The Importance of the Internet for Marketing Homes

A recent article on examiner.com adds further weight to the conclusion that the Internet is a major resource for homebuyers and a well prepared home and strong photos of the home will make the best use of this critical marketing venue: Sellers, here's how buyers find homes .

Note the comment about the ideal situation involving a large number of multiple offers. The more potential buyers that a listing attracts, the more likely that this ideal can be achieved. The photos of a home are one of the very first things that home buyers look at online. When homebuyers have a number of choices, they may tend to overlook listings with poor photos, or at least give them less consideration.

Eichler Homes in New York State?

Yes. There are four of them. This was not one of my grandfather's better ideas, especially since he didn't have the designs altered to suit the very different climate. Also, although the article doesn't mention in, the process of getting homes approved and built was (and probably still is) quite a bit different in NY State, compared with California. In addition, my grandfather had built up a very efficient operation in the Bay Area, which was not available to him on the other side of the country. In addition, building only a very small number of homes did not offer the kind of economy of scale that he had in the Bay Area. Thus, the homes in New York State were not as profitable and possibly did not really make any economic sense at all. 

This article tells part of the story: Modern Spotting: The Lost Eichlers of Rockland County, NY

Recent Interior Photography

Do you think the lighting here looks natural? I hope so, since that was the goal. However, the ambient lighting in this scene was not ideal and needed some significant help. So, I used three or four lights for this photo, both to even out the lighting and to add some life to areas that looked a bit dull.

Recent Lifestyle Photography

I recently did a lifestyle portrait for Alex Wang, a real estate agent with Sereno Group in Silicon Valley. The photo was used in a full page ad in the August 2014 edition of Gentry Magazine.

Gentry Ad

Pixels, Resolution and Reproduction Quality

Here is a useful article that addresses these matters: Pixel Perplexities and Other Digital Nonsense

It is amazing how many professional photographers, graphic designers, Web designers and editors do not understand these concepts, which are so essential to proper photo reproduction and proper Web display.

Another Satisfied Customer

"Blackburn sold on Thursday.  We did well.  I believe presentation makes such a huge difference.  I may have another listing coming out of that one from a neighbor who was so impressed with prep, staging and marketing.  It is fabulous to have such impressive photos!"

Leslie Woods

Sereno Group

The listing mentioned above sold in a little over two weeks from going on the market. The quote provides a nice illustration of the effectiveness of the marketing presentation for real estate listings. Furthermore, not only do prospective buyers respond to high quality professional staging and photography, prospective sellers do as well, another reminder that great marketing, in which photography plays an integral part, not only helps to market the listing, but to market the listing agent as well.

Big Box Photography

Not all of my work involves photographing higher end properties. Sometimes clients need very basic types of buildings photographed, and these can often be quite challenging to make look good for marketing purposes. The warehouse in the photo below was particularly challenging because it was basically just a big box of a building located in an urban, industrial area, with rather uninteresting surroundings. Furthermore, there were a number of obstructions in front of the building, such as a fence and utility poles and wiring, which forced me to choose a closer perspective than I would have liked. This close position required the use of a very wideangle lens to encompass the entire building, which distorted the building vertically to a considerable degree. The photos below illustrate the original distorted version and the final version in which I used Photoshop to correct the distorted view. The final version also reflects a variety of other retouching, to remove distracting elements and enhance the sky.

I shot this scene from an elevated perspective on a cherry picker. The elevated perspective had the dual benefit of allowing me to shoot over an obstructing fence and lessening the vertical distortion somewhat.

The client used the photo to market the property for lease as a data center on their website and in various Web and print directories.

Before Retouching and Final Processing

After Retouching and Final Processing