Photography For Real Estate

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 [...]

The holidays  are wearing off and it’s hard to avoid the fact that it’s time to start engaging again.
In the real estate world it’s still a relatively quiet time that’s perfect for education, reflecting and planning.
At this time of the year I always like to spend some time reviewing what things I did last year [...]

I got an e-mail yesterday from Rusty Freeman in LA. Rusty said:
Larry: Just wanted to tell you about an MLS search we completed this past week on the local board. We searched the county for all homes $2 mil & up. Found over 1,000 listings. …
I was looking for [...]

In my Real Estate Photography Business book I use a distribution curve from a 2004 National Association of Realtors (NAR) income study to demonstrate why it’s so important for real estate photographers to target their marketing.  The NAR income study shows that:

In 2004 the median income for Realtors who had been in the business for [...]

I had an insightful conversation last night with a highly successful portrait photographer (lets call him Jim) that has been struggling, unsuccessfully, during the last 12 months to break into real estate photography.
Even though Jim’s real estate work is jaw dropping good, from what I could tell he has just not connecting with the top [...]

Whoa! Did I get an education today! A couple of my Kiwi readers (Neville and Martin) put me on to the subject of QR (quick response) codes. This is some of the coolest stuff I’ve run into in a long time. It all came out of my post yesterday about mobile phones being important in [...]

Today, because I used to be a agent or have used Tourfactory products in the past, I got a promotional piece of “bacon” from TourFactory. Bacon is not to be confused with Spam because it’s much tastier than Spam. Anyway, here is the whole piece.
Because I think it is valuable to analyze and learn from [...]

You may have missed a valuable idea in the comments on my post on tapping into neighbor interest in listings. It’s worth another post. The essence of the discussion is, another powerful way to get exposure with the neighbors around homes you shoot is with a rider sign on the For Sale sign or on [...]

Whenever a new listing comes on the market in a neighborhood the neighbors are always very interested in every aspect of the listing. What is the list price? Who’s the agent? What kind of marketing job is the agent doing? etc. They are interested because next week or next month when they want to sell [...]

Wall Street Journal reporter June Fletcher did an article on 8/21/2009 in the WSJ real estate section about her frustrations as a buyer looking at typical real estate marketing photos.
It’s good to keep these kind of press articles to use in your marketing materials. They carry weight because they are published in a well known [...]

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 [...]