My wife (a 25 year Realtor) and I were viewing Quentin’s video and the counter-point, red-neck real estate video that Scott sites and commenting on the fact that with Quentin’s life-style video there is really nothing of any significance that the Realtor can add by being in the video talking. Her insight was that the reason you DON’T want the Realtor in the video talking is you want the potential buyer to make their own personal interpretation of what they see in the video. Marketing a property is about getting the potential buyer to project or visualize themselves in the property. Quentin’s life-style approach with simply great images and a light audio track is an effective way of doing exactly that. A Realtor in the video pointing out that “this is the kitchen” is a total distraction from what you want to be doing with marketing.

Thanks Scott for the outstanding post and examples!

What is an Agency Shooting Contract?
This is where a real estate photographer enters into a contract with a agency (real estate company) to shoot some number of listings per year. In return for a guaranteed level of business from the agency, the photographer gives the agency a discount on the price of each shoot. This kind of arrangement is a win for all parties. The photographer gets a guaranteed level of business, the agency raises the level of their marketing and the agents get a price break on good photography for their listings.

Agency Shooting Contracts are Not for Everyone
I think before you try getting an agency contract you need to be in demand by top agents. Your demand in the office you are negotiating with will help you in the negotiation. On the other hand, if you already have a large customer base and you are already shooting 400 or more shoots a year then an agency contract may not for you. Oh, yea, with these kind of contracts you probably need someone to back you up so you can take time off now and then.

Key Items to Negotiate

1. Price: The agency is going to expect between 10% and 15% discount from your established shoot price in exchange for a guaranteed number of shoots.
2. Minimum Shoots Per Year: Look for agencies that are going to give you a minimum of  250 to 300 listings a year
3. Exclusivity: Some agencies may want you to only shoot for them. This consideration should decrease the discount you give them.
4. Permissions: Don’t give away your copyright. Make sure it’s clear that any use of the photos outside the contract needs to be approved by you. That is, if the agent wants to give the architect, builder, stager or home buyer photos, they have to come through you and should expect a licensing fee charged to the appropriate party.
5. What’s Expected of Agents: Thomas says, “The hardest part of a contract is managing the agents and scheduling. Having a well though out plan in advance is key to making it work.” Here are the agent terms and conditions that Thomas uses.
6. How Billing and Payment works: Set the contract up so you don’t have to nag agents to get paid. One way is to collect upfront. Another way is bill the agency once a month and they pay you directly. The agency can then bill the agents directly and take care of collecting from them.
7. How photos are delivered: You need a fast efficient way to electronically deliver photos because of the high volume you are likely shooting for in a contracted situation.
8. Scheduled rate increase: Once you establish your rates, it’s difficult to raise your rates. Thomas recommends specifying COLA plus 5% or a rate increase per year that you are comfortable with, if this is not agreed upon in the initial contract, it will be difficult if not impossible to raise your rates without jeopardizing the contract.

General Negotiating Advice

• Mike’s advice:
  • Negotiating a contract has less to do with you, and more to do with external variables than you would think.
  • Small agencies will have the money to contract with you, but they may not have enough volume. Look for agencies that will give you 250/300+ listing a year.
  • You are in the driver’s seat when it comes to writing a contract, if you write one from scratch with the broker/general manager, you’re better off for it.
  • While negotiating price. be sure to give examples of costs like professional camera gear, lighting equipment, a reliable computer, specialized software and travel. By doing this, it highlights the fact that you aren’t being paid just for your “eye” or “creativity”, you’re producing a product.
• Thomas’s Advice:

The ideal contract is where there is a compulsory aspect that every property over a certain price will be photographed, that will depend on the area but let’s say over $1 million. Everything under that price the agent has the choice to have it photographed or not. The agent will need to give at least 3 days notice to set up a shoot and the images will be turned around the next business day by 12 noon. A standard shoot is $xxx and generates up to 12 images and an Estate shoot is $xxx (double the standard shoot rate) for up to 24 images. These designations are based upon a) How big the property is and b) how many images an agent wants. For example a 4,000 sq ft house automatically falls into the Estate category even if the agent only wants 12 images. If an agent wants the 24 images, even for a 2,000 sq ft house that also goes into the Estate category.

Thanks to Thomas and Mike for sharing all their insights in this area.

Here’s the whole story told by the listing agent Jerry Barbanell. “The buyer came with his agent to see the home, beach front property, you know buyers, well not really sure, but was interested. It is now Saturday morning, at the buyer is at home, as he sits down with his coffee, opens up the Real Estate section of the morning newspaper, and BAM , here is a full page photo of the home he wants to purchase, the one he saw only a day prior. WOW, he thinks to himself, this home look’s fantastic, with this photo, that “darn” listing agent is going to sell this home this weekend. To which, he pick’s up his cell phone call’s his agent, “make an offer”, right now before anyone else see’s this home. Jerry sold the home 30 minutes into the Saturday morning edition of Orange County Register. Did our twilight image sell this home, well Jerry thinks so. Great Photography, does sell homes, just ask one of our satisfied Realtor clients, Jerry.”

Here is Rusty’s description of the technical details of this shot: “The image is a twilight “blue zone” photo, as the base image, taken during a 10 minute window after sunset,  then compiled with about 10 photoshop layers of individual flashed images with a studio strobe, being fired every ten feet while my assistant walked down the street, held the flash, fired, walked out of camera another ten feet, fired.  Photoshop was blended layers by our staff wizard RAF, into the image seen.  Camera was a Canon 5D, base image set on AV, aperture f/18, ISO400, the flash cycle images, manual 200, ISO 400, aperture f/7.1, lens was a Canon 16-35m F/2.8.  This was a fast image, not much done to the base image, a few lights are blown out on the garage, but overall the image is good quality for a brochure or front page of the Real Estate Section of our local county newspaper, Orange County Register.  This is our typical MLS Twilight image.

Thanks Rusty for the story. Keep up the good work! Sounds like you’ve turned Jerry into a regular customer.

We want to formally thank the over 100 beta users for all their feedback and suggestions. I want to highlight just a couple PFREtour.com tours that are already being used market properties:

• 9902 Little Gasparilla Island FL
• Beachfront Rancho Santa Cruz, La Pastora, Baja Mexico
• 555 West 23rd St #S11M, NY

Since January 6 we have added the following features:

1. Syndication to Trulia, Zillow, & Google base.
2. Added music.
3. Support for international tours ( 3 character State field).
4. Custom google maps URL for properties that don’t have an address.
5. Private branding option added (currently changes pfre link at bottom of the tour).
6. Custom domain names available for any tour.
7. Miscellaneous Slide show Improvements.
8. Realtor.com (Picturepath) posting.
9. Black background option.
10. Added ability to display photo descriptions.

New PFREtour.com prices effective Monday March 22:
(current prices will remain the same until the PFREtour.com launch)

1. 1 tour $10
2. 10 tours $90
3. 20 tours $160

Currently Planned PFREtour.com Feature Enhancements:

1. Tour statistics for each tour.
2. More music choices.
3. A photographer portfolio page that will show all PFREtours by a photographer.
4. An agent portfolio and past listings page showing all PFREtours for an agent.
5. Allow PFREtours  to be embeddable.
6. Allow tour creator to control slide transition time and display times.

We believe that we will have these six features added in a matter of weeks but aren’t going to commit to specific dates. If you’d like to give us input on prioritizing these features or give us input on new PFREtour.com features we’ve setup a google.com/moderator area for anyone to contribute input and or vote on everyone’s suggestions. We are committed to doing what users think is most important.

Thanks again for everyone’s help in getting PFREtour.com running smoothly.

A PFRE e-book is a life time subscription to learning about real estate photography. That is, after you purchase one you get all future updates. However, getting future updates depends on keeping the e-mail address associated with your original purchase since that’s the only way I have of sending you future updates.

Since I started publishing e-books they have gotten a lot more popular because of Amazon’s kindle. Amazon claims to have sold more e-books during the last quarter of 2009 than it sold hardcopy books. Later this year the iPad will add another dimension books to the e-book medium. PFRE e-books are currently distributed just in PDF form because that’s still the most useful form that works on all platforms. However, I’m going to be watching the evolution of e-books on the iPad and doing what is necessary to make sure that PFRE e-books work well on the iPad. I have no idea what that means at this point.

I’m currently working on the following PFRE e-book updates that will occur some time in 2010:

1. Updates to Photography For Real Estate: There will be updates to the hardware chapter, the HDR chapter, the workflow chapter and a new chapter on video for real estate photography.
2. Updates to The Business of Real Estate Photography: There will be updates to the “deciding what to charge” chapter and a bunch of updates to chapters that have to do with marketing. I want to organize the strategy and tactics that we all are learning about how to survive in this recessionary economy.

I am also in the process of working on partnering with other authors to publish a wider variety of real estate photography e-books.

The questions Mike and I discuss this episode are:

1-How to convince agents that photography is worthwhile and worth the cost?

3-Would you recommend processing your photos in PTLens before processing them in Photomatix?

My answer was, “The market for real estate video is, I think, large. The problem is that it’s more difficult to shoot video   than shooting stills. You need some special equipment and there is a lot to learn when you start shooting video. You need special editing software and there are hosting considerations. There are only a relative handful of real estate photographers that do it now but those that do it well and market it well are getting business.”

This is my take from talking to a lot of real estate photographers and agents and looking what’s being done on the multiple and on agent’s sites. I’d like to hear what everyone thinks and get a feel for how much video is being shot.

From what I see agents eat it up when it’s available and marketed well. What do you think? ]]> http://photographyforrealestate.net/2010/02/23/what-is-the-market-for-real-estate-video-how-many-are-shooting-video/feed/ 36 http://photographyforrealestate.net/2010/02/21/aperture-vs-lightroom-is-there-a-best-choice-for-real-estate-photography/ http://photographyforrealestate.net/2010/02/21/aperture-vs-lightroom-is-there-a-best-choice-for-real-estate-photography/#comments Sun, 21 Feb 2010 19:27:03 +0000 larry http://photographyforrealestate.net/?p=4207 Apple’s recent release of Aperture 3.0 highlight’s the fact that photographers that are Mac users are faced with a choice of do they use Adobe Lightroom or Aperture for digital asset and workflow management.

I want to disclose right up front that I am a Mac user and I use Lightroom extensively and Aperture only occasionally. I use Aperture primarily because I cover it in my e-books and am interested in being able to give sound, unbiased advice in the area of workflow.

I don’t intend to do a feature by feature comparison (others have already done that) but rather raise some of the general issues and considerations that Mac photographers should use to help make the decision of which is best for them personally. Here are some of the issues to consider if you find yourself trying to decide between Lightroom and Aperture:

1. Lightroom 3 is still in beta so in a way there are details to compare with Aperture 3 but there could well be significant new features in the final release of Lightroom 3 that we don’t know about. So exact feature comparisons are still impossible. However, it’s clear that the noise reduction and sharpening in Lightroom 3 is going to be world class!
2. There are some dazzling new features in Aperture 3! It now manages video files and even allows you to create mixed video and still slide shows and I love the new adjustment brushes! Ya, Lightroom has adjustment brushes but the Aperture 3 brushes are more intuitive and work better.
3. It’s been two years since Aperture 2 was released. One has to wonder why Apple takes so long between releases. Is their development staff big enough? They took a similarly long time between the first two versions of Aperture. They also take too long time to get RAW support for new cameras. Apple keeps promising to get better in this area but their track record is dismal. Just ask a D300 user that had tried to use Aperture 2 for RAW files.
4. When Apple makes an update to Aperture they don’t have an open beta process with users like Adobe does, where users can give input, they just drop a release on the users. This closed approach seems to be part of the Apple culture. This closed approach makes sense for their consumer hardware products (like iPhones and iPods) but doesn’t make a lot of sense for Professional level software products. This closed approach to software development is more convenient for the developers but I think it does not make for great customer relations.
5. Apple software products have a high level of integration with other Apple products. Aperture is nicely integrated with iPhoto, me.com and I expect the same will be true for the iPad. This integration may eventually extend to iMovie and Final Cut Pro. You will never get that level of integration with Lightroom.
6. There are four times more Mac photographers using Lightroom than Aperture. Taking a look at these popularity numbers is an valuable insight. Up through Aperture 2 Mac photographers clearly preferred  Lightroom.
7. I find Aperture 3 runs noticeably slower than Lightroom Beta 3 on my MacBook Pro (2.4 Mhz Core 2 Duo with 2 gig ram). I did this comparison by loading exactly the same 40 images from my 5D MkII into a fresh catalog in Aperture 3 and Lightroom Beta 3. Update: John Quarles notes below in the comments that his experience is that Aperture 3 need at least 4 Gig of RAM and 8 is even better.

So, is there a clear winner at this point if you are a real estate photographer? I don’t think so. Before the release of Aperture 3, I would have said Aperture was out of the running, but Aperture 3 gets Apple back in the game. I’m personally put off by the sluggishness of Aperture 3 but its features are stunning. There is still no way for real estate photographers to straighten verticals and remove barrel distortion in either Aperture or Lightroom without using a plugin like PTLens and there never will be because both Aperture and Lightroom are committed to non-distructive adjustments.

For anyone in the process of making a choice between Aperture 3 and Lightroom 3 I recommend that you listen to TWIP (This Week In Photography) episode #129 also available through iTunes (search for TWIP). This particular podcast is a well balanced discussion of all the strengths and weaknesses of Lightroom and Aperture. Also, you need to tryout both Aperture 3 and Lightroom Beta 3 on your particular Mac. There are free trials for both. Which you choose depends a lot on your machine and your personal priorities.

1. Hot shoe
2. RAW mode
3. HD video (well, maybe not essential)
4. Manual mode

In addition to these essential real estate photography shooting features the HS10 has some other amazing features like:

1. 30X optical zoom from 24-720mm and it’s a manual zoom for better and faster control.
2. 10fps high speed shooting for action shots.
3. 1000fps high speed movie mode.
4. 1080p video with stereo sound.
5. Some cool in camera features like motion remover and motion panorama.
6. Apparently, good low-light performance.

All of these features for $499. The HS10 will ship in March 2010. It’s available for pre-ordering now at Amazon.

I’m continually amazed by what Moore’s Law continues to do to compact cameras!

The answer to the what to charge question has two parts:

1. How much on the average does it cost you to show-up to any property in your territory?
2. How much should you charge as an hourly rate?

How much to show-up? Anyone in the business of driving around to properties in these days of rising transportation costs needs to be keeping track of vehicle costs and reviewing them frequently. Figure more than just fuel costs. You need to include auto insurance and vehicle replacement costs. Here is a great site to help you calculate vehicle costs.

What is your hourly rate? This is a tougher question. But you know what hourly rate you’ve been paid in other jobs. The difference when you are working for yourself is you need to figure out what accountants call a “burdened” rate. That is, a rate that includes paying for marketing, health insurance, camera equipment, retirement and all the other costs of making this a long term sustainable job.

What’s the competition charging? It goes without saying that knowing what the competition is doing is always an important part of the what to charge question. Take care when doing this. You have to also compare the competition’s services. Studying the competition’s prices and offerings needs to be a regular exercise.

The PFRE what do you charge poll: The “what do you charge poll” on the Polls page (third from the bottom) shows the results of poll data I’ve been collecting for some time on what real estate photographers say they charge. This is a 100,000 foot level view of prices because the people voting are from 110 different countries, 67% US, 7% CA, 6% AU etc. All presumably converted to USD before they voted, this only gives a general feel of what the range of prices are. It’s more important to make sure you are recovering your expenses and making a fair wage. As much as anything this poll gives a feeling for the distribution of prices that agents are willing to pay.

The big city effect: Since I spend time in Seattle, WA and Salem, OR I’ve become keenly aware of the difference of what services cost between Seattle and Salem. Everything in Seattle cost twice as much as it does in Salem. This location factor effects what real estate photographers can charge as well. In big metropolitan areas real estate photographers need to charge more because it’s more expensive to operate whereas in sleepy rural areas where the cost of living is less. In general, you’ll need to charge less in small rural towns.

The effect of marketing: I think the effectiveness of your marketing is an important factor that is frequently over looked because photographers like to photograph better than they like to market. If you do effective marketing and keep your name in front of your potential customers and if successful agents use your services, you’ll get more business at a given price than if you just sit back and wait for the phone to ring.