Photography For Real Estate

I want to kick off the concept of tour reviews, a new use for the flickr group discussion group. In a comment on the discussion of What to charge for real estate photography Mike Yother suggested that we setup a new scheme to allow all you gentle readers to evaluate and vote on tours. Mike’s [...]

The answer to the what to charge question has two parts: How much on the average does it cost you to show-up to any property in your territory? How much should you charge as an hourly rate? How much to show-up? Anyone in the business of driving around to properties in these days of rising [...]

Here’s a nice little ad for real estate photography that reader Gary K Meyer sent me. This video is from the site: openhouse NYC: FLOORPLAN. I don’t have much background, but it sure is a nice little ad. Thanks for the link Gary!

Tour usage overall and video tour usage are both increased significantly over 2007.Last year at this time when I looked at tour usage only 8% of the listings I reviewed on our local MLS (Seattle’s east side) had links to tours. Click here for last years details. This year when I looked at a similar [...]

Registration is now open for the Seattle Photography For Real Estate workshop on April, 25. Click here for the schedule and full details. Or click on the Seattle Workshop button along the top of the header image. Scott Hargis has agreed to fly up to Seattle and present the first ever Scott Hargis Lighting with [...]

John Sembrot pointed out to me that yesterday in the Home and Garden section of the New York Times there was an interesting article by Kimberly Stevens, titled “Picture, Picture on the Wall…”. This article describes the trend currently going on where because

I’ve just changed the poll on the left hand side-bar. The new poll asks: What is your main method of lighting for real estate photography?As usual I’ve moved the summary of final results of the last poll on real estate photography pricing up to the “poll pesults” page on the button above the header images. [...]

OK, this is not about real estate photography but I can’t help it, I got a Canon G9 last week and I just love it! I wanted camera I could carry in my pocket that shoots RAW and shoots video. That has all the controls that my big-boy camera has. The G9 is a wonderful [...]

I admit it I’m a little biased towards Lightroom since I’ve used Lightroom since it came out. But since in TWIP #5 Scott Bourne and Alex Linsey were so “ga-ga” over Aperture 2.0 I decided, “OK, I’ll keep an open mind and check out the new Aperture 2.0 just released”. I downloaded the 60 day [...]

Mark LaBoyteaux from Hawkeye Media posted a spectacular example of one of his aerial 360s in a comment on one of my previous posts on shooting aerial 360s. Note that this example is using FPP flash that can be displayed full-screen. Click the full-screen control at the bottom right control bar to go into full-screen [...]

Based on some recent discussions about the real estate photographer marketing technique of attending real estate office meetings I’m becoming more convinced that the most effective marketing technique for real estate photographers is to do more targeted marketing.The thing that got me thinking about this is the fact that in the real estate offices that [...]

During the Photo Marketing Association annual show (PMA) in Las Vegas Jan 31 through Feb 2 two new low-end DSLRs of interest to real estate photographers were introduced. Canon introduced the EOS Rebel XSi and Nikon introduced the D60.

I’ve pointed out Saskatoon agent, Norm Fisher’s really funny presentation of bad real estate photos before but it’s so funny I think it is worth featuring again. I feel like inventing a real estate marketing award for Norm’s presentation. I was reminded of this subject by the fact that Athol Kay, a Connecticut Realtor got [...]

Scott Pruett told me about a cool new browser addon for Firefox, Safari and IE that gives a very slick immersive way of browsing photos on flickr, Picasa, Facebook and many other photo sites. Download it at picklens.com. I just used it to browse through the photos on the PFRE flickr group and it is [...]

There’s a great new podcast called TWIP (This Week In Photography) that’s being done by Scott Bourne and Alex Lindsay. Scott and Alex are well known for their books and podcasts on the subject of Mac technology but they are both excellent photographers. I’ve found many podcasts on photography difficult to listen to but Scott [...]

PFRE reader Michael Asgian is launching a new property site hosting service called homeXposure.com. Michael’s company panostar.com, based in Newport Beach, CA, has been offering real estate marketing and imaging services since 2002. Panostar offers real estate photography, virtual tours, real estate flyers and postcards.

Today I noticed that both of my favorite slide show products, buildatour.com and SlideshoPro have new features.Buildatour.com now has the ability to download your tours to your local computer and make a auto-run CD of the tour. This is a very cool feature. I’ve found that both buyers and sellers love to get CD tours [...]

As I described in an earlier post, once a month I’m going to choose a real estate photographer of the month from the PFRE real estate photographer directory. My criteria for selecting will be the photographers work, the way the work is presented on their website and their participation in PFRE and the PFRE flickr [...]

About a month ago I noticed an ad in Inc magazine for open2view.com, a company that was founded in New Zealand in 1999. Open2view has grown to 200 franchises expanding into Australia in 2004 and to the US in 2007. They are starting out in HI, CA, AZ, WA, GA, NC and FL. I’ve spent [...]

A week ago I did a post about how real estate photographers should get to know the stagers in their area and work together promoting each others services. One of the reasons is good agents use stagers and these are the very same agents that are likely to appreciate good photography. So why not promote [...]