Posts Tagged with “Real Estate Photography”

What Makes a Great Naples Property Listing?

Blog Post, Real Estate Marketing, Real Estate Photography, Stock Photography
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June 19, 2020

by Sunservices SW | Feb 10, 2020 | Real Estate Photography | 0 commentsNaples Real Estate Photography

9 Ways To Make a Property Listing That Sells Fast

By now you know that you need high-quality professional images to help you sell your Naples area real estate listing. But that doesn’t mean you just throw the images up on a webpage and let them speak for themselves.

To really take your real estate listing to the next level and sell fast, you need more than simply hire a great Naples real estate photographer. Here are my top nine ways to make the most out of your real estate listing.

1. Grab Their Attention With A Great “Hero Image”

You only get one first impression, so make it a good one. Luckily, Naples Real Estate is full of amazing properties, so most times this is easy to do.

Your hero image — that is, the first that appears at the top of your listing — should be the one with the most “wow!” factor. What is the main selling point of the home? What is going to make people want to scroll down and see more? That’s your lead, your hero.

Your hero leads potential buyers into the rest of the home. It connects with them on a deeper level — because remember, buying a home quite often an emotional decision. If your hero image gives site visitors a good feeling about the home, then you’ve nailed it.

2. Make Potential Buyers Say “That’s A Cool House”

“These little things are not the standard options or even the extravagant upgrades. They are the cool features or “wow factors” you didn’t know you needed, but once you’ve seen them, you really want them in your home.”

Newhomesource.com

Once you’ve hooked them with a compelling hero image, guide them through the home with images and accompanying words that make your potential buyers say, “that’s a cool house.”

Highlight the unique features and show off rooms in a way that gives it a sense of cool. Make it look new or make it like retro and fashionable.

Again, this ties into giving buyers a feeling. Your real estate listing is your opportunity to show them rather than tell. If your listing doesn’t make your property look intriguing to you, your buyers aren’t going to think so either.

3. Use Bright, Well-composed Interior Shots

Naples Real Estate Photography

Hey, this is where hiring the right Naples area real estate photographer comes in!

Make sure you have bright, well-composed images of your interiors to use in your listing. Your trained, professional real estate photographer will know how to do this each and every time.

Where there are rooms with great natural light — show it off! Natural light is a great selling feature and you want your rooms to appear bright and spacious. For other rooms where there maybe isn’t much natural light — your photographer will know how to use soft artificial lighting to showcase the space and make it look natural.

4. Make Sure Your Images Flow Through The Home

Your listing online is most often the first time your potential buyers will view the home. You want the listing to flow in order of how a person would walk through the home, otherwise it will feel disjointed.

Or worse, if you put things out of order, when your buyers visit the home and the layout is different than it was online, they will feel as though they’ve been purposely misled. This is a bad customer experience and can harm your reputation.

Make sure your listing flows through the home properly and in a compelling way to help your potential buyers visualize themselves walking through the home, and then match that vision when they come to see it in person. 

5. Have More Images Available Than What You Put In Your Listing

This one is two-fold.

First, you want to make sure that if your potential buyers want to see more images, they have that option. Consider that many of your customers may be coming from out of state and will want to be able to see every possible detail of the home. You should have a “see more” option with a gallery to the remaining images or a scrolling gallery at the end of your post.

However, this does not mean that you should throw every image of the home into your listing. This will create way too long of a page and create a slow load time. This will hurt your Google ranking as well as creating a bad user experience.

Use the proper amount of images to show each room in the home, then provide access to more images that provide different angles or more detailed photos.

6. If You’re Adding Video, Make It Short & Sweet

If you’re adding video to your real estate listing (and you should), make sure it gets to the point.

You don’t want a video that’s 10 minutes of you rambling about the weather or anything that isn’t of interest to your potential buyers. Introduce yourself and the home and get right down to it. Walk them through the home and show off its best features.

Quick, easy, effective.

Note: Your photographer should typically also be able to provide real estate video.

7. Maps Are Important & Aerial Images Can Add To Them

Another major selling point of your real estate listing will be its location.

“In a real estate boom, buyers will clamor for almost any house that hits the market. This is great while it lasts, but when the party’s over, only homebuyers who chose the best locations will be holding property that depreciates at a much slower rate. This discrepancy is largely a result of a home’s location.”

Invesopedia.com

Where is the home in relation to:

  • The highway
  • Airport
  • Schools
  • Grocery store
  • Bars and restaurants
  • Coffee shops
  • Gyms/fitness centers
  • Parks
  • And more

Use maps to show the listing’s relation to everything that might be important to your buyers. Where possible, you can also use aerial photography to show off anything that’s within walking distance. As a bonus, this is also a great way to show people your home from above, including the condition of the roof, your yard and property lines, your position within the neighborhood, and more. 

8. Include All Property Information In Your Virtual Tours For Your Viewer Interest & SEO

You know that your potential buyers want to learn all of the necessary property information in your virtual tour, but did you know it’s also great for your SEO?

Yes, Google scrolls video content as well, and including this information helps your virtual tour be SEO-optimized. Strong SEO means more eyes on your listing.

Important property information to include will include:

  • The address
  • Year built/remodeled
  • Floor plan and square footage
  • Number of bedrooms and bathrooms
  • Neighborhood details
  • Proximity to nearby facilities and main roads
  • Parking

9. Have Strong Real Estate Agent Branding

Remember, you’re not just selling a home, you’re selling your credibility as a trusted real estate agent in your community as well. This means you need to have strong, clear, attractive branding that is consistent throughout all of your listings and media.

Consistency helps buyers identify your face and logo with your listings. If they like your listing and then see your branding on another, it will give you an immediate edge. Strong branding across all of your platforms builds trust with your audience and shows them you’re an expert in this market.

Summary

Taking these steps can ensure you have a strong online listing and help bring more eyes to your website, and hopefully, convert them to showings and sales. Lazy real estate listings are easy to spot nowadays, so you need to be sure you’re taking every step you can to make yours as compelling as possible.

For more real estate listing and photography tips, stay tuned here to the blog.

Jon Kreider is the owner and lead photographer at Sun Services SW, providing real estate photography services to the Naples, Marco Island, and Bonita Springs communities. Jon specializes in real estate photography and video, bringing homes to life online before they are viewed in person. Learn more about Jon’s services or shoot him an email today to discuss your photography needs.

How Often Should You Post to Social Media?

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Comments Closed
October 19, 2019

A common question that I often hear when it comes to your Naples area real estate social media efforts is “How often should I be posting?”

And the answer, as it seems to be for so many things, is “it depends.” For this particular topic, how often you post depends on the social media platform we’re talking about posting to. I found this post from Keeping Current Matters to be a great guideline filled with useful information, but have went ahead and added my own take below.

Don’t Post Just to Post

Another part of the “it depends” answer is what you plan on posting. Keeping a regular posting schedule is great, but only if you have relevant content to post for your audience. Think images and updates on listings, real, timely advice, Naples and Marco Island area information, etc.

Posting at random on a set schedule does nothing but pollute your followers’ timelines. This will hurt your credibility and could eventually lose you some followers. You need to make sure each and every post you make to your various social media channels gives your followers something they want or need so they’ll keep coming back for more. Relevant information about your market trends and local Southwest Florida news is key.

As they begin to learn that you will provide them with good content that is aligned with their interests, they will look to you as an expert in your field and routinely read your posts rather than skip right by. You can imagine that this is an especially valuable tool for those looking to buy a home in Naples or Bonita Springs.

“Pay attention to the 3 E’s of Social Media Content – Enlighten, Engage and Entertain” – Nicole Baker

Different Social Media Platforms

With that out of the way, let’s take a look at the various social media platforms in play for the real estate market and put together an outline for how often you should be posting.

Twitter

You probably thought I was going to start with Facebook, didn’t you? But from a volume standpoint, you should be posting on Twitter much more often.

This is because of the platform’s design. Twitter is a high-volume/low-value network, meaning you have to post often to keep up with the fast pace of conversations. This involves interacting with other users on the platform and replying to any responses you get to your tweets.

It might be quite difficult to come up with 40 quality tweets per day, while three should be relatively easy. If you’re not tweeting at all currently, it’s a good idea to build up your posting regimen slowly. You can also a management platform to schedule your posts in advance to make your life easier.

Here is a nice list of 13 of the best Social Media Posting and Scheduling tools.

Instagram
“Within few years, Instagram has been able to attract more people than any other social media website ever did. It has reached more than 150 million active users. Thus, if you are not using Instagram for business, it means you might be missing out on millions of potential customers” – FanZappy

Instagram is a great platform for real estate given its visual nature. You can easily fill up your feed with great (professional!) photos of your listings and the natural beauty of Naples and the Gulf Coast, but that doesn’t mean you should be dropping dozens of posts per day.

Instead, carefully curate daily posts with one compelling image or with multiple images to showcase a given area. Make sure the images tell a story rather than filling the space just because you had to post something today. Instagram posts have a decent lifespan, so you don’t want content that won’t age well or does not hold any real value to your audience.

Not only should you be strategic with the images you choose, but also with your accompanying hashtags. Use a few hashtags in every one of your posts to build up an image pool that people can search through. You may also find some influential accounts that you can tag in your posts to reach a bigger audience.

Consider a daily Instagram post as well as one or two stories per day to start and see what kind of engagement that brings you. Here is a great list of 7 Instagram Stories Ideas to Get More Followers

Facebook

Facebook is an incredibly useful social media platform for real estate. Like Instagram, Facebook values quality over quantity so you don’t want to oversaturate the newsfeed. A daily post should be just fine on Facebook as well.

You can even conduct some research on your Facebook audience to find out when they are using the platform so you know the optimal time to post. As far as lifespan is concerned — a Facebook post will land somewhere in the middle between a tweet and an Instagram. High-quality posts is the most important factor here.

When posting images on Facebook, like all other platforms you may want to pay attention to your image sizes for different types of posts. This way that amazing Naples Area Stock photo you picked out will look just the way you imagine it will when your audience sees it in their newsfeed. The guidelines for different images on different parts of a Facebook feed are ever changing it seems, but here is a link to the latest.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has less value than the above three when it comes to real estate postings, but if you are posting relevant market information instead of just images of your listings, then it is worth having a presence. You’ll only want to post to LinkedIn sparingly during the workweek and keep your focus on market trends and insights.

Since LinkedIn is a professional network, your followers will look to you as an expert in the real estate market and seek information from you on investment opportunities, the local market, plus news on area amenities and attractions.

Pinterest

Some home buyers will use Pinterest to envision what they’d like in a home, so it may be of value for you to have a presence on the platform. When you have a feature in a listing that someone covets, they may very well find you through a Pinterest “pin.” You can easily post to Pinterest several times a day without issue since it operates differently than the other platforms.

Any relevant images you have for listings are fair game for Pinterest content. Just make sure you use the appropriate hashtags so people can find your content and it may be a good idea to mention it to your professional real estate photographer that you would like a few detail shots of your listing for your social media posts.

If you are looking to jump into the Pinterest game here is some good info on Pinterest and Real Estate Marketing

Summary

Overall, the frequency with which you post to social media largely depends on your market, your following, and how much valuable content you have to share. If you have tons of great images of your listings, you can spread them out over time until the property is sold. If you have access to a nice selection of stock photos of the Naples and surrounding areas then you can also create a steady flow of interesting Social Media posts and content.

Create a plan that won’t overwhelm you and make adjustments as you learn what works and what doesn’t. As long as you aren’t overdoing it and spamming your followers with irrelevant posts, you should drive interest and engagement which hopefully brings more of the right eyes to your listings.

And it’s not as much work as it sounds. Think about how much time you already spend looking through other Naples agent’s content. And don’t forget, there are platforms available like Hootsuite and Bufferthat will send your post to multiple social sites at once, and you can customize them as you see fit.

Looking for a professional real estate photographer in Southwest Florida? Jon Kreider at Sun Services SW has expertly photographed properties in the area since 2013. A commercial photographer serving the Naples, Marco Island, and Bonita Springs communities, Jon specializes in real estate photography, Naples Stock Photography and video, bringing homes to life online before they are viewed in person. Visit Jon’s website or shoot him an email today at jon@sunservicessw.com to discuss your real estate photography needs.