What should the customer know about your pricing (e.g., discounts, fees)?
The minimum base price is $200 for a beautiful set of natural light, true-color interior and exterior stills for a typical 3-bedroom / 1-bathroom home consisting of 10 spaces (named rooms or areas). I like to include all four walls to provide an accurate size and layout impression. This means I provide at least two photos per space.
Each additional space adds $20 to the base 10-space price.
The 360° virtual tour simulates the typical home walk-through running as a 2 to 4-minute video. The prospect has full stop-and-look-around control.
The virtual tour price is the final still photo price minus $50.
Detailed and dimensioned floorplans allow the prospect to see how the rooms flow, and answer any "Will my furniture fit?" questions.
The floorplan price is the final still photo price minus $50.
The minimun base price for a complete image package of Interior & Exterior Still Photos, Virtual Tour, and Floorplan would individually total $500. If ordered together for one photo shoot, the total price will be discounted 20% to a $400 minimum base price.
Virtual staging uses computer AI to fill empty rooms with stylish furnishings.
The cost is $25 per still photo and $50 per virtual tour room image.
The most successful Realtor I have worked with said, "Never let a prospect leave a showing empty-handed. Always give them a marketing handout." I can design a "best-in-class" handout for your home.
The graphic design cost ranges from $100 to $1000 for an 8.5"x11" flyer to a multi-page bound booklet.
What is your typical process for working with a new customer?
My priority is to understand exactly what the customer wants to achieve and where they plan to use the images. I will discuss ways to fulfill the objective. We will agree on the scope of the assignment, price, and timing. After delivery of the final images, I will ask for referrals because the customer will be absolutely delighted with my work product.
What education and/or training do you have that relates to your work?
I attended the University of Wisconsin – Madison for seven years. I structured my Social Psychology undergraduate degree for a career that involved marketing with an emphasis on decision making and persuasion. My elective courses included design, photography, and architectural drawing. My post-graduate MBA was in Real Estate and Finance.
My entire career has been in marketing real estate – from raising capital to own and operate 4,000 apartment units, to assuring maximum occupancy of those units, to founding and operating a successful regional rental guide business and website. On the practical experience side, I photographed interiors and exteriors for over 10,000 residences from 2000 through 2022.
How did you get started doing this type of work?
I founded a regional MLS-style rental guide in 2001, at the dawn of digital photography and digital-to-plate printing age. We distributed the monthly printed rental guides free at grocery and convenience stores. By 2010 the online version included interior photos and floorplans for most listings.
From the beginning, I wanted to give renters a better experience than homebuyers received from the Realtor MLS. “Better” included superior interior and exterior pictures, floorplans, and (more recently) 3D virtual reality tours. I have photographed over 10,000 residential units.
My customers liked the imagery so much that I began a fee-based photography service to charge for the imagery and help the customer also post to other listing sites.
What types of customers have you worked with?
I have worked for 1,200 property owners ranging from large companies with properties totaling over 100 units to “mom and pop” single-family home, condominium, or duplexes.
Describe a recent project you are fond of. How long did it take?
I photographed 30 stills, created a virtual tour, and drew the floorplan for a nice Airbnb unit. The unit furnishings included antiques, and antique framed artwork filled the walls. Since Airbnb does not provide labels to describe room photos, I added a label strip to the bottom of the photos to describe each image.
It took about two hours to shoot the stills and virtual tour. Half an hour to measure the layout. Photo processing to provide accurate, bright, and realistic “what you see is what you get” images took an hour. Virtual tour assembly took an hour. Drawing the floorplan with all the furnishings took another hour. The total time came to 5.5 hours.
What advice would you give a customer looking to hire a provider in your area of work?
Today’s technology revolution means online renting and buying is a growing reality. As a result, photography is the primary marketing tool for real estate sales and rentals.
Effective marketing photography must be:
• Complete - Every space needs full photography covering all the space in each room. This means at least two different position shots of every living space, so the viewer sees all four walls.
• Accurate - Colors, perspective, lighting, and shadowing need to be realistic to make each photo represent what the eye sees.
You want your prospect to get enough information spark a “This is perfect for me!” response. That means they need to feel like they have accurately “seen” the whole home. If prospects physically tour your place and find misrepresentations or omissions, they are gone, and you will have wasted the preparation and showing time.
Therefore, you should be sure your photographer has the understanding, expertise, and experience to deliver a complete and accurate visual representation of your property. It needs to answer all their questions and motivate them to tour your property with the expectation that it "checks all the boxes" on their must-have list.
What questions should customers think through before talking to professionals about their project?
First, shop your competition. Look online at properties for sale or rent in your property’s price range. Identify the top 20% in terms of imagery and text descriptions. Apply the 80-20 rule, the listings in the top 20% will be interesting to 80% of the prospects. That should be your objective, a marketing presentation in the top 20% in terms of accuracy and completeness. This gives you two important things: a quicker sale at a higher price than the other 80%.
Next, think about the marketing price in comparison to your sales objective. If you are selling, the increased interest from top 20% marketing may spark a competitive bidding scenario that nets you thousands of dollars above your asking price and a quicker closing. If you are renting at $1,800 per month and a resident moves in a week sooner, you are ahead by $420 in rent and save a week of marketing costs.
Now, quit thinking about the cheapest photographer. Start thinking about hiring a photographer with the understanding, expertise, and experience to deliver a complete and accurate visual representation of your property. That real estate photographer will net far more for you.
