In today's competitive markets, it's more important than ever to create your real estate listings "stand out" from the crowd. Over 85% of buyers are actually utilising the Internet to find that home or property of the dreams. If you are a realtor, a broker, or developer, quality real estate photography is quickly becoming among our most significant marketing tools creative revolverAs a new start-up in the real estate photography business, anyone can plenty of the "heavy lifting" for their clients. By teaming with a web-based platform, now you can take professional quality photographs of property listings, and have the flexibility to offer different levels (or bundles) of services to your clients. This takes work flow to an entire new amount of convenience without sacrificing quality.

Let's face it - plenty of real estate listing photos are taken by amateurs with their point-and-shoot cameras. You've all seen them. And perhaps that's your chosen way of marketing your properties. What sets the "pros" in addition to the others is not merely great images, but the ability to utilize an agency's own "branding" in their virtual tours for a very reasonable cost (typically under $20). With unlimited hd photographs, support for panoramas, and agent-specific branding, the web-based virtual tour platform offers the budding real estate photographer a quick and simple method to produce and host quality real estate listings for the industry.

Additionally, a self service client panel allows your web visitors to download images in multiple sizes (email to prospective buyers, used in print ads), edit names and descriptions ("ceramic tile throughout"), rearrange slide show images, access live statistics, create RSS feeds, and more. Clients enjoy syndication features making their virtual tours compliant with MLS and other major real estate portals and automatic posting to Facebook and Twitter accounts. Some virtual tour hosts even supports voice-over narrations and the ability to add your own music to slide-shows. How cool is that?

Gone are the times when a realtor or broker can just snap several photos and upload for their realty site and expect to create in prospective buyers. Today's consumer is not just a computer savvy bunch, they've become so visually oriented that sloppy images usually get glossed over, while the really eye-catching photos tend to draw them in and keep their attention. Even a member of family "newbie" may take this concept and make it easier for the agent or broker showing their properties to the planet in perfect manner. Consider offering premium packages with "High Dynamic Range" photos, also called "HDR" images. HDR yields impressive results with little extra effort, and allows a photographer to deliver very high quality for a nominal fee.

In accordance with recent Wall Street Journal article, at the closing table listings with nicer photos gain between $934 and $116,076-as measured by the difference between asking and final price-over listings using photos from point-and-click cameras. The data also revealed that listings with nicer photos have more online attention. And yet, for all this, only 15% of listings incorporate higher-end photography. This is even true at the high-end. The WSJ also found that over fifty percent of $1 million-plus listings were shot with low-end cameras. There is a distinct segment there just waiting to be filled.

Sure, anyone can take pictures and post them on a web site. Exactly what do set you aside from all others is the initial delivery of services at a competitive price level. Seems like a "win win" combination for real estate sales.

John Bates is a professional digital photographer whose images and illustrated articles have been published in Nature Photographer, SuperModels Unlimited, and Trooper magazines. His commercial clients include Detroit creative revolver Brothers Choppers, General Motors, American Specialty Cars, and even the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq. You are able to find out more about John and his marketing methods at: