to me in my 42 years of imaging is the digital camera. The worst thing that happened to me is the digital camera. In general, the quality of imaging has gone in the toilet for the bottom line as every real estate on site agent has their own digital and they shoot their own images. They also do their own hair cuts and brain surgery. Because you own a hammer does not make you a carpenter.

Larry’s comments relate a feeling that we’ve all felt and have been touched by in various ways and various extents in the last two years. Before the end of 2006 we were all living in an economic bubble. This bubble was in more than just real estate. The bursting of that bubble has forced all businesses to become more efficient just to keep going. Anything to do with print media has particularly been hit hard. Print media is disappearing from real estate marketing. Print media wasn’t particularly effective in the early 2000s but since  budgets weren’t very tight no one was forced to make changes.

Since the barrier to entry for digital photography is low and marketing budgets are tight, competing successfully is as much about customer service and selling your product as it is about the images.

Getting a home owner to prepare their home for a photography session is essential to getting good results but it’s more difficult to get through to some homeowners and agents than others. In my experience about 2 out of 10 homeowners require some special help in this area and some agents are prepared to help them but some aren’t. There’s nothing worse than showing up for a shoot and the home is a total mess. You’d think that straightening up the house before a shoot would be a no-brain-er for everyone involved but it’s not.

Getting a home “parade ready” is a important part of marketing a home for more than just getting good marketing images, it’s also for getting the home ready for buyer showings.

Some agents are going to do a good job making sure a homeowner has their home “parade ready” without the photographer telling them but others need something to remind them to handle this issue. I suggest that until you get to know your agent clients you have a explicit discussions with them about whether or not the home they are wanting you to shoot is photo ready. Having a check list to communicate to agent clients about what you expect is a good way to guide this discussion with the agent. The following are some items for this preparation check list:

1. Contain pets in the garage or out of sight.
2. Remove all vehicles from driveways and do not part in front of the house.
3. Move garbage cans so they can’t be seen from the street.
4. Remove garden tools, hoses and sprinklers.
5. Mow and rake the yard.
6. Sweep driveways and sidewalks.
7. Remove piles of magazines and newspapers.
8. Clear off counters in kitchen and bathroom areas.
9. Put indoor trash cans out of sight.
10. Clean all the photos and kids drawings off the refrigerator.

In the long run it’s MUCH easier to handle this before you get to the home and it’s a mess. Once you get there and the home isn’t ready there aren’t any good options. Depending on the level of the mess, probably the least of all evils is to just reschedule the shoot but the driving time and costs and your scheduled shoot spot is a loss.

Beware of renters: they are the worse case because they frequently could careless about the process of getting the home sold or rented. Also, a large percentage of tenants will be to the point of being uncooperative at the end of their lease or being faced with the prospect of moving. Some of my worst nightmares in home preparation have occurred when we listed homes that are occupied  by renters.

Iran Watson started a thread in the PFRE flickr group about shooting acreage so I jumped in and described how on a large land listing we had I had used Photoshop to make a put a transparent surveyors map layer over a Google satellite map layer so that buyers could see the vegetation, the streets and how the newly subdivided lots fit on the property as a whole. It was a work of art and beautifully illustrated all the existing land features and the newly platted features at the same time. The seller thought it was fantastic. I was going to write a post and show it to you here as an example of how to make illustrations to marketing land.

In the process of doing this post I did a little research on the Google Maps and Google Earth terms of service and as far as I can tell using Google Maps in this way violates their copyright. Not surprising I guess. So I’ve changed my advice. It’s tempting use screen grabs of Google maps and mark them up with Photoshop to make a nice illustrations for land listings but one of the things a MLS member does when they upload images to the MLSs they are asserting that they are not violating copyrights.

So don’t scrape Google Maps! And I promise Larry and Sergey that I won’t do it any more either. Too bad, I was looking forward to showing you my beautiful subdivision/satellite map.

I was a bit shaken last week when a regular reader said, “a friend just put her house on the market and I was checking the PFRE blog looking for some of the articles about why good photography sells homes faster but no luck“. I thought I had proven this proposition beyond a reasonable doubt but perhaps I need to have a post that lays it out real simple step by step.

So let me walk through the basics in what goes on when someone is looking for a home these days:

1. Price  and location are the most important factors in selling a home. If  the home is priced too high or in a location no one wants to live in, awesome photos make little difference. Price is a key issue in todays down market. Home sellers having a hard time wrapping there mind around how much their home has dropped in value the last couple of years. Getting home sellers to price their home at market value is a big struggle for some agents.
2. Once a home is priced near market value and there are a bunch of other homes in the same price range and location, the importance of photography kicks in big time.
3. Now days 90% or more of home buyers use the Internet start their home search and they are faced with deciding which of all the hundreds of available homes they are going to go look at. Home searchers are faced with choosing which homes to physically go see and photographs play a major part. Any one can appreciate this by simply going to any real estate website and pretend they are looking for a home. As of right now if I go to zillow.com (zillow is not unlike most home search sites) and do a home search there are 163 homes within a couple of miles of where I live between $200k and $300k and I live in a small town (just below 350,000).
4. As I browse through these 163 homes the  initial selection must be by a handful of facts like year built, number of bedrooms and a small thumbnail photo of the front of the home. The importance of this thumbnail are unmistakable! A compelling thumbnail is like the bright flashy piece of metal on a fishing lure. It attracts home searchers attention to look at the listing details.
5. Once you click on the thumbnail to get more detail the importance of the photos increases. The text descriptions in listing details are legendary for their sparseness. One agent or home owner in a thousand will take the time to write good compelling marketing copy so photos pretty much take over the home searcher’s attention, even if the photos are awful. It is easy to see that good photos give the home seller a distinct advantage in the selection criteria. Even though Zillow allows an unlimited number of photos very few homes have over 20. I believe 15 to 20 photos gives a listing a clear advantage over one with less.
6. Why are “good” photos more effective than “bad” ones? Because at this time in history even a 65 year old person has grown up with TV and magazine advertising that uses strong compelling images. Even though most people can’t tell you what makes a strong image, they know one when they see it. Strong images work at an intuitive, emotional level. You don’t need to understand how the image works to see and feel it’s strength. Strong compelling image can be created for exteriors and interiors of homes just like other subjects!
7. The end result of this online search process is getting on the home searcher’s short list of homes they want to see in person. A home will never sell if no one physically comes to see it and it’s easy to see from the steps above that photos play a key role in getting home searchers to come look at a home and thus selling it.

So to summarize, when homes are priced near market value, photos become a key factor that causes home searchers to come look at a home. A home can’t sell if no one physically looks at it. Even though it’s not easy to prove scientifically because market conditions vary even with in the same zip code, it’s easy to see by stepping through the home searching process illustrated above that strong marketing photos will have a significant effect on selling a home faster. Every home seller client we’ve met had understands the power of marketing photos immediately.

OK, I’m going to try this again. This time I’ve worked harder at being clear and concise. My previous post on this subject got too many people worked up and that was not my intent. There are no comments allowed on this post because the negative comments about any specific company can be damaging and I can’t sort out what the truth is and don’t want to facilitate in bad-mouthing any company.

What got me going on this subject is that I’ve gotten many e-mails in the last few weeks from people that feel they have had bad experiences shooting for real estate photography companies. There’s no way I can sort out the facts from these complaints but I think it’s important for people to understand that everything is not sunshine and roses out there. Here are some general points I’d like to make:

1. My goal with this blog and my e-books is to help independent real estate photographers get started and be successful. I purposely don’t do any advertising so I can be as unbiased as possible. So in that sense I’m biased. I’m biased towards promoting independent real estate photography.
2. At the same time I realize that being a good marketing person is not everyones thing. It takes a time and a lot of hard work to get started. Not everyone has the time it takes to go this route. So there are many photographers that work for companies to make some cash quickly and minimize startup time.
3. You can find photographers that have complaints about any company out there.
4. You can also find photographers that are happy working for any given company.
5. I think it is perfectly clear that real estate photography is NOT a high profit margin business. It’s very competitive. The more people you have trying to make money off of a shoot the less the shooter is going to get. This isn’t rocket science, it’s simple arithmetic.
6. There are hundreds and probably thousands of independent real estate photographers with all business they they want. There are huge advantages to working for yourself but it’s not for everyone.

So the bottom line is because there are a significant number of complaints from photographers shooting for companies, you need to spend some time carefully researching the company you are thinking about working for and evaluating if this approach is for you. A great way to do this is to participate in the PFRE flickr discussion group and talk to other photographers who work or have worked for these companies. You can get a diverse set of opinions and great insights from this group on most any aspect of real estate photography… they are awesome! You also have to be careful in any forum like this because some people don’t identify themselves. The best advice comes from regular contributors that do not hide their identity.