Photography For Real Estate

I was talking to my real estate photographer friend Kevin in Bellevue, WA yesterday. Kevin is the proud owner of a new 5D MkII and was telling me that he has been connecting with real estate agents by doing portraits for agents. He said he uses a  Canon 85mm L f/1.2 lens and two Profoto [...]

There was a lot of interest in the e-mail marketing post I did back on June 10. Michael Yearout sent me some data on his drip marketing campaign so I thought I’d pass it along to show that there’s more than one way to do e-mail marketing.
First of all Michael uses ratepoint.com for his e-mail [...]

Thanks to Scott D for letting me know about a June 10 real estate photography article in the Charlotte, N.C, The State by Cristina Bolling titled, When You Market your house online, make sure the images are picture perfect. Articles like this make good marketing hand-outs to give to agents and they are filled with [...]

I want to point out that Herb Dierks of Tourfactory.com gave us some very valuable insights and advice in his comment on the last post; too valuable to pass up!
Herb said, “can your slide show be uploaded to YouTube? How many cell phones are capable of viewing it? From my perspective, photographing real estate [...]

How would you like to have a online or printed directory of all the most successful listing agents in your area (your best prospective clients), that is updated twice a month? It has names, phone numbers, web sites and e-mail addresses and a list of all their listings. By the way, this directory doesn’t list [...]

I spent this weekend off the grid on a mountain biking trip in the Columbia Gorge in Northern Oregon along the Columbia River. All that blood getting pumped to my brain gave me some important insights. Besides all the extra blood in my brain, here were the three events that triggered my insight:

The first was [...]

Scott Hargis sent me a copy of his e-mail marketing piece today and I think it is particularly well done so I thought I’d show you what it looks like and run through what I like about it. Scott has been doing this for several years so he’s refined this by trial and error.
A screen [...]

I had several conversations this past week with real estate photographers that re-affirmed my belief that real estate photographers can create more opportunities for themselves if they don’t define their job as just a still photographer or just a videographer. Yes, this requires a broader set of skills but, what’s new? Success in any field [...]

This last week a Realtor ask me to look over his work that was presented on his web site. The photos were wonderful, but they were buried several clicks under a barrage of text and presented with a small, clumsy little slide show that I couldn’t figure out how to control.
There’s a lesson here for [...]

One of the most important parts of building a successful business as a real estate photographer is being able quickly and clearly communicate why photography is important to selling real estate. I know, this is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer. But if you’ve talked to Realtors you will find that only the top [...]

PFRE Advertiser, iPropertyWebsites, will now be offering custom private label footers to all Authorized Resellers with the purchase of any bulk package (5-pack, 10-pack, etc.) of website licenses/credits. The website credits can be purchased in advance at a discount and can be used anytime (they never expire).

This is the time of the year to review your marketing plan and think about what you are going to do to market your real estate photography services in 2009. Here are some things to think about that will help you stretch your marketing dollars:

There is a good thread in the PFRE flickr discussion group about considerations for making a real estate office presentation for the purpose of connecting with potential customers. There is tons of great advice in this thread about how to approach this method of connecting with prospective customers:

These meetings are all about personally connecting with [...]

I’d like to welcome and introduce a new PFRE advertiser: iPropertyWebsites.com. iPropertyWebsites.com provides single-property websites and will be offering a two for the price of one discount special for PFRE readers all through the month of November. Just mention the PFRE blog to the iPropertyWebsites.com sales staff when you e-mail or call iPropertyWebsites to take [...]

Yesterday I got a question from a reader asking what I thought about using a link to his Smugmug site in the PFRE Real Estate Photographer Directory.
My response was: “I highly suggest that if you register for the REP directory that you have a real estate photography only site that has a portfolio of your [...]