Real estate marketplaces like Redin and Zillow offer an incredible amount of information online for home buyers. But the most important information buyers are looking for is home photos. Our brains are wired to prefer images, and photos are highly effective at influencing buyers. Studies show that listings with professional photography sell faster and for more compared to properties without professional photography.
So how can marketplaces further improve the effectiveness of their home galleries and increase engagement from online users? Here are 4 great technologies that can compliment a marketplace’s existing photo gallery and help sell more homes online.
Guided video tours
Not every room or feature of a house makes it into a home’s online gallery. Video tours help buyers fill in these gaps and can help highlight details such as how rooms connect to each other, or how a room looks while moving around. Video tours provide excellent information without needing to browse through hundreds of photos or large blocks of text. Most importantly, video tours are an easy way for buyers to engage with a home that requires even less effort than viewing images in a gallery.
Video tours are also great for real estate agents to make home buying more personal. Agents can connect with buyers through videos, and this helps build trust and generates more online leads. A good walk-through video can be entertaining and informative, and leaves a strong first impression of a property that makes it more likely buyers will revisit the listing in the future.
This great example by The Tanya Eklund Group shows how effective video tours can be at selling homes online.
Virtual staging
Oftentimes, homes are quickly put on the market under conditions that are less than ideal for real estate photography. A messy room, shabby furniture, or bad paint job can make a home seem very unappealing online. These factors don’t decrease a property’s actual worth but will reduce a property’s appeal online and will make it harder for the listing to succeed online.
Virtual staging is a technology that can help address many of these problems. Virtual staging works by editing existing images to remove or replace furniture, digitally replace a paint job, or to remodel fixtures like cabinets and counter tops. When shown alongside non-altered home photos, virtual staging is a great tool to help buyers visualize a property’s full potential.
Here’s a great example of virtual staging from an article published in The National Association of Realtors:
Though virtual staging can be extremely powerful, it is important to never misinform buyers or misrepresent a property with false imagery. Virtual staging should always be displayed alongside original high-quality home photos so buyers can tell what the house actually looks like vs what it could look like.
3D home modeling (AKA virtual tours)
3D home models are a far more effective way to showcase a home’s layout than a traditional 2D floor plan. 2D floor plans can be hard to understand and are difficult to grasp a sense of scale. 3D models are a much more intuitive way to understand a home’s floorplan, and 3D spaces can also be filled with digital furniture to help buyers better understand how the room will look like once furnished.
3D models can show the vertical axis which helps buyers understand how tall a room is. This is especially helpful when looking at multi story homes with staircases or raised ceilings. As demonstrated below, layouts with 3D rendering are much easier for potential renters and buyers to connect with compared to a traditional 2D flat image.
Having a photography solution that scales
Some of the biggest challenges real estate marketplaces currently face with photography include juggling multiple appointments, managing a variety of billing relationships and maintaining a consistent photo style and quality across many different photographers. Typically, marketplaces today work with hundreds or even thousands of photographers individually - a task which is both difficult and inefficient.
Snappr, an on-demand photography service, is a modern solution to this problem and is the best way real estate marketplaces can successfully manage their photography at scale. Retaining a service like Snappr eliminates the need to manage individual photographers making it incredibly easy to schedule shoots, manage billing and store photos all in one place.
With the largest network of professional photographers in the nation, Snappr can even book shoots with as little as 2 hours notice, delivering stunning professional real estate photography that will attract more online home buyers than ever before.
Ready to take your photography to the next level and make a real impact on your bottom line? Contact Snappr’s Enterprise Team today to learn how you can benefit from our industry-leading real estate photography services.
