Photographs

Excerpt from "Fast Home Staging for Real Estate Agents" - to Pre-order your copy for $39.95, email jennifer@homestyle.co.nz

There are a lot of books and courses out there about photography, and this is not designed to be a substitute for those if you aspire to be an expert in this area. Let's look instead at the 20% of effort which will bring you 80% of results in Real Estate photography.

Once again, if you already have talent, skill and success in your photography, you can either skip this section or use it as an opportunity to focus on the subject and remind yourself what you already know.

If you use professional Real Estate photography services, compare your results, and the photographs your service produces, with those of other agents - do you have the best person for the job? I tend to look for people who are passionate about what they do - and efficiency and professionalism imply experience.

Top tips for great marketing photographs

• Take photographs from the door - once you have finished arranging the home to be a buyer-magnet, this will be the best view of the room
• Use a wide angle lens for whole room shots
• Make sure photographs are level - tops of windows and pictures parallel with the top of the photograph
  
• Balance the composition from left to right and top to bottom - this means a similar weighting of objects in the picture, but does not necessarily mean symmetry: good pictures can be taken which balance top left and bottom right, for example
  
• See if you can centre the composition on one particularly appealing object
  
• Include views from one space to another - this adds intrigue and allows spatial thinkers to put together a floor plan in their minds
  
• Turn on all lights and lamps and open curtains and blinds and net curtains fully (remember to turn off lights and put window treatments back the way they were before you leave)
  
• Use fill-in flash (just the normal flash setting usually works fine) where there is a lot of light from outside the room, or lots of shadow within the room
  
• You may also wish to remove any eye-catching but unappealing objects or distractions - take a good look at where things were before you do this, as you will need to put things back exactly as you found them
  
• Have a look in magazines for evocative spreads of photographs - see how the mood of a home can be captured by close-ups of one or two special items or a table-scape
  
• The outside photographs are very important - a good street shot sets up overall expectations and tells people they have come to the right place. Angle the house so the building and garden fill the frame as much as possible, minimising driveway and garage door. If this is difficult, you may be able to creatively overlap pictures in advertising. An evening shot may help focus attention
  on the house itself, lit up in contrast to a darker drive and garage
  
• Vary images with one or two garden close-ups also
• Look closely at the results, and be objective - if there are some pictures you are really proud of, ask yourself why and see if you can incorporate that into future photo shoots
  
• Use your Home Staging Toolkit to improve what you have to work with!

For further advice, you might try identifying someone in your office who has unusual success in getting people to view off their advertisements or internet profiling. Offer to buy them lunch in return for answering a few short questions about how they do it.

Make these brief and specific, but give them room to expand in their answers. And do them the courtesy of writing their answers down, applying them and thanking them for the success they generate for you.

Depending on the level of co-operation within your circle, you may need to go outside your geographic area to find someone who does not see you as a competitor.

Sorts of questions you might ask:

• What are the main things you do which you believe contribute to your success in getting people to view the houses you sell?
  
• What is something that if you had known it at the beginning of your career would have got you to where you are faster?
  
• Do you have any specific advice you are willing to offer to help me achieve success?

Advertising copy

A related area is the wording of your advertisements - this is outside the scope of this book but the questions above apply to this subject as well - tap into the expertise of your network.

In brief, you are creating a vision of the buyer's new life, and you can do this with words as well as pictures. Have a look at advertisements for other houses and see which ones capture your imagination.