Photography For Real Estate

Just recently Robert Barr, a relatively new real estate photographer, that works on the Eastside of Seattle told me that, “my business is doing GREAT!  I had 4 gigs so far this week and may have one more before the week is over.  I am officially making more money now then I was at my previous job.” Robert is charging [...]

This is a guest post by Brett Clements, of PlatinumHD Propvid Australia (note that in AU the refer to the home seller as the “vendor”): As PlatinumHD Propvid slowly expands internationally, we’re being exposed to different ways of doing things. Different ways Agents do things. Different business models. Increasingly, we are being asked, why is the quality [...]

Bjarne “Kris” Haug, of New Orleans posed a question last week about property video pricing. Kris is thinking about expanding into the property video business and wants to know what to charge. Great question, many real estate shooters are adding video to their list of services and want to know about pricing. Here was my [...]

Peggy Taylor, of Tampa Bay, FL left a comment on last Thursday’s post that is just too important not to highlight for everyone. First some background. About a month ago I did a post on Peggy’s work because she was featured on agentgenius.com. Many PFRE blog readers complained at Peggy because she was charging $99 [...]

I recently had a discussion with a real estate photographer that is struggling to get his business started. I was challenging his $75 pricing. And he was telling me that he has spent the last year or so friending about 250 local agents on Facebook and then offered them all a $50 shoot for their [...]

There are a bunch of real estate photographers out there that are not recovering their expenses and not paying themselves an adequate hourly wage. I want to do some arithmetic for those folks. The price you charge for a shoot has three parts: Your fixed cost of being in business per year spread over the number of [...]

I’ve just finished a significant update to my Business of Real Estate Photography eBook. For existing subscribers to this eBook, I’ll be sending out download links in the next few days to everyone that has ever purchased this eBook. The download link will go to the e-mail address you used to originally purchase this book. [...]

I recently got an email from Atticfire that reminded me that I haven’t mentioned them for a while. I first discovered the Atticfire and did a post on it back in Oct of 2007. Since that time participants in the PFRE discussion group managed to reverse engineer how the Atticfire team creates the dramatic effect in their images. Back [...]

There are more an more reasons these days to be carefully tracking your expenses and adjusting your shoot prices. In case you haven’t noticed the price of oil and petrol is knocking on heaven’s door! Since my post last Nov on computing your cost of showing up and writing a new section in my Business [...]

Over the years we’ve had a lot of heated discussions here about ethics of image modification in the context of real estate photography.  I think the subject is important enough that I have a separate page dedicated to summarizing the consensus that has evolved out of these discussions over the years. Here is a general outline [...]

In the last week I’ve had four discussions with people concerning some aspect of being both a real estate agent and a real estate photographer. I find when a subject like this pops up out of the blue from a bunch of different people I usually indicates a trend going on. There were four different [...]

I got an electronic Christmas Card from PFRE reader Jan Van der Heyden in Antwerp Belgium. (note that Jan’s website is in Dutch and if  you use the Chrome browser his site will be automatically translated from Dutch to whatever language you like). Jan tells me that despite te fact that he has no background in photography what ever [...]

I see a lot of real estate photographer’s e-mail addresses and I’m continually amazed by how many either in business or in the process of starting their own business don’t use e-mail addresses in their own domain. This is a marketing oversight! First of all, your e-mail address gets seen by a lot of people. [...]

Long time PFRE reader, contributor and Tasmanian real estate photographer Milton Lowe just sent me and article from his local Sunday Tasmanian newspaper that quotes him explaining the benefits of real estate photography. In the article Milton points out that he has been doing real estate photography for 5 years after being a real estate agent for [...]

I think special recognition is in order for Huffington Post because Estella Sneider just sent me an example of coverage that a listing she shot recently for Mauricio Umansky just off sunset strip in LA. The Huffington Post article actually has a link in the article to Estella’s website. I’ve ranted before about the fact [...]

Dan Abraham, a real estate photographer in Prince George, BC offered to let me share his successful technique of getting more business by helping your agent clients get more listings. If you are a regular PFRE reader you will recognize Dan’s name from a post I did on area listing sites to promote your photography [...]

I’ve had several discussions this week and last that suggest that some people in real estate photography need some help analyzing their costs of being in business. I think there are many beginning real estate photographers that don’t know what the lower limit is for what they can work for. $99/shoot may make sense in [...]

Fred Light, recently started a discussion in the PFRE flickr discussion group that is worth highlighting. Fred’s post points out a tuaw.com review of the Square credit card reader designed to make it easier than ever before to for individuals and small businesses to take credit card payment anywhere without having to have a merchant account. This product [...]

Several months ago I did a post on real estate post processing as a business opportunity. As a result of that post I established a list of people doing post processing in the PFRE community. The list is on the right side-bar just below the flickr graphic. Mike Gardner, a Malibu Realtor and photographer has been [...]

In the last two years I’ve been amazed by how many people thank me for helping getting them started in creating a new job for themselves in real estate photography. I now spend a significant amount of time just answering questions about how to get started in real estate photography, what to charge and all [...]