January 30th, 2012
Last week PFRE reader and real estate photographer Mike Lefebvre sent me a link to an video of an interview that he had with Steve Pacinelli of techsavvyagent.com. I think the thrust of this interview is important. That is, there are a lot of people trying to shot for agents that have not taken the time and [...]
January 5th, 2012
Ron Rosenzweig sent me a link to this recent article by small business guru Steve Strauss. Steve lists what he thinks are the top 10 trends in small business for 2012. Many of these are some of my favorite subjects. While I agree with Steve on most of the trends he identifies I want to [...]
November 16th, 2011
These days real estate photographers can accept credit cards to collect their shoot fee right on site from their clients. I talked about his a year ago. Early adopters were already doing it then but now it’s become very routine. The way you do it is with this little free swipe gadget that attached to [...]
October 27th, 2011
Today a real estate agent/photographer told me that, “..It seems that most agents, including our office manager think that once the agent pays the photographer they own them. I’ve been talking to other photographers and tell me that they retain ownership…” This illustrates the confusion that is rampent in the real estate community about ownership [...]
October 19th, 2011
Yesterday I answered several emails from struggling real estate photographers complaining about how tough it was out there and how hard it was to compete and answered some blog post comments that suggested that what I was preaching was totally unrealistic. It takes more than that to get me off message, but I was starting [...]
October 16th, 2011
I’ve been reading Michael Lewis’s latest book Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World. In it Lewis researches the cultural background of the recent financial meltdowns that we’ve been happening all over western civilization. Like Iceland, Ireland, Greece, and United States. There’s a common thread in every one of them: we all want to do just look [...]
September 25th, 2011
This weekend I talked to Russell “Rusty” Freeman who has been a long time PFRE reader. Rusty has been building and operating a real estate photography business in the LA for a number of years. Long time readers will remember many of the posts we’ve done about Rusty (just type “rusty” in the search box [...]
September 21st, 2011
Scott Kelby’s new book and seminar that is currently on tour are a great way to learn how to shoot portraits if you’ve not done that before or you just need a refresher on some modern portrait techniques. Then call up your local real estate office and make the managing broker and offer to [...]
September 19th, 2011
In yesterday’s post I explained that a real estate photographers success is highly dependent on building your business relationships with the top listing agents in your area. I got a number of questions about how to do this. There are very few businesses where you can make a list (names, phone numbers, email addresses) all [...]
September 18th, 2011
Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto observed in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people. It turns out that what is now known as the Pareto principle or law of the vital few, shows up in economics, in business, and in almost every aspect of human endeavor. Yup, you guessed [...]
August 11th, 2011
Here is a great Webinar, hosted by Photoshelter.com and presented by Blake Discher, Detroit-based freelance photographer, specializing in editorial, advertising, annual reports, and portraits. Even though Blake isn’t talking about specifically about real estate photography, most all of his insights apply to creating a profitable business in real estate photography. The webinar video is just under 60 [...]
August 8th, 2011
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing some coaching of beginning real estate photographers using various forms of video conferencing and I’ve been amazed by how effective video conferencing is. I’ve used Skype and Gotomeeting.com for my coaching sessions. Skype has been unreliable in many instances but Gotomeeting, which just added HD video to their [...]
July 17th, 2011
The following post is by Suzanne Feinberg. She and her partner Brad run Powervision360 Productions in the Phoenix area: This is a very tough market for real estate photography right now, or is it? Some people are claiming great success. One of our vendors is claiming that he has buyers of his products that are [...]
June 21st, 2011
I want to pass on another success story. Allan Mackenzie who is very active on the PFRE Video for Real Estate flickr group posted this video that he did recently. Allan’s recent post in the PFRE flickr group explains the whole back story on this video. While this video is not a property video, the [...]
June 19th, 2011
I’ve come to the conclusion that all you need to track your business financials is a few good spreadsheet templates. Here’s what’s lead me to this conclusion. At beginning of this year at our house we went through a traumatic upgrade from a 2004 version of QuickBooks to QuickBooks 2011. My wife Levi, the accountant in the [...]
June 11th, 2011
I want to pass along a TED video by Simon Sinek from a couple of years ago because it has some powerful ideas in for anyone creating and building a business. I think it is especially relevant to photographers and cinematographers that because this limbic brain that Simon is talking about, that makes decisions but doesn’t use language [...]
June 7th, 2011
Sherry Keenan, of St. Petersburg, FL told me to day that the real estate photography business in St. Petersburg area is going very well and she has over 100 business cards of agents that she has made personal contact with and wants to start a drip email campaign to keep in contact with these agents [...]
June 5th, 2011
A real estate photographer on the East Coast recently told me they were having a hard time making a go of it. My initial feeling was that lack of success in real estate photography these days is likely related to one’s marketing approach since I hardly ever hear of anyone not getting enough business once [...]
May 30th, 2011
I had a different post scheduled for today but I just discovered Guy Kawasaki’s new book Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. So I am anxious to pass it on to everyone. I don’t read books any more. I’m in the process of listening to Enchantment in audio book form. The theme [...]
May 16th, 2011
I recently got a question asking what to charge a Stager for reuse of some photos for the stager’s web site. I realized that it’s been a long time since I’ve talked about the potential synergy between real estate photography and staging. In upper-end interior photography stagers, frequently called stylists almost always are an integral [...]
