Photography For Real Estate

Now that the new directory is up and running I wanted to point out some of the cool new features of the new directory:

• Three types of entries: Just as it’s been for years, there are three types of entries. Standard, Winner (Photographer of the Month winners) and Premium.  Premium entries show up at the top of all directory searches.
• Shortcuts: The four links West Coast, Middle States, East Coast and Outside US correspond to the four different pages of the old directory.  There are also shortcuts for some states and cities down in the footer.
• Detailed search: For a more detailed search use the country and state drop downs plus the Name/Website/City search box. People are likely to search by city name just because that’s the area they are likely to find a photographer they need. So you should use your simple city name when you register.
• More information: This new directory let’s you supply and update your information. It has a free form description area where you can put any text you want about your business. It’s free form so you can put phone numbers email addresses or what ever you want in there. Also, each directory entry has an email form for people to contract you.
• Comments: Right now comments are allowed on directory entries but after a couple of days operation I think this feature was a bad idea. We are going to be turning off comments.
• New PFRE Directory Access for old directory subscribers: I know that old directory subscribers would like to get their login account and password for their directory entry so they can update and change their entry like new subscribers. This coming week (week of 5/13), I’ll be emailing out accounts and passwords to all the old subscribers that I have email addresses for. So be patient, we’ll get everyone taken care of.
• Click through Stats: Each directory entry shows how many visitors have clicked on your directory entry (left hand number labeled “views”) and how many have clicked the link to your website (right hand number that is labeled “sent out”).
• Get Listed Now: Anyone who is not logged in to the directory will see the orange “Get Listed Now” button which allows you to sign-up and put yourself in the directory as soon as your payment is authorized.
• Directory subscriptions: Standard directory entries are $30/year and a Premium directory entry is $40/year. All the feedback I get from the almost 500 photographers currently in the directory indicates that you get business from this directory.
• Directory Traffic: The directory is currently averaging around 2500 Pageviews a month and with the new directory you’ll be able to see how many of those your directory entry gets and how many viewer click-through to your site.

I’m glad to get the PFRE Directory updated so it is no longer limited. I believe this is a much better directory for half the price it’s been.

Cleanup: There are still a few old invalid entries in the directory which I’m working on cleaning up.

Performance: Yes, during peak periods the PFRE blog is at times slower than it should be. My next step is to get the blog moved to a higher performance server to remedy this. I can’t promise when, but it will be as soon as possible.

Update 5/13: All the little startup problems we had are now fixed.

Thanks to my bro down in Perth (Dave Williamson)  for getting me going on this week in real estate video TWIRV. I was preoccupied this week with getting the new Real Estate Photographers Directory running so I didn’t have a subject for this week’s TWIRV until Dave sent me this little ditty by Raphael Alberto Perez (his initials are RAP).

Raphael’s video got coverage in HuffPo. Raphael did this whole video with his iPhone and a greenscreen. Turns out Raphael isn’t the only Realtor to be RAP’n. Here are some others:

• Makin’ Money – TheAgent.tv
• Real Estate Rap: Houses Gettin’ Sold!
• Real Estate Rap

Interestingly Raphael’s YouTube has already been remixed by DGMUSICisGOOD. This may be a first; a remixed property video.

This all goes to show you that if you are willing to get out there and do something wild and crazy on camera you can get a lot of  attention. After all marketing is all about getting attention. “I don’t care what you say about me, just spell my name right.” – P.T. Barnum

Suzanne Feinberg in Scottsdale, AZ correctly pointed out to me today that it has been a very long time since I’ve talked about the PFRE photographer directory from a “what can it do for your business stand point”. So Suzanne wrote a guest post on SEO for real estate photographers and offered to coach three PFRE readers on this subject. If you are interested in Suzanne’s offer contact her via her contact page. Here is her post.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Are you using it effectively to help bring in new clients? Do you want it to be so large that people find you nationally or do you want to be found locally? Have you had any formal training or are you just going it on your own? Did you know that your “ranking” isn’t as important as how easily it is to find your company? These are important issues for the real estate photographer. Larry Lohrman has been great in talking about the physical issues of taking the photo, using appropriate equipment and then processing the images. He does this great for stills and for video. We all have learned so much from this blog.

However, there is one topic that we don’t seem to have enough information on, and that is Search Engine Optimization. This changes constantly as the formulas that Google uses are constantly changing. And, google isn’t the only search engine out there. Did you know that if you have good Bing juice that your google juice will rise?

There are two types of SEO – black and white. You don’t want to do black, you do want to do white. This is not an SEO lesson, but rather to point out how to improve your white SEO. Did you know that Photographyforrealestate.net has some of the best white SEO on the market today and that if you search generally on a local basis, a lot of times your posting or listing on Larry’s blog/directory is what pops up – a lot of times ahead of your website or linked in or facebook entry?

This is because google formulas look for you based on who is linked to you. If the person linking to you has a higher score than you, then you are very likely to be found in the search and more regularly by the crawlers. How does the blog/directory help your SEO. Continue Reading »

The Worldwide PFRE Directory started out as a spreadsheet in 2006. We’ve made several upgrades to it over the years, and today Cristi,  my “WordPress mechanic”, is in the process of implementing the latest upgrade/redesign to the directory. Here are some of the important features of the new design:

• The primary goal for the directory redesign was to make the whole process of maintaining the directory less manual for me. With the old directory I had to make updates with an HTML editor. With the new directory you enter your own data in your directory entry, and you can come back, login and update it whenever you like.
• The new directory is implemented as a WordPress database and is  searchable by country, state and city, or other string.
• Premium directory entries are show at the top of directory searches.
• There’s a freeform space for you to add a description of your business, phone number, e-mail all what ever you want (with in reason).
• Since I don’t have to do all the manual work to maintain it I’m cutting the yearly subscription cost in half. $30/yr for a regular entry and $40/yr for a premium entry.
• Everyone that’s already in the directory as of the conversion will become permanent at no cost.
• Cristi has assured me that the new directory redesign will keep the top SEO ranking that the old directory has.

I’ll be updating this post when Cristi gets the new directory up and running. I won’t promise any particular time or date. If every thing goes well the new directory should be operational sometime 5/8 or 5/9. While we are updating the new directory registrations have been turned off.

Update late 5/8: Directory update is going well we expect to have the new directory live some time on 5/9. You can look at the new directory here. I will probably do a post on 5/9 to explain some of the new features.

I’ve done a post about Pennsylvania Realtor, Jeffrey Hogue before, but Jeffrey and his bucket truck are such a special story I think the occasion of Jeffrey re-painting the truck is a reason to feature him again. When is the last time you saw a real estate agent that believed strongly enough in marketing and photography that they would go out and buy a bucket truck just to make sure they got good elevated front shots!

All you have to do is look at Jeffrey’s website and it says it all. Jeffrey has great listing photos (better than some professionals) and expresses a true passion for photography and marketing. It’s no accident that Jeffrey has been a top agent in his market for 10 years. Being passionate about marketing is what makes you a top agent.

Jeffrey says:

Several years ago I stumbled onto a web site named “PFRE”. One of the posts was about how photographers take elevated photos of homes. I have always loved photography and wielded a pretty mean camera when taking photos of my listings. Then “PFRE” introduced me to Scott Hargis and I purchased his ebook. That was probably the most expensive book I ever purchased! I went out an bought about $20,000 in Cameras, lenses & lighting that was consistent with what Scott uses. I studied and practiced his techniques for months. This along with my extensive background as a Realtor (18 Years as one of the top in my area), my ability to create real estate web sites and my sheer lust for marketing were not enough. No no, I had to find something that no one had and make it work. I listed a home that was owned by a Tree Specialist and he had a bucket truck. That was it. I took my extreme passion for real estate, photography, web design & marketing and purchased a class 8 (25.000 GVW) bucket truck. I designed the wrap and viola. There it was. The meanest, most beautiful real estate billboard on wheels with a bucket lift for aerial photos of my listings and storage for all my signs. The moral of this story is simple. Invest in yourself and your abilities. It is the best money you will ever spend. The truck has been the talk of the town. It was in the local paper, real estate ads, Active Rain blogs & now PFRE.. What an honor!. Thank you “PFRE” for the inspiration and information to help me go farther.

There are only a handful of real estate agents that can do photography at this level, and many of them are PFRE readers and contributors. My hat is off to Jeffrey for the great marketing job he is doing. He is a model for the successful agent.

Last week I had a reader tell me he’d like to see some discussion on the blog about how to improve his real estate workflow in Aperture. As he gets busier he wants to speed up his workflow without sacrificing quality. My short answer to his question is, “get a copy of Lightroom!”

First of all let me say that I use both Aperture 3 and Lightroom 4. I’m a Mac user, and there’s several things I really like about Aperture 3, but I NEVER use Aperture for real estate work. I do all of my real estate work with Lightroom! Here’s why:

1. Lightroom 4 is faster for correcting verticals and barrel distortion: There’s no equivalent of the Lightroom Lens Correction panel in Aperture. This means if you care about fixing converging verticals and barrel distortion (and you’d better care if you are a real estate photographer) you have to use the PTlens plugin with Aperture, and make a round-trip out to PTlens for each photo (yuk!) or run a PTlens batch process outside of Aperture to do what you can literally do with a click and a couple of sliders in Lightroom 4 and will be done automatically in Lightroom 5.
2. Lightroom and Aperture 3+PTlens are effectively the same price: Back when Lightroom was over $200 and Aperture was only $79 there was at least a money argument for real estate photographers using Aperture, but nowadays Aperture 3 is $79, PTlens is $25 and Lightroom 4 is $106 at Amazon. That means Lightroom is effectively $2 more than Aperture for real estate.
3. Lightroom 5′s new Upright feature takes fixing horizontals an verticals to a whole new level: Once Lightroom 5 is released the new upright feature that straightens verticals automatically will save real estate photographers a huge amount of post time. It will probably save the price if the upgrade in the first week!

So my answer to the post title is, YES! Aperture is Dead For Real Estate Photographers. If you are a real estate photographer and you are still using Aperture 3 to post process your shoots I guarantee you can speed up your post processing by purchasing a copy of the new Lightroom 5 when it is released. In the mean time get a free beta copy here and start getting up to speed. Sure, there may be a short learning curve if you’ve never used Lightroom before but it is not all that different an interface than Aperture. You’ll be up and running in a couple of days.

The most amazing thing to me is that Aperture 3 was released 2 years ago and Apple hasn’t added all the features in the Lightroom 3 yet. It makes me wonder if they even care about competing!

You may have noticed that  YouTube passed an impressive mile stone  last month, YouTube  has passed 1 Billion unique viewers a month. The article in today’s USA Today features Eric Schmidt claiming that, “the battle between YouTube and TV is over”. You’d probably be right if you are saying, “oh yeah, Eric Schmidt is just promoting his new book, The New Digital Age“. Eric has been on a book promotion tour this week. One statistic in the USA Today article that is significant is that 18 to 34 year olds now watch more YouTube than TV.

But there’s more to the YouTube thing I think than a bunch of media hype. Internet video is probably the most significant Internet development to come along maybe ever. YouTube gets a lot of the attention because it’s free, easy to use and everybody is using it. The democratization of video creation is pretty important. For real estate doing great video is much harder than it looks. It’s easy to create video, it’s hard to create great video.

Here are some interesting real estate videos I’ve come across this week:

• Mud Season in Steamboat Springs by Charlie Dresen. Charlie does a monthly video blog where he talks about what’s happening in Steamboat. Charlie does a great job doing casual information videos. I think Charlie does one of the best real estate video blogs I’ve seen.
• “Killing the Cliche”- SVP: by The NYC office of PlatinumHD.tv. Even though this little video is about agents in New York all calling themselves Senior Vice Presidents, I’ve noticed a lot of SVP’s in the Pacific Northwest so I think the cliche extends well beyond NYC.
• 5125 Rumble St, Burnaby: by Patrick Prade of Burnaby, BC. What I like about this video is the narration style where the make and female voices sound like Mr and Mrs buyer talking about the features of the property. This is a unique approach that feels very effective to me! Patrick also pointed out that there is a Google+ community called “the best if real estate video” that readers of This Week In Real Estate Video may be interested in. I noticed that there are a number of readers and contributors already in the community.

I’m ready to start accepting Interior shots with breath taking views  for the May 2013 PFRE photographer of the month contest. Here are the contestants so far. iPad/iPhone users use the slide show on the left side-bar.

For those not familiar with this series of monthly competitions take a look at the Contest page that describes all the rules and the whole contest process. For a look at previous monthly winners and all the yearly winners go to the best-of-the-best page (on the top menu bar click “Featured”).

This contest is a juried contest. The list of jurors is on the contest page. The primary purpose of the contest is being recognized by your peers in the real estate photography industry.

The theme for May is “Interior with breath taking view”, and we will be accepting only photos with that theme until May 15. The winner will be picked by the jury between May 16 and May 23. The contest is anonymous. That is, no one knows who submitted the photos (except me) until the jury has chosen a winner. Once a winner is chosen the names and the number of points the jury awarded to each entrant is posted on each photo.

As usual the submitted images are available for viewing and discussion in the PFRE Photographer of The Month flickr group. I post them there as they are submitted. Also for people with devices that won’t display Flash the left-sidebar widget displays the submitted images in a non-Flash format. This sidebar display lags the flickr group display by several hours. Or use one of the great new Flickr Apps available on tablets and SmartPhones.

Long time readers an members of the PFRE flickr group know Vince DeStefano of Melbourne. Vince has contributed many articles on aerial real estate photography and Pole Aerial Photography over the years.

Recently Vince has invested in a UAV system for his real estate photography business (you can do that if your business is in AU). The video to the right is of a recent test flight he did.

Here is Vince’s description of his system:

Just wanted to tell you about my new quadcopter I have purchased for aerial video and photography. It’s the perfect tool for real estate photographers and it has now replaced my elevated pole rig.

Its called the Steadi 470 and its made by a company called Zero Tech. The beauty of this quadcopter is that it has been built and designed to shoot aerial video using a steadi cam system. It has absolutely no other purpose than to shoot video and stills.

Lots of guys spend countless amounts of time and money researching and building their own drones for aerial photography. Zero tech has done all the hard work on this one and it just works! Continue Reading »

Thanks to Aric Boyles for pointing out this awesome little piece of Javascript goodness by Vladimir Agafonkin of Kiev. Note, I’m talking about Vladimir’s SunCalc.net webpage, not the IOS App that is similar for $.99.

For those that are not familiar with LighTrac, it’s an IOS/Android App that will show you what the sun angle and elevation will be at any given address and date. LighTrac is $4.99 in the  Apple App store, Amazon App Store and Android Google App Store.

Of course the whole point of LighTrac and SunCalc and other similar Apps is to be able to plan a shoot so you are not going to be shooting directly into the sun for the front shot.

Vladimir’s SunCalc.net website is very cool. It works beautifully on iPads, laptops, large screen desktops and even small 7″ tablets like iPad Mini and Kindle Fire. It works on SmartPhones too but on small screens like the iPhone 4s there is just too much stuff smushed on the screen to be useful. Perhaps on the larger Samsung smartphones with a larger screen it works better.

I should mention that SunCalc doesn’t show you the sun elevation  like LighTrac does but to me that not a show stopper.

I think SunCalc is a great example of how great web apps can be done that will run on any device and in this time of transition from desktop/laptop to mobile devices you really want these apps to be available everywhere.

Hats off to Vladimir!