A Kirkwood classic listing provides a good opportunity to demonstrate one of the virtual tours that can be included with a shoot.
Branded Tour and for the MLS:  No Branding Tour

   

If your photographer is not supplying this service, you have to question if you really have a RE professional photographer.  To do this right requires some special training and the right software. Notice how the brightness and shadows of the properties match up to the sky.

Each of the images above are post-edited photographs before and after drop-in sky.

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Stop, Don’t Sell Your Home!  Sell Your Property

 Audience: Sellers, Realtors 

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Putting your house on the market? Keep in mind that it’s not YOUR home you’re selling. It’s a piece of property that you want someone to visualize as THEIR home!  That may sound like common sense, but it is so easy to glide over the obvious details, especially as you live in YOUR home every day and go about living your life with family and perhaps kids and pets. 

Simple steps can be made that will increase the selling price by thousands of dollars and shorten the time on the market dramatically.  These suggestions come from a photographer that has shot hundreds of homes.  Agents worth hiring are all too aware of these points and will help guide you along the way.  This may seem like simple common sense and somewhat repetitive, but listed below is representative of what I see daily. 

Curb Appeal & Exterior

That all-important first impression is what a potential buyer sees as they pull up to the property in their car.  That buyer will only see the property if they are motivated by impressive photography on the web, or their buyer’s agent drove them there.  How do you think people start looking for THEIR NEW HOME these days?  You got it–most start on the web.  The first feature photograph is typically the front of the house. 

It doesn’t matter whether you are selling a modest home or one north of that million-dollar mark.  There are things you can do that require minimal expense or time to dramatically improve curb appeal.  Don’t assume that a high-priced home automatically looks good; many don’t and can be nightmares for photographers and agents.  Of course, everyone wants top dollar for their property. 

Here are some things to consider for the exterior, before the home hits the market and before the photographer arrives.  Keep in mind that if your selling team has done its job, it’s possible for the property to be seen by thousands of prospective buyers. 

• Remove clutter from the front of the house. That includes children’s toys. On so many shoots, I find myself and hopefully the agent moving items to the garage or hiding them from view.  This would apply to both the front and rear of the home.   Do you really want your photographer to deal with this, or pay full attention to what is necessary to market the property? In addition to children’s toys, remove lawn tools, garden hoses, trash cans and all other distractions from sight.  (Those trash cans can’t always stay in the garage, but they can be kept clean and tidy.)
• Depending on the time of year, the lawn should always be freshly mowed, and you should do your best to deal with a weed or mole problem.  The mole or critter situation is worth hiring professional help to resolve.
• Remove grass and other vegetation from expansion seams or cracks in the sidewalk and driveway. I include trimming overgrown shrubs and bushes in this category as well.
• If the exterior is dirty and perhaps marked with mold stains, clean it.  Who wants to buy a house with mold-covered gutters and vegetation showing? That about guarantees distressed sale pricing.
• If needed, power-wash the driveway, sidewalks and patio areas.  If you have gone through the expense of having a pool, the water should be clear and the pool should be in obvious working order.  It is frustrating for a real-estate photographer to walk into the pool area to find the owner pouring super shock in a green-colored, foggy pool.

 For the rest, we can leave it to your common sense and suggestions of your realtor.  Accent color in the way of flowers can add to curb appeal. At a minimum, the home should look clean, uncluttered, and well maintained.
   

Interior

You always have the option of securing the services of a home stager.  Your agent may provide one or be able to refer you to a qualified individual.  Good agents maintain a contact list of professionals to help market your house.  You should start on this well ahead of putting your property on the market, as this effort may take awhile.   

• CLUTTER results in bad marketing photographs.  Keep in mind all those potential buyers looking at your property on the Internet.  Then there comes the day the home goes on the market and you schedule an open house!  Clutter will not only make a room look smaller, but messier, too. De-clutter all surfaces, including the floor.
• Remove as many personal photographs as possible. You want the prospective buyers to visualize how the house will become their home. 
• Rooms should be staged for the intended purpose.  If a dining room has been turned into a playroom full of toys, it is time to consider showing the room as intended.  A mass of toys in that playroom in a finished
  basement will not only look cluttered, but give an impression of how the property was maintained.  Time to box things up for the sale, or at least during the photo shoot, open houses and showings.
• Too much furniture in a room can make a room look small or cluttered.  A little sparse is better than over crowed.
• Cleaning cannot be understated.  This especially applies to the kitchen and bathrooms.  There should be very little on countertops and everything must be spotless.  Remove bath towels and floor mats.  New accent towels can be used to add a splash of color.
• Color coordination counts. Light colored walls typically work better than dark.  The help of a stager in this respect cannot be understated.  If you’re going to paint before selling (always a good idea), I strongly recommend using that stager to help with color selection.
• In most cases, only living spaces are photographed.   For open houses and showings, people look in closets.  Did I mention clutter?
• REPAIR anything that needs it.  Remember, you will be required to disclose any defects.  It is worthwhile to have your home inspected well in advance of going to market.  The home is going to be inspected for the buyer to get that mortgage, so why not know as much as possible upfront?  Things found wrong are a negotiating point to lower the price!

That’s a start.  These are some things to consider even before you sign a contract with an agent.  A good agent will help with all this in greater detail to help you get the best price possible and sell your property during the contract period.  After all, the selling agent’s duties include investment of time and money in hiring a professional real-estate photographer.  Add to that staging advice (often hired), advertising, scheduling of showings, holding open houses, and assisting in meeting all those legal requirements.

Printable copy of this article (pdf)

The MLS and sites that syndicate to these images are too small to do a good job of representing a property.  Large, high-quality images have more impact, draw more attention, and are less likely to be eliminated from consideration.  This is because they are often less distorted than smaller images. (See- The Case for Slide-Show Virtual Tours).

The tours provided by Fred Depp Photography Standard Shoots and up offer full-screen viewing.  Click the icon on the lower right of the virtual tour to see the full-screen view. (In this mode, however, you’ll need a good Internet connection.  Slower connections will mean some hesitation in the first few views.) Here’s a sample tour:

BTW iPhones are auto detected and served, too.  So when you’re using the Realtor.com iPhone App, the virtual tour fits right in.

The often-quoted mega agent Barbara Corcoran  did an interview on the Today Show recently.  Barbara  summarizes the importance of “Waging War Online” by hiring a professional photographer!  

Worth emphasizing is something Barbara didn’t mention, and that is that once you have those professionally-done images, people need to see the work large and crisp. Even if viewed on a Droid or iPhone, a virtual tour gives control of the quality and size  back to the photographer and thus the agent.

Audience: Realtors

Here is an example of an image you’ve just uploaded to the MLS:

This is how your client might find your property listed on the web:

That was a simulation.  If you’ve been an agent awhile, then you know the problem or may have wondered why sometimes results are even worse than this depiction. Please read on.

The variety of types and quality of virtual tours is wide and encompasses everything from simple slide shows to Hollywood-quality cinematography. Is video more likely to succeed than slides pasted together to create a tour, or a series of 360-degree panoramic presentations? As for slide shows, they can be automatically generated from MLS-listed property images by real-estate web sites. No matter what your opinion, there are some important concepts to consider in your decision about whether to do virtual tours.

Let’s examine the process of listing a property for sale from the marketing point of view, with emphasis on what a potential client sees when selecting a property for consideration.

Assuming the home has been staged and de-cluttered, etc., it is time to take those photos. A series of images is taken by the photographer or the agent. The best images are selected and uploaded to the local MLS and Realtor.com. Your pictures look fine on the computer—everything is sharp and clear. But here is where it starts to fall apart.

When the MLS processes the images you’ve uploaded, they resize them. They place their logo on the shots and compress the images, allowing them to take up less disk space and load faster in a browser window. The compression process takes away picture information, and thus some of that sharp and crisp look. (Fred Depp Photography provides images uncompressed as a starting point.) The result is that the property doesn’t look as good as you want it to look. Maybe there is even a little color shift. The point is, the mutilation of your presentation has begun.  Each time the image is recopied the distortion increases.  Your picture quality depends on the level of compression a site uses.

Digital cameras save images to the storage card in jpeg file format. This is a compressed file format that irreversibly loses picture information each time the image is saved. JPEG compression makes your file sizes small, so you can fit more pictures on your digital storage card. JPEG is also the file format that is typically used to upload to the local MLS. Smaller-sized files also download faster and load quicker on the web.

There are various levels of JPEG compression. High compression produces lower quality and smaller files. Lower compression equals higher quality and larger file sizes. Each time the file is transferred, picture information is lost. Your computer to MLS to other websites…

Professional photographers use a different file system that does not lose file information. You may have heard the term RAW format used by photo geeks.

Have you ever Googled the address of one of your properties for sale and found all your competitors and a plethora of third-party sites promoting your property? Have you noticed that this can happen in just a couple of hours after you list to the MLS? That means that the destruction of that quality real-estate photography work that you paid for continues. Now it is more than just the losses from JPEG compression! Different web sites use different aspect ratios for their photo and slide-show presentations. Fred Depp shoots with a ratio of 3:2 that works just fine for the MLS. Many other sites use a 4:3 aspect ratio. There is no 100% standard, and how they make all the adjustments is out of your control.  So now your image is either cropped or further distorted. And you thought it was YOUR listing!

The aspect ratio of an image is the ratio of the width of the image to its height, expressed as two numbers separated by a colon.

..

Wikipedia Definition 

One sure way to gain control of YOUR listing is through the virtual tour. A virtual tour is a link to a web page. This gives you some control. Most importantly, you can control the quality of the information presented. This can be accomplished without breaking the bank.  Lower-priced properties can have a simple, no-thrills, low-cost, basic slide show.

Here’s a sample of a very basic slide show virtual tour

Please notice that the images are larger, crisper, and cleaner. For homes, say, above $300K, you’ll want to add a little extra. This could include information about your agency, a description of the house, contact information, music, and so on.

Fred Depp Photography Slide Show Virtual Tour Sample

If you have a speedy link to the Internet, try viewing in full-screen mode. Click the icon in the lower right corner. Of course, the music can be adjusted by the user, or you can elect not to have music. The link above includes agent branding. There is also an MLS version with no branding. Both are included when the tour is generated. 

Tours are designed to adapt and automatically work on mobile devices such as the iPhone. This tour software detects the device and can present tours in this device, including your contact information. Think of a rider on your signage or an addition to your property brochure that includes a “QR” (Quick Response) code for an instant link to the tour. Aim the phone’s camera at the QR code and with the right app, your phone will display the tour.

This is a QR. You’ve seen it on bank statements, and its use is growing in North America.

If you need help with implementation of the technology, just contact Fred Depp Photography.

Currently a tour can be syndicated to Zillow, Trulia, & Google Base when the tour is created.  The tour web address can be entered in the MLS listing when you upload images, along with your agency’s own web site. Realtor.com has a fee for listing tours. The Fred Depp Photography tour can be applied to the Realtor.com site as well.

Update – February 14, 2011

When using a syndication service (other than the MLS) or upload images directly to a 3rd party listing service, pay attention to image upload instructions .  A suggested image size of 640×480 images has an aspect ratio of 4:3.  It is better for you or your photographer to convert an image with a 3:2 aspect ratio before upload to these services.  If you don’t provide the correct format, the listing service computers will do the conversion for you and introduce a distortion in your image.

Audiance:  Realtors, Sellers

Fred Depp Photography is now offering Virtual Tours.  The tours are hosted by the Fred Depp web server for embed into you your own web site or submission to a MLS.  Virtual tours are also published on YouTube. You can see the first samples at http://www.youtube.com/user/freddeppphotography .  Of course YouTube videos also embed in websites with the YouTube logo and advertising.  The tours are typically created unbranded.  At your choice branding can be added.  Since the local MLS does not allow any branding except their own, there is some sense in actually having two versions of a Virtual Home Tour for a property. 

 Sameple Tour Page: 4540 Dubois Creek Lane

Audience:  Realtors

Photographs are a central component of marketing a property. The primary function that photos perform is to get prospective buyers to come look at the property and contact you, the agent!

In today’s market where 87% or more home buyers start their home search online, a little thumbnail of the front of the property becomes the first reason buyers choose to look at more photos of your listing instead of the 20 others at the same price and location. Great interior photos, in turn, become the reason a buyer chooses to look at your listing instead of the others. As pointed out by Vivian Toy in her classic February, 2007, New York Times article, Making Every Pixel Count,“a picture can be worth more than a thousand words, much, much more.”

But there are even more compelling reasons for using great photography to present your listing:

• The home seller client will be pleased with how you are presenting their property.
• It’s a well-established fact that great photos and marketing materials are a way to get more listings. Neighbors of the listing property watch carefully how a property is marketed. If they like what the see, they will ask you to list their property.
• If you are competing for a listing, the commitment of professionally-done photography and marketing materials can help you win the listing.

As the marketing expert in charge of selling your client’s property, it is very important these days to understand the way marketing photos work so you can use photography to maximum benefit, whether you are shooting your own photos or hiring a professional photographer.

Here are 10 essential principles that you can use to give your marketing photos maximum effectiveness:

1. Keep in mind what the primary purpose of a real-estate marketing photo is. It’s to sell the property. Make sure each photo visually supports this purpose. Anything that distracts the viewer’s attention from this purpose should be eliminated, if possible. Items 3 through 8 below are the most common distractions that pull the viewer’s attention away from the purpose of the photo. Also, photo composition is all important because it controls the viewer’s attention and causes them to focus on the photo.
   
   While the photo on the left shows perspective and gives the viewer a feel for the size of the room, a table is blocking the key feature of the room. The image to the right draws attention to the fireplace and a large window with a view.
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2. Use a wide-angle lens to shoot interiors. Wide-angle lenses increase the feeling of space in interiors. What’s a wide-angle lens? Lenses with a wide enough angle of view to shoot interior don’t usually come with off the shelf-cameras. For interiors, a lens should be between 16mm and 24mm effective focal length.
   
3. Remove clutter and stage interiors for best results. It’s a well-known fact that staging homes pays off. Homes sell faster and for a higher price when they are staged. Most lived-in homes have too much clutter. Photos will look better and show more of the home if clutter is reduced and furniture is staged by a trained home stagger.
   
4. The primary exterior shot is THE most important photo. Spend extra time, money and effort to get a “knock-out” front photo because this is the photo that will be seen most and first by prospective home buyers. Online thumbnails of this photo must entice the buyer to look closer at the property. Encourage the seller to put extra effort into preparing the curb view. Many homes benefit from an elevated front shot where the camera is 10’ to 20’ above the street level. The green-checked image here was shot at about 15′ above street level. There is certainly a place  for an elevated photograph, depending on the property.
   
   Given the size of the image on MLS listings, a closer image of the front of the home at eye level to reflect curb appeal is the most appropriate for many agents. This applies to modest as well as expensive properties.
   
5. Render interiors light and bright. Bright interiors are upbeat and make a more positive impression on the prospective buyer, so you want light, bright photos. Photos from amateur cameras are often under exposed. Special lighting or photo-editing techniques must be used to get interior rooms to appear light and bright.
   
6. Vertical lines (walls, etc.) must look perfectly straight. We live in a world where we unconsciously know that all walls are perfectly vertical. When a viewer sees a room where the walls are not parallel with the side of the photo, the viewer is visually distracted and disoriented. A voice in your head is saying this is not right.
   
7. Vertical and horizontal lines must be straight. Wide-angle lenses cause lines near the edges of photos to curve so special efforts and software must be used to remove distortion.
   
8. Don’t let bright windows distract. Unless special lighting or photo-editing software is used, interior windows will tend to look too bright, so the view out the window is not visible. It is always possible to show the view out the window if it is an important selling point of the property; however special work by the photographer may be required to make sure the exterior view is clearly visible.
   
9. Don’t let color casts distract. Strong color casts (typically a strong orange color) distract the viewers attention.
   
10.  The way photos are presented, both online and in print, has a big impact on the overall effectiveness of marketing a property. Photos have the most impact when presented large (800×600 pixels or larger) and in a smooth, easily-controllable slide show. Real estate sites typically do not present photos in the most effective way possible. The purpose of a virtual tour or slide show is to maximize the impact of marketing photos.

As a realtor, you can look for a photographer that uses these principles.  If you are technically inclined you can use these principles to shoot photos yourself, or have support staff with technical expertise shoot the photos.

As the listing agent in charge of marketing a property, you are responsible for implementing these principles. Use these guidelines to produce, select and present your marketing photos for maximum effectiveness.

If you or someone on your support staff is not up to creating photos that follow the 10 essential principles above, hire a professional real-estate photographer to shoot photos of your listing.

For a few hundred dollars a listing you can hire a professional real-estate photographer. Experienced real-estate photographers will follow these principles. But remember, you are the marketing expert. If you don’t see these principles being followed, ask questions.

This post material is licensed by PhotographyForRealEstate.net under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.  To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/.  It has been modified from the original for this blog post to reflect the views of Fred Depp Photography. Any modifications or additional artwork fall within the scope of the linked license. The license only applies to this specific post. Other posts and content of freddepp.com remains protected by copyright unless specially stated otherwise.

As a real estate photographer it is often the case that I arrive at a property not really ready for the shoot.  Vegitation may be growing from cracks in the driveway, to branches cluttering the roof or missing light bulbs in interrior fixtures.  this seems to apply from modest homes to the barley sub million dollar properties.  To assist sellers in making sure the best light is put on that important photoshoot used to present their home on the listing services, I’ve prepared a Photo Shoot Checklist.

Updated Real Estate Photography Checklist

Seller agents are welcome to print out this check list (single double-sided sheet) to distribute to their sellers.