Do your home listing photos end up looking like this?

Or are you able to transform them into this?

 Yes, that’s the same room.  C’mon, admit it – you’re impressed, no?

Here’s my prediction:

Good staging and photography are going to be absolutely key to getting home listings in the future.

(And, key to having them sell at the top of their market value range – aka, leaving you with happy sellers who rave to their friends about how their home was transformed.)

But so many agents still don’t do it!  Just this morning I saw a $2.5 million waterfront home listed with photos that had obviously been taken by a non-professional with a 35 mm camera.

Granted, it wasn’t atrocious, but the angle of view was so narrow that one-third of every room didn’t make it into the shot.

(What’s the commission on a $2.5 M home again?  Even if it’s discounted?  Seems like plunking down $250 on a professional photographer would be reasonable.)

Regardless of the price range you’re working with, putting a home on the market is extremely stressful for sellers.  Understandably so - there’s a lot on the line.

Here’s how you can position yourself as the go-to agent:

1.  Be able to give home sellers good advice on how to prepare their home for sale. 

Then, coach them through the process.  They need to feel that they’re in the hands of an expert.  This should be at least one thing being taken off of their plate.

If this isn’t your specialty now, find someone in your area you can hire to do it, or study up on before and after photos now.  It’s not just a trend, it’s the future.

2.  Get dazzling photos that showcase all of the home’s best features.

Home buyers’ standards are rising as they become more accustomed to high quality user experiences online, and I hear more and more complaints about how bad most Internet home photos are.

Home sellers often don’t know what they’re missing until they see it – but they sure don’t need to be told twice after being shown a before-and-after comparison like the one above.

Hire a pro if you’re in an area like Seattle where you can get a typical house photographed for around $170.  It’s a no-brainer.

(The ’after’ photo above was taken my all-time favorite Seattle-area real estate photographer, Tucker English.) 

If professional help is not available, get a camera suited for interior shots.  One with a 24mm lens or less, not 35mm.  And learn how to use photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop Elements so that when your warm tan wall comes out a cold blue because of lighting you can bring it back to its true self.

3.  Take “Before” and “After” photos of your listings and post them on your website.

Posting a great before-and-after photo gallery on your website is the best way I know of to get sellers wanting to list with you.

(This is a great opening for newer agents, by the way, since you don’t have to have a huge string of listings.  You just need to show what you’re capable of doing for your next home seller client.)

Bottom line?

The demand for higher quality home staging and photography is only going to become stronger, and now’s a great opportunity for enterprising agents to make a name for themselves.  (A superb opportunity – because the norm is currently pretty bad!)

Hopefully that will change soon.  In the meantime, you can see more before-and-after shots and get ideas for your own marketing at our Home Listing Photo Gallery page.

Want to add thousands of dollars to your real estate income next year? 

And add loyal clients to that bank vault of contacts you need for long term success?  Then follow these tips.  (After 8 years of running a now-thriving real estate business, I honestly think I would have at least $100,000 more in the bank if I had read a list like this earlier on.)

New agents, this goes double for you.

Here they are:

1.  Stay in touch with past clients.

I can’t believe how often I ask people who their real estate agent was when they bought or sold their house, and they can’t remember – even when they liked that person enough to use them again!  (Yes, that clinking noise you hear is the sound of money down the toilet.)

Next time you walk into your house, glance at the foundation and wonder how your home would look without it.

Past clients are the foundation of any successful real estate business.  Contact your current and past clients at least once a month.

2.  Automate your marketing.

Unless you have an assistant, at some point you’re going to be too busy to get your marketing out the door.  Plus, your time is too valuable (or will be too valuable) to spend doing everything it takes to churn out quality marketing consistently.  Start looking now, and find something that will go out regardless of how busy you are.

3.  Be yourself.

The best advice I ever got in my real estate career was from my now-gone Harley-riding agent friend, Rick Bakke.  It’s simply,  “If you can’t be yourself in this business, hang it up.”  (More on how to tell if you’re just leaving your comfort zone or becoming someone you’re not, in my other post on Rick’s advice.)

4.  Get your own domain name.

It doesn’t matter if you think you’re not ready for a website, or even if you’re not techie at all.  Just do this:  Go to Godaddy, search for your first and last name with .com after the end, and buy it if it’s available.  (It’s a measly $9/year investment, it’s easy, and you don’t need a website first because you’re just buying the name.)

If you’re feeling creative, search for some other good website names too – but at least buy that one.  Go ahead.  I dare you.

5.  Get your own blog

At least 70% of the agents I talk to either don’t have a website, hate their website or are re-doing their website (and spending plenty in the process.)  But these days it’s easy to be online, even if you have no web experience.  Get your own real estate blog - Active Rain is real estate-focused and is a great place to start for free.  (Blogger is another easy option.)

6.  Learn basic Search Engine Optimization.

If you read even just Day 2 of this great SEO Power Strategies course by Brad Callen (it’s free), you’ll be light years ahead of 50% of the people who are online.

7.  Learn basic copywriting.

Real estate is actually a marketing business – but 90% of us jump in without ever having learned how to make someone want to buy something!

Here’s a cheat sheet:  It’s about them, not you.  Talk about benefits, not features.  People buy on emotion first, then justify with logic.  (Thus, starting a home description with “$2,000 carpet credit”, like I just read yesterday, is a bad idea.)

For the best advice, start with Copyblogger.  (Brian, I would have said that anyway.

8.  Ask for a referral at the end of your voice mail greeting.

Just say, “And if you were referred to me by friend or family member, please let me know who that was so that I can tell them ‘thank you’.”  This reminds people that you expect and appreciate referrals.

9.  Ask for referrals, period.

Most people find this painful.  But what I learned is, it works.  No matter how much people love you, sometimes they will forget to refer you unless they’re reminded.  And, no matter how badly you botch the asking, they’re more likely to refer you afterwards.

And speaking of botching….

10.  Get the referral spiel down.

If asking for referrals feels awkward, you’ll subconsciously try to avoid it.  But by not asking you’re guaranteed to lose out on thousands of dollars in future business.

So make it not awkward.  I don’t care if it means locking yourself away in a hotel room with a week’s supply of Crunch Berries, do what it takes to come up with a spiel that sounds like you and that slips nonchalantly off your tongue.  (That tip alone will pay for years of high-end coaching – which now you may not need!)

11.  Beware of time-wasters.

If you work in a social office, this can be a challenge.  But the next time someone pauses at your office door in a well-meaning attempt to talk about their Schnauzer’s last toenail operation (or worse, to commiserate with you about how real estate sucks), remember that there are always more of them than there are of you.

Beware, and find ways to politely guard your productive time.

12.  Don’t ask “How much can you afford?”

Ask, “What price range would like to stay within?”

13.  Learn the basics of home staging

This is key to getting listings in the future.  You don’t have to get a certification (although that’s not a bad idea), but learn what it takes to prepare a home for sale.  Over 80% of agents don’t do this, or if they do they flub up the photos.

And speaking of photos….

14.  Always take “Before” photos of your home staging.

Why?  Because a “Before and After” home staging photo gallery is one of the most powerful marketing techniques you can use to get home listings. 

(But take it from me – you’ll be tempted to skip the “Before” part, so just make yourself do it.)

 15.  Learn how to take good real estate photos.

Or, hire out.  But the current level of quality for real estate photos online is abysmal, and clients are getting tired of it.  Be on the crest of that wave, not behind it.  Start by using a 24 mm camera, or wider angle for interior shots (not the usual 35 mm.)

16.  Ask for testimonials, and use them in your marketing.

The power that other people have when it comes to selling your services is far greater than your own.  Yet most real estate agents have a string of happy clients and no written testimonials they can quote.  There’s an easy way to ask for and get testimonials that I only learned a year of so ago, and it’s in my post “How to Get Better Testimonials”.

17.  Hang in there.

At the end of my fifth year of real estate (and having done pretty well during the third and fourth years), pretty much all it took for me to burst into tears was for someone to say something incredibly poignant along the lines of, for example, ”Hi Irene, how are you?”

I went five straight months without a paycheck – working like a horse the whole time – and by the end I seriously was wondering if the jig was up.  Was this going to be, in hindsight, the part in the story when I would say “And that’s when I got out of real estate?”

I went from November through March without a paycheck.  But by December I had made twice what I made the year before.

Often we’re tempted to give up when we’re 80% of the way to reaching our goal.  And nearly always, the last 20% of your effort will produce 80% of your results.

So, hang in there. 

This morning I was reading John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing blog (by the way, this is an awesome blog if you want to get the early bird scoop on incredibly cool products.) Case in point, he posted about the Jing Project, a free downloadable screen recorder from one of our favorite companies, Techsmith.

(Techsmith makes the very affordable Snagit, which makes capturing screen graphics to use in your marketing and website a piece of cake, and the more hefty Camtasia, which is great for recording and editing screen videos, plus making videos of Powerpoint presentations.)

Anyway, knowing the company it didn’t take long for me to figure out that this would probably also rock, so in about 5 minutes I had Jing downloaded and tried it out by making some short (2 or 3 minute) home staging video tutorials using before-and-after photos.

Click to check out the home staging video page.

Hope someone finds this, and Jing helpful – and if anyone finds a cool way to use Jing in their business we’d love to hear about it!

By the way, you also get a free account with Screecast, so as soon as you’re done recording and approve the video they upload it to their Screencast site and give you a link to it.

(Also, with Screencast you retain the copyrights to your stuff – unlike a lot of online video hosting places.)

Here’s a good example of how using the right camera can put you miles ahead when it comes to online photos that make sellers happy.

I personally like this example because the before shot is not all that bad – I took it with my old 35 mm camera, which is what I used to take all of my home photos with, and the house itself is newer, with high ceilings and an open floor plan.

Here’s the before shot:

In addition to the 35 mm lens width, there are a few other problems we needed to fix:

The clunky chair in the foreground and the blue futon in the bottom right corner take up a lot of space and make the room look smaller. The keychains hanging to the left of the photo are distracting, and the lamps and tables at the far end of the room look cluttered – plus, the whole photo is a little on the dark side.

However, you have to admit it’s pretty much in line with a lot of run of the mill photos you’d see online anytime.

Here’s the after shot, taken with a 24 mm lens camera:

We took out the futon and replaced with the blue chair that had been blocking the main view, added plants (my usual workhorses) as focal points at the far end of the room, and a stager (Leda Buller, of LCB Design in Kirkland, WA – great at minimalistic staging) added a few small items.

But notice the big change in how much more expansive the room looks! The 24 mm lens really shows the size and high ceilings that make this a great living area. (I also used editing software to lighten the photo since it still turned out a little darker than the room actually was.)

Comparing these two photos, isn’t the second one much more inviting? Most importantly, it makes the features that add MARKET VALUE to this home obvious – high ceilings, large size, open feel, and good light. This home sold in less than 2 weeks for 99.4% of list price – in other words, people who saw the photos were not disappointed when they visited the house, the photos just did a good job of representing what was actually there.)

Here’s another thing to note: When you’re dealing with all kinds of competition for listings, this is where you can really stand out. Sellers who see the first photo just think, “Oh, there’s a photo of our living room, it looks fine.” They don’t know what they’re not getting. But when they see the second photo compared to the first they are floored. Suddenly the bar has been raised, and you raised it.

Bottom line? It’s much easier for sellers to understand what they’re paying for when they can see your skills increase the market value of their home.

By Irene Dorang

Bad photos of homes for sale can cause the money and effort put into staging the property go to waste – don’t let it happen!

Once a home is staged and ready to be listed, it’s time for photos to be taken for marketing materials and, most importantly, the online photo galleries.

And here’s where many homes lose an edge that they should have had.

Briefly – because a picture is worth a thousand words (and there’s a link to ‘before and after’ photos below) here are some mistakes you can see in most online photo galleries:

Top Online Home Photo Gallery Mistakes

1) Not preparing the home sufficiently beforehand, especially by de-cluttering.

De-cluttering is one of the best things you can do to prepare a listing for sale. Remember that the camera adds the proverbial 10 pounds to items in the home too, and when in doubt, remove!

2) Bad photo composition, making rooms look small or boxed in.

The goal is to feature what sells, and these days that means open floor plans. When you’re framing your shot through the camera, keep in mind that the online viewer can see only that, not the surroundings that you’re aware of.

3) No point to the photo – an inexplicable shot of part of a bathroom counter, or of a non-essential room that will never photograph very well.

Some rooms can’t be left out of your online home photo gallery (for example, the kitchen, main living area and master bedroom are key rooms.) But if there’s a secondary room that it’s impossible to get a good shot of, ask yourself which is more likely to turn buyers away: Having the photo, or leaving it out? Often it’s a shot they won’t miss if it’s not there.

4) Photos that accentuate an undesirable feature.

Sometimes agents inadvertently highlight a feature that discourages online viewers. A prime example is a camera view that makes it obvious that a main window looks out onto a neighbor’s unkempt lawn, or that a backyard is low on privacy.

Give the home a chance! Let buyers see the big picture in person, rather than turning them away before the showing ever happens.

5) Using a camera with a too-narrow lens angle. (The standard 35mm lens is not wide enough to take the best interior shots – a 24mm lens gives a much better result.)

No, we’re not talking fish-eye lens here. The fact is, a 24 mm camera view is much more similar to what you see in person than the view through a 35 mm, which makes every room look smaller than it really is.

6) No editing of photos to correct lighting and color imbalances – this is HUGE. It takes quite a bit of time, but is well worth it for the final result.

Nearly every interior photo needs to be lightened, and often color hues need to be shifted in order to correct unrealistic grey, blue or purple tones that resulted from the flash. (All cold colors that tend to be less appealing overall.)

But seeing is believing. Here’s a better photo of the scene we were going for above:

This was taken with a 35 mm camera, not a 24 mm, but just de-cluttering and choosing a good angle for the room composition still made for a great photo that showcased the openness and natural light.

Visit The Agent Guide’s Home Staging Center for more home staging before and after pictures.