I’m toying with a new idea, and it all has to do with photo quality. In particular, the real estate photo listings. On my last post I noted that it seems that few people actually care about the quality of real estate pictures listed on the internet (see “Does It Really Matter Anymore?“). The somewhat surprising number of detailed responses to that question compelled me to investigate this issue more.
I’ve done a number interviews with agents and done some deep digging into the blasé attitude that a large number of real estate agents, brokers, and agencies currently have about their images. The prevailing opinion is somewhere between “our clients don’t pay any attention to pictures, they expect them to look bad” and “property pictures are only useful for a short period of time, they’re not worth the effort,” and even “I have to pay for them out of my own pocket, the cost involved is just not in my budget.”
Really?!
It just seems astonishing to me that exquisite product photography is employed to promote everything from energy drinks to baby diapers while sub-quality images are used to entice people to buy multimillion-dollar houses. Yeah, that makes sense- not.
So- I’ve decided to offer real estate image optimization services to agents who understand that quality sells quality and that garbage doesn’t. I put together a couple of videos presenting my case for spiffing up lackluster images. Since I’ve picked up a couple of tricks in my 45 years of photography, digital color and image reproduction, and I’m quite confident that I can significantly improve the appearance of the majority of real estate images I have seen on the Internet. BTW, I don’t hype images, I present them in their best light ever- I figure I get all spiffed up to go to a fancy restaurant… just makes sense to me.
While putting this service model together I’ve encountered a number of people that have been so underwhelmed with the pictures associated with a given property that they decided not to even visit it. One of these folks actually purchased another home (attracted by the well done images), only to find out that the ugly-picture house was an amazing property; one that they perhaps would have purchased instead.
So, let it be hereby known that the real estate image optimization service known as ImageOpt is open for business. Two things you should take a look at… 1) the “Mythbuster” video I put together as a promo (http://www.imageprep.net/real-estate-mythbuster-video.html), and 2) the website for the service that includes tutorial movies on how to gather and submit images for optimization (http://www.imageprep.net/imageopt.html).
To make this service a little more attractive, I’m offering a quite unusual pricing structure for the four different types of services I’m offering: Basic Optimization (stills), Optimization and Transition (video), Grayscale Zoom to Color (video), and StillMotion with Text and Music (soundtracked video). The agents pay only 60% of the fee with their submission and don’t pay the balance for 60 days– nutz right?
What? It’s called incentive!
I’ll get a feel for the interest in this venture from the little survey I’m including here. This should be fun. And it should be an eye-opener for both the agents and for myself. We’ll see. Take the Poll. Let me hear what you think. You can check more than one, or you can offer another opinion. If you have friends who are in real estate, ask them what they think.
That’s the Way Eye Sees It anyhow.
See you next time.
Herb
