Real estate photography is an effective way to market your home and sell it faster. It’s a proven strategy that works for thousands of home owners. Yet it’s not the easiest way to market your property because it requires significant time, effort and money. This book will show you how to effectively sell your home with real estate photography in 12 easy steps!
Take photos of your home to sell it faster
When you’re selling a house, take photos of it to make it look like it has been professionally photographed. You can use the photos to advertise your home online and in magazines. You can also take photos of your home before you put it up for sale to show potential buyers what it looks like and how it works. You can take a ring photo by placing your finger on one of the exterior sides of your house and snapping a photo. You’ll want a ring photo that is wide enough that your ring finger can’t fit through the frame when you are standing underneath the photo, which may be the case if your house has drawers and doorways. If not, just be sure to get a closeup photo of your ring finger when you are standing near the photo. Place your thumb and index finger on the interior side of your house, about three feet away from the exterior side. 2020 brought advances in phone cameras and zoom lenses so now it is easy to snap a photo with a phone. Stand two or three feet away from the phone, point your phone at one side of the interior side of your house, and snap a photo. You have two different options: a wide shot (approximate 40x or 51x35mm) or a standard (approximate 38x or 50x35mm) shot. If you are using a smartphone with an Android operating system, open the Photos app and tap on the arrow on the upper right to open Zoom. There, tap the icon for Take Photo. Then tap Set as Photo. If you are using a smartphone with an iPhone OS, open the Photos app and tap on the arrow on the upper right to open Zoom. Tap onto the icon for Take Photo and then tap Set as Photo. When your image is set, tap Done. Now all you have to do is post your ring shot photos on your site and social media.
Create a “staging area” where you can display your belongings
You want to create a “staging area” where you can display your belongings. Here you can show off your best pieces and accessories. When people come into your home, they tend to gravitate towards your most important pieces and accessories. This is a great way for them to get to know you better and see what you value most. You can set up a cupboard, wardrobe, closet or storage space in your house that showcases your highest-quality items. This frees up your main living spaces to showcase your furniture pieces. This also keeps your parents or carers happy as they don’t have to visit just to see your most prized possessions. Here’s where you can display photos that you have taken. If you’ve got a photo album, then photos means you have a series of pictures that represent you, which can be useful for other reasons when it comes to marketing or branding. Clients often like the chance to see more photos so their decision to work with you is easier. You can create multiple “staging areas” and display your most prized possessions in each one. This practice improves your chances with families who have multiple adult children. They can see all your best pieces and accessories at once and you don’t need to explain why you own that particular thing. Set up this “staging area” in your house. Show off the one item you own that is particularly significant to you and showcase how you have used it. You could have a photo of that item on your fridge. Your family can choose to visit that location and see it. You always have a Snowgroom! Snow is a great place for you to display your jewellery. You could build a stand based on a jewellery rack that you have in your home. The neat part about a jewellery rack is that it stands out when displaying items of the same colour. Here is a great trick to make this easier. Make a chest in your house closest to your kitchen, this chest will be your ‘Snowgroom’.
Use professional photography services
When it comes to SEO and getting as much traffic as possible to your website, the first thing you need to do is ensure that your website and all of its pages are easy for people to find. The most common types of content that get crawled by search engines are: blog posts, pages on current news topics, news page headlines, product listings, case studies, news items, forum posts, and any other content that presents a trusted source, reputation, or has an affiliation with a brand. PR and SEO are not separate. In fact, SEO is all about improving the visitor experience. With experience comes knowledge, which, in turn, allows you to rank higher and get more traffic to your website. Understand the types of content that get crawled on the web and optimize your site for the search engines — in other words, introduce your content to the search engines early so they can index it for you and rank it high. That is the first step in getting high rankings online simply because of your content. The following are the other steps. The compounding effect of optimizing your CMS means competitor analysis will catch you sooner than later, especially if you aren’t optimizing your site for crawlers. Broken links mean a lower bounce rate — especially when you have a well-thought-out content strategy that includes going back to the start to fix what needs to be fixed. While not all some of the work will be visible to search engines, ignore the theory and go back to the basics when it comes to your SEO. Create and maintain a good webpage and set your website to the proper paths to be crawled. Go back to your SEO CMS and make a list of the pages that need to be crawled for your specific CMS version. Be sure to include pages with images or videos in the page title and meta description.
Speak with real estate agents and build a relationship to get more leads for your home
Real estate agents are an excellent place to start when it comes to getting leads for your home. Get to know them and build a relationship with them and you’ll find that they’ll be more willing to trust you when they find out that you’re a real estate agent and you provide them with leads for their homes. When I was starting out I often thought I wasn’t good enough to do real estate. The top agents knew everyone and knew the biggest houses in the city. That was the reason I quit my job in real estate and decided to work with movers and handymen instead. These were people I paid to do work on my properties instead of letting professionals do it for me. Working with movers and the handymen upgrade my rental companies and add clients to my portfolio. Pro Tip: Don’t be afraid to ask a lot of questions of agents and try to understand their job when they first send you a pitch. You’ll have a lot of questions to answer and a lot to gain from learning how the industry works. Pro Tip: Most agents offer creative incentives to encourage calls to action during a property’s tour. I like to always ask the agent if they’ll pay me for the calls they get. According to real estate, being able to pay a few extra bucks for every lead generated is well worth the investment. Once you have a network of agents who are willing to do real estate work for you, it’s time to start advertising. The first step in starting to market your rental property is to make sure you have quality images of the place. You can either grab photos from Conde Nast or Pexels and post them on your Instagram or website. Another popular marketing strategy is to use Instagram’s search bar to find photos that pop up when the search terms you used are mixed in with real estate agents’ Instagram handles.
Don’t forget to follow-up with your leads and solicit offers from real estate agents
People are busy and it can be hard to find the time to follow up with leads and solicit offers from real estate agents. However, it’s a vital part of the process because you want to make sure you’re following up on all the leads you’ve been given.Allow me to explain: It can be tough to respond to every one of the emails you’re getting, especially from junk marketing companies (scammers). This is because being inundated with offers is normal in the real estate world, so it’s important to have the emails that contain actual offers and not those from marketing and sales companies who are trying to sell you something. Real estate agents receive a lot of offers, so answering them is important, but this is also a time when there are many cold leads that don’t really exist but someone is telling you they do because they think you’ll buy something from them. Now, it can be hard to repurpose your email list once you have a good grasp of who has been cold calling and who has actually emailed you back, however, the second you’re done accepting and opening their offer, it can be valuable to clear out any clumps of leads in your database and then begin to follow up with each lead on LinkedIn, Facebook, and even in your email. Once again, I can suggest LinkedIn as another option to start cold calling, especially if you use Substack or Mailchimp to create your list. LinkedIn is a great platform where you can follow up with leads that have originally emailed you as well as get to know real estate professionals who are active in their local communities — this way, you can choose the people who you want to follow up with and are actually worth following up with.