Photography For Real Estate

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 [...]

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 [...]

The free downloadable Realtor Photo Guide that we give away here on the PFRE blog got some coverage on the Wall Street Journal Real Estate blogs today.
Thanks to WSJ blogger Sara Max for the coverage and for the links back to the PFRE blog. Sarah points out a recent post on the SeattleBubble.com blog that [...]

This last week I must have talked to 15 to 20 real estate photographers about how either their website or tours aren’t visible on the iPad. I’m sure that many of you think I’ve gone “Chicken Little on you”.
So just so you know that if I’m wacky I’m not the only one, I want to [...]

I got an iPad a couple of days ago. I decided that it’s important to pay attention to the iPad as a browsing and e-book reading platform. Google analytics for the PFRE blog shows that 2% of the PFRE blog traffic is already from iPad users. Probably a more significant fact is that the traffic [...]

This last week the This Week in Photography (TWIP) Podcast had an interview with John Philpin, the chief marketing officer of LiveBooks. The subject of the interview was a discussion about the fact that photographers and other creative people need to have websites viewable on iPhones and iPads. John explains why LiveBooks has decided to support iPad [...]

In my last post on social media, I talked about social media from the point of view of how I use it (and don’t use it) to promote this blog. Promoting a geographically focused small business like real estate photography is very different problem.
Here is the marketing problem that real estate photographers have:

Your potential clients [...]

I did a post on in March about how Russ Freeman’s great twilight front shoot helped Russ’s listing agent customer make a quick sale of a San Clemente home. Russ told me yesterday that the Wall Street Journal was running his photo of this San Clemente home as the center piece of an article on luxury homes.
Russ [...]

In the process of building this blog over the last 5 years I’ve spent some time studying how to get top ranking for a the search terms “real estate photography” and “real estate photographer”.
One thing I noticed early on was that real estate photographer Bill Bayless (realestatephotographer.us) was very hard to beat in the Google [...]

I got a question recently on e-mail marketing that made me realize that even though I’ve talked about the basics of e-mail marketing I’ve never pointed out why you don’t want to do e-mail marketing through your regular e-mail provider. Here’s why you want to use a e-mail marketing service that is designed for e-mail [...]

Rusty Freeman sent me this amazing real estate photography story this morning. This exterior shot of a San Clemente listing that Rusty shot for Realtor Jerry Barbanell listed at $4.3 million allegedly sold the home in 30 minutes.
Here’s the whole story told by the listing agent Jerry Barbanell. “The buyer came with his agent to [...]

This last week I talked to two real estate photographers that have built area listing sites designed to reach home sellers with the message that good photography helps to sell homes ( John Quarles in the Birmingham, AL area and Dan Abraham in the Prince George, BC area). Area listing sites list part or all [...]

For those that may not have noticed Jeremy Esland’s thread in the PFRE flickr group recently, I think it is worth posting here again. This before and after gallery is from ampimage.com. The owner of the site, Ashley Morrison, specializes in interior and hotel photography. Ashley works with Marie McMillen an interior designer when shooting [...]

Sometimes when you are doing marketing copy being painfully honest is the best approach. This marketing copy is brilliantly simple and unforgettable.
This little commercial is a kick, but it’s just the “tip of the iceberg”. This commercial was done by Rhett and Link over at ilovelocalcommercials.com. These two guys show the power of a video [...]

I noticed that Reator.com released a iPhone app yesterday and downloaded it and used the app to browse through all the listings in the neighborhood I thought I’d take a look at the Realtor.com site directly. Since we quit using Realtor.com in about 2004 I’d not looked at Realtor.com for a very long while.
I was amazed [...]