Real estate marketplaces like Redfin and Zillow offer a wealth 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 than those without.
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 complement 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 highlight details such as how rooms connect to each other or how a room looks as you move around. Video tours provide excellent information without requiring you to browse hundreds of photos or large blocks of text. Most importantly, video tours are an easy way for buyers to engage with a home, requiring even less effort than viewing images in a gallery.
Video tours are also great for real estate agents to make the home-buying process more personal. Agents can connect with buyers through videos, and this helps build trust and generate more online leads. A good walk-through video can be entertaining and informative, leaving a strong first impression of a property and making 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
Often, homes are put on the market quickly 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 they reduce its appeal online and make it harder for the listing to succeed.
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 repaint, or remodel fixtures like cabinets and countertops. When shown alongside unaltered home photos, virtual staging is a powerful tool for helping 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 see 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 floor plan, and 3D spaces can also be filled with digital furniture to help buyers better understand what the room will look like once furnished.
3D models can display the vertical axis, helping 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 than traditional 2D flat images.
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.
