Update to Realtor’s Guide to Using Photos
July 5th, 2009
I want to thank everyone that’s given me input on my Realtor’s Guide to Using Photos In Real Estate Marketing. I just put an updated copy of the guide up for download (click here to download). Although I did a post earlier on what this free guide is all about, just for clarity I want to restate my thinking about this two page guide:
- The purpose is to provide something to help more real estate agents to start thinking about the role of photos in real estate marketing.
- It contains the basic ideas that agent need to understand whether they are shooting listings themselves or hiring a photographer.
- It suggests that if you can’t do this do these things yourself find someone that can, just be in charge of making sure it happens. I see plenty of people that call themselves real estate photographers that don’t have good verticals. Agents should be telling them to straighten up and fly right!
- It is short and concise and fits on one double-sided sheet of US letter side paper. I wanted to keep it really simple to just get agents started thinking about the subject.
- I’ve added some small photos that help illustrate the points.
- I’ve also added a live link to Vivian Toy’s NY Times article. I think this is them most authoritative source that gives weight to the subject and has some good multimedia on it.
- I’m releasing this as Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial. This means everyone is free to redistribute it, change, modify and extend it (just say it originally started at photographyforrealestate.net) and don’t sell it.
So spread it around the world. Give it to people on street corners. And improve and refine it as you see fit. The more listing agents understand these ideas the better business will be for real estate photographers. And, by all means keep giving me suggestions for refining it if you don’t want to modify it yourself. I’ll be updating it from time to time.
11 Responses to “Update to Realtor’s Guide to Using Photos”
Dave July 5th, 2009 at 11:48 am #
The images for items 3. and 7. cover the first line of text.
larry July 5th, 2009 at 12:05 pm #
@Dave- Ah, thanks for catching that. I made a few last minute word changes and for got to check the photo spacing… it’s fixed now.
John Quarles July 5th, 2009 at 5:55 pm #
Thanks, this is great. I have added it to my website!
Jay Zenner July 6th, 2009 at 5:46 am #
All the hoopla in real estate marketing circles is about adopting social media, optimizing your web site and perfecting your online lead generation strategy. Missing from almost all discussion is the importance, especially for the listing agent, of properly marketing homes. This is especially disturbing in the current market where qualified buyers are in short supply in many segments and the competition to reach them is fierce.
Just flipping through the listings on the local MLS or on sites like Realtor.com I’m amazed how bad the photography often is as well as the copy writing and positioning of property. Thanks for your contribution to improving the situation. Someday I believe that through the natural progression up the learning curve the conventional wisdom will recognize that “converting leads” may be more effectively accomplished by demonstrating strong skills marketing homes than pungent twitter posts as important as the latter may prove to be.
Anonymous July 6th, 2009 at 6:42 am #
Just want to thank you for creating this document and providing it for our use.
Jon
Andrey Khrolenok July 6th, 2009 at 12:14 pm #
Russian translation of this Realtor Guide: http://photo-profi.ru/files/RealtorGuide.pdf
Thank you Larry for article
larry July 6th, 2009 at 5:22 pm #
Andrey- Awesome! Thank you for the Russian translation. I will add a link on the side-bar.
Anyone willing to translate it into other languages? French, Spanish etc.
Jon July 6th, 2009 at 6:45 pm #
Another great resource Larry. I wonder though about the high compression of the photos in the pdf. Although they each illustrate the points made (verticals, color cast etc) they look too fuzzy and pixelated for a publication that is trying to promote the quality of photography. I know it’s a trade-off between quality and file size, but I’d be happier going with better image quality and a bigger PDF before broadcasting to potential clients.
Possible?
Regards …….. Jon
larry July 6th, 2009 at 6:58 pm #
Jon, You are probably right. That’s a good reason to take it up to 4 pages (two double sided pages)… so the photos can be bigger.
I’ll work on it.
Photo News Today » Blog Archive » Update to Realtor’s Guide to Using Photos - Larry Lohrman (Photography for Real Estate) July 7th, 2009 at 11:01 am #
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Fran August 10th, 2009 at 2:39 am #
Realy helpful guide. I’ll add it to the new site I’m designing right now. Thanks Very Much !!!