Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: Photography
By: Greg Swann,
Phoenix Real Estate,
Post Archive,
RSS FeedPosted: Friday, March 21st, 2008, 7:35 am MST
Category: Marketing, Photography, Real Estate, Technology
I read somewhere the other day, I forget where, about a web site for a listing that had 47 pictures. The author of the post clearly thought that was a lot of photos.
Cathy organized her first batch of photos for the web site I will be building today. We will be adding other photos later, but this is by far the biggest batch.
How many? Not a huge number for Cathleen — only 221, about 28 megabyte’s worth. The finished web site probably won’t have many more than 300 photos — not counting the virtual tour and the video we have planned.
Is that overkill? We don’t think so. Everybody knows how to turn off the TV, but if you want to know everything about the home, we want to show you everything about the home.
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Related posts:11 Comments so far
Not overkill at all, as a home buyer the more high quality pictures I can see, the more information for my decision making process.
On a geek note, consider having Flickr of Amazon host all those photos, and just link to the URL. That way, you don’t pay so much for storage space or bandwidth.
http://www.flickr.com/upgrade
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261
I like that idea. I find people look harder when buying a car or a fridge that a house. I agree, if I’m really into a home and thinking of buying it, the more pics you have the better.
As a home shopper, I would certainly appreciate more pictures. the LI MLS has space for eight low-rez shots and a lot of realtors don’t even give you that much.
On the other hand, once you’ve got two or three dozen shots, how much value are you adding? I mean, it’s a mid-century ranch. It has say six, seven or eight rooms plus a bathroom or two? How many things are there to actually take a picture of? After a while, aren’t you just showing the same thing over and over again from a different angle?
> Not overkill at all, as a home buyer the more high quality pictures I can see, the more information for my decision making process.
Obviously we spend a lot of time in our houses, but people are always pointing out details they have seen in the photos that we have missed. We know people look at our photos.
> That way, you don’t pay so much for storage space or bandwidth.
Thanks. We strive to live as low on the food chain as we can. If we have to go to an added-value vendor, as with the virtual tour discussed in the next post, we will. But anything we can do ourselves in a cost-efficient way, we do. We host on a dedicated dual-core Apache server with 160 gigabytes of storage. We serve well over 100gb a month without breaking a sweat.
> How many things are there to actually take a picture of?
It’s like eating: Who besides yourself can tell you when you’ve had enough to eat? When you’re done, you move on. Someone else might stay to look at every picture a dozen times.
My take: Portion control stinks.
I’d suggest you ramp it up a bit and put a live web cam in the kitchen and living room to allow buyers to see how the current owners use their home.
I’ve been selling real estate for a while and some sellers just want to get a picture of every little thing which they think is unique,
they think it a family album. Mike
Wonderful site for the house, Greg and Cathy. You are without compare and your sellers are most fortunate.
I do think that the Obeo tour, while the very best of what there is out there, is almost a distraction during the search for a buyer - with a site as grand as this. I do think though, that after a buyer is negotiated into a deal that one of these sites would be a nice surprise addition for them to enjoy while waiting for the close. Where I am in NY that takes quite a looooong while, and the buyers come back sometimes every morning to the house site to be close to their new home. Love sick is what they are!
Radio Paradise worked really well with this site…Grateful Dead Not fade away right now… and I can see a big reef tank along one of the walls in the living room..
I think it is fine. If someone is interested in a house in that price range, they will appreciate the photos and are likely to view all of them. I think not including photos or only one or two photos is a far more serious fault than too many photos.
Greg - I’m a little behind with my reader. But I do want to thank you for the inside view of your operation. I thoroughly enjoyed perusing the single-home site. Although I use them, they sure don’t look like that!
[...] a month ago, I was reading a post that Greg Swann wrote over on Bloodhound about out-marketing the competition. I suppose it was more of a series of posts and this one dealt with single property websites. Greg [...]