Bad Photos Kill Real Estate Deals: PROOF INSIDE

Bad photos don’t make for good real estate deals. As most of you know, I am an active Texas REALTOR® with a very successful real estate company in Austin, Texas. Between pricing properties for one client and looking for homes under $200,000 for another, I stumbled upon a house that meets the “$200K and under criteria” perfectly. Then I got to the photos and felt like this was the perfect time to remind everyone (including real estate professionals) how important photos are when selling your home. And this is why I started PhotographRGV; To revolutionize the way Greater McAllen listings are presented to the market by taking awesome, professional photographs for other agents and brokers in the Rio Grande Valley. One, because I can and two because it’s a very needed service. Imagine spending only $100 or so for a full set of professional HDR photos of this house? Instead, you get them as I found them. (No, the house isn’t crooked, the walls aren’t yellow and the rooms really aren’t that small.)

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The Benefits of Professional Real Estate Photography

Photography is not just an important element of real estate marketing; it’s fast becoming the most essential one. More than 80% of today’s house-hunters use the internet to research properties, and these prospective buyers rank photography as the most important tool in searching for a home online. Many agents are content to take a few pictures with a point-and-click camera. Unfortunately, due to their limitations, these cameras are often incapable of capturing the true nature of a property. Spacious rooms become small, dark and uninviting; windows with jaw-dropping views become walls of white light; stunning architecture warps into strange and unappealing angles.

Great photography can draw a buyer in. Bad photography can turn them away. A professional photographer has the skill to show a property at its very best. Our passion is to ensure these spaces look as beautiful in print as they do in real life.

The benefits of professional real estate photography are numerous:

Generate Leads

Online listings with professional photography generate an average of 61% more page views than their point-and-click counterparts.

Sell More Consistently

Homes priced above $300,000 are more likely to sell when their listings feature professional photography.

Command Higher Prices

In 2010, a brokerage called Redfin surveyed MLS systems around the U.S. and discovered that listings with professional photography sold for higher prices than their counterparts. On the low end ($200k to $300k asking price) these listings sold for an average of $935 more. On the high end ($1m and above) the average increase was $116,076. Listings in-between these extremes typically saw an increase of $5000-$20,000. Even on listings with lower asking prices the financial benefit outweighs the cost of hiring a professional photographer!

Impress Current Clients

Your clients want to know their listing is in good hands. High quality photography shows them you’re committed to the exceptional presentation of their property.

Attract New Clients

Beautiful photography is an excellent way for an agent to showcase their professionalism and marketing savvy, and it gives them an impressive portfolio with which to attract potential clients.

Professional photography is a crucial component of an effective online marketing strategy. At PhotographRGV.com we offer this service at a competitive price, and we provide 24-hour turnaround so that your listings get online as fast as possible. We’re here to help you sell your properties more effectively than ever before!

Why Use RGV Professional Real Estate Photography

Next to listing a property on the local MLS and the internet, making the property look attractive to buyers is the most important thing an agent must do. With 80% of home buyers shopping for a home online (according to the NAR), the way your listings look is an important factor, if not the most important, in generating buyer interest. It’s no secret, better-presented homes get more traffic and more buyer interest, therefore selling faster. More than ever, your listings must stand out from the crowd.

“Good photos will grab people’s attention and help you sell a home,” says Jacky Teplitzky, Executive VP of Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate. “Bad pictures will absolutely give you trouble, because you won’t have any calls on it, and nobody will come to see it.”

Whether a listing is a million-dollar home or a fixer-upper, a professional photographer will bring out its best. Proper lighting techniques, good composition, and some tricks of the trade only professional real estate photographers have, ensure your listing looks its absolute best. While staying true to its actual condition and features. Marketing a home can be an expensive undertaking, but allocating a budget for professional photography ensures your marketing dollars are getting you the return on investment you need, and your listings are getting the traffic they deserve. Professional photography isn’t a luxury anymore. It’s an absolute necessity in marketing real estate properly. So why is it so important?

  • The competition is fierce.
  • Buyers are tech-savvy and expect to be impressed.
  • Alternative listings draw attention away from yours.
  • Agents have to market better than ever to be competitive.
  • FSBOs are using the same marketing tools agents have access to.
  • Would you want your biggest investment marketed with a few snapshots? Your sellers don’t either.

Can you afford it? The real question is, can you afford not to? With current market conditions, smart and demanding buyers, FSBOs, and the local competition, your marketing dollars need to sell your listings. Apart from staging, no other marketing investment is as important as professional photography in marketing a property effectively. In addition, once made aware of the impact of professional photography in making their biggest investment so much more attractive to buyers, a large number of sellers are glad to take on the small investment themselves, if already not provided by their agent.

What is & Why Use HDR Photography For Real Estate

First, let’s start off with “What is HDR Photography?” – Put simply, HDR is a range of methods to provide higher dynamic range from the imaging process. Non-HDR cameras take pictures at one exposure level with a limited contrast range. This results in the loss of detail in bright or dark areas of a picture, depending on whether the camera had a low or high exposure setting. HDR compensates for this loss of detail by taking multiple pictures at different exposure levels and intelligently stitching them together to produce a picture that is representative in both dark and bright areas.

Why HDR for real estate photography you say? Simply because real estate photography and shooting interior architecture has been and still is one of the most difficult exposure challenges to solve in the realm of photography. Consider this…

In many cases a shot needing to be captured to showcase a property needs to capture the exposure range of the interior and the range of the exterior. My question to you would be, “Have you ever shot landscape photography?”. The reason I ask is because if you have, then I’m sure you’ve experienced the vast exposure range of the bright highlights and the dark shadows in those landscape shots. Well, the shadow region of that landscape shot in 9 out of 10 images will be brighter than the brighter parts of an image for an interior shot. Which is why when you need to capture the dynamic range of an interior and exterior for one image, you’ll begin to appreciate why HDR is utilized in real estate photography.

If you think it is difficult to capture well exposed shots shooting landscapes and you’ve never attempted to shoot interior architecture / real estate, then you haven’t experienced PAIN yet! Seriously. Until you’ve attempted (regularly) to shoot real estate in daylight hours (not sunrise/dusk, but bright daylight), then you haven’t yet found out why HDR is so important and useful for architectural / real estate photography. Because that is when you will find out the dynamic range from highlights to shadows indoors with no window in frame can be wide enough by itself and difficult enough to capture by itself that when you add an entirely new brightness range of outdoors into the mix, the reality of what digital sensors can capture becomes clear.