UPDATE: We are now officially live with our new services! Click here to check it out now!
We’re very excited about the vast overhaul that our talented designers and web developers have made to our real estate marketing services page. Here’s a sneak peak (the live version online in a couple days).
Sneak Peak #1 (click image below for larger view)
A sneak peak of our new look and feel!
Sneak Peak #2 (click image below for larger view)
...and isn't it beautiful!?
No one denies that computers change how we do things, and for the most part are lauded as making our lives easier. But do they? In the real estate industry, as in other highly competitive sales industries, getting the right costumers interested in your online presence/sales offer could be one of the most difficult things to get right–even as a master google-er. And the obvious reason for this is that there is too much information online, which makes targeting and luring a market difficult.
This saturation of options and information quite simply clutters people’s minds and makes them almost numb to it by increasingly reducing attention spans. And can you blame them, given that an average person views between 3000-5000 ads per DAY. One day!! Big number, huh?
Amongst all this clutter, it doesn’t take much investigation to learn that Presentation is in fact more important than ever. And it doesn’t take much to improve your realtor presentation. When it comes to property listings, it could be something as simple as de-cluttering the property or hiring a professional
real estate photographer to shoot photos of the listing.
As we pointed out in an earlier post ( http://www.stonehomephoto.com/blog/2011/03/wsj-research-shows-pro-photos-raise-value-of-real-estate property/ ), real estate photos by a professional increase your property value. The reason is that buyers are visual shoppers and prefer clear, clean photos and real estate floor plans. Photos are fast, tells a lot and don’t obligate the viewer to anything. Good real estate photos make your property look better, larger and brighter.
Along with photos, video tours of your property listing posted to YouTube give the buyer your personal view on what’s unique about your property. It’s a strong and free tool, and could be utilized for any marketing needs, and can be linked with most major search sites. With portable technology like Android and Apple’s iPad tablets, iPhone, Blackberry (you probably have one of these) you could also be meeting potential clients where ever you are on the street, bakery, subway or Home Depot, and showcase your real estate property video right there on the spot, reducing delays and accelerating sales.
The bottom line is that there is so much you can do, and a good place to focus your energy is to take the time to plan your presentations and marketing campaigns carefully, as this inevitably will increase the value of the house or condo listing by thousands and fast-forward your sales time.
At StoneHomePhoto.com we Know the importance of presentation, and our friendly staff would be more than glad to assist you with professional photos, virtual tours, floor plans and more.
Great advice for anyone interested in videography–click here.
In addition to providing our clients with beautiful 2D finished floor plans, we now also convert 2D floor plans that we have done for you real estate marketing into clean, realistic 3D plans (empty or virtually staged with realistic furniture!). Our plans are realistic and subtle. Plus: They look great on feature sheets and brochures, as well as on your MLS listing!
Click floor plan image below to view larger.
We offer an end-to-end floor plan service:
How we do it:
Click to view larger!
From a recent Wall Street Journal report:
… listings with better photos command higher asking prices: If you believe your [listing] is worth the investment of good photography, you’ll probably ask more money for it. The surprising part is that the tactic works. At the closing table, listings with nicer photos gain anywhere between $934 and $116,076–as measured by the difference between asking and final price–over listings using photos from point-and-click cameras.
Click the chart below for a larger view (Note: The green bar represents SLR photography; the red is point and shoot.):
The green bar represents SLR photography; the red is point and shoot.
To read the full Wall Street Journal report, click here.
It’s supposed to be funny, but I’m sure some people won’t get it.
Click image to view larger.
Technology research and advisory company Gartner offers a list of text “strategic technologies” that will have “significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years”. Here’s their take on the impact that video will have in the coming years for businesses (or click here to view the full list). Realtors–get your real estate video tours on:
” Video is not a new media form, but its use as a standard media type used in non-media companies is expanding rapidly. Technology trends in digital photography, consumer electronics, the web, social software, unified communications, digital and Internet-based television and mobile computing are all reaching critical tipping points that bring video into the mainstream. Over the next three years Gartner believes that video will become a commonplace content type and interaction model for most users, and by 2013, more than 25 percent of the content that workers see in a day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio. “
Finalized a few contact sheet designs for real estate clients. These are great leave behinds for open-houses and realtor showings.
Need photos and mind-boggling print design? Email or call us today: 416-488-3295
Came across this article summarizing the findings from a market research survey KGS Multimedia outlining seven internet marketing mistakes made by real estate agents. Among the seven, I found this one particularly interesting (underline mine):
” 6. FAILURE TO USE VIDEOS TO MARKET YOUR BUSINESS: When most real estate agents hear the word video, they immediately think expensive. However, with cost effective technology like HD cameras now in cell phones and computers, broadcasting your messages through YouTube or other sites is now a cheap and effective way to promote your business. Research has shown that over 80% of Internet users watch online videos, and it is one of the fastest growing SEO techniques being used in the industry today. What video campaigns are you implementing in your business? Do you have something the world needs to see? If a picture is worth a thousand words, then imagine what a short video can be worth to your business?”
Video is at such an odd point currently. It feels to me as if it can’t possibly evolve further, but then I’m reminded of the past. Remember when hotmail’s “instant messenger” seemed like social networking reached a peak and that it couldn’t possibly improve or grow further? But it did–twitter, linkedin, groupon, etc, and new media solutions keep surfacing despite our (well, at least my) feeling that we can’t possibly do more with what we have. (did you know groupon was started 2 years ago and now makes over $800 million in revenue EACH YEAR!)
You can’t possibly make video better or more accessible than it currently is, right? Probably wrong. And if history is any judge, some enterprising, bright individuals or groups will make video cool and the solution will be so obvious and simple that we’ll all be saying, “duh, we could’ve thought of that”… The only problem is that we didn’t. :)
Or will we? Given that we are on the so-called forefront of digital hdSLR video, perhaps we have an advantage of sorts? If we do evolve and improve video, I think it will require us to think outside of the proverbial box that we’ve grown comfortable and apathetic in.
So my question to those who think video will improve: how will it improve? Will it be something stupidly simple?
And perhaps more importantly: are you doing something to lead the evolution to take the “instant messenger” status of video and take it to the next level (think how twitter resurrected a stale concept and made it cool again)?
Who’s doing something different with video and what are you doing?
