Picture Perfect

Smart Photos Do More

By Geneva Ives on Jun 4, 2013 in Technology | 1 Comment

Here at Point2, we help real estate agents market themselves and their properties. That means we spend a lot of time looking at listing photos. We’ve seen them all – the good, the bad and the truly incomprehensible.

While we all know that evocative listing photos can promote a property by encouraging viewers to picture themselves living in the space, we can’t help but wonder: what if these millions of images that are being traded across the Internet by agents, owners and real estate portals could do even more?

Don’t worry, this is not an article about the future of smell-o-vision. Instead we take a look at today’s smart photos to show you how a curbside snapshot can be so much more than just a pretty picture. Here are three new real estate marketing applications brought to you by advances in imaging technology.

Share Locations

What’s the first rule in real estate? Location, location, location. This is reason enough to geotag your listing photos. Geotagging is the practice of associating your images with a geographical location. Geotags tell your audience, and search engines, where a photo was taken.

Geo-data makes it easy to add another layer of ‘searchability’ to your photos so consumers can find you based on a desirable location rather just than a desirable set of search criteria. With so many people using their mobile devices to find properties, geotags help them search for nearby homes more easily.

Although most of today’s smartphones and digital cameras can add geotags to your photos automatically, real estate agents and brokers might want to check out RealtorCam, an iOS app that adds location and date information to your photos, plus easy custom captions. Viewers can see how great a house looks, where it’s located and read more about a hard-to-spot feature – like built-in surround sound – all in one photograph that you upload to your website or share via email, Twitter and more.

Pad Your Resumé

If you’re anything like us, you probably have a growing collection of real estate-related photos on your smartphone. Aside from starring in the occasional text message to an interested party, they’re probably just taking up space.  Today’s new photo apps aim to give these camera phone pics new life by using them to create your visual resumé.

Show potential clients what an expert you are in the field, literally, by using apps like Instagram or Abodograph to share the photos you take when you’re out looking at properties. Instagram is a free photo-sharing service that allows you to use filters to turn almost any photo into a work of art. With over 100 million monthly users, this is a clever place to showcase your listings to a younger audience, like today’s Gen Y buyers.  For seven easy tips that will put Instagram to work for your real estate business, click here.

Abodograph is another free app that compels you to “prove you’re a real estate expert” by using your photos to create an attractive real estate photo resumé that appears on the web. Online leads can see your photos and your actions – for example, you can post photos while you’re showing a home or holding an open house – and message you directly. Abodograph delivers real-time push notifications straight to your iPhone so you can respond to prospects instantly.

These attractive, shareable images create differentiation by speaking volumes about you and your work ethic. How many of your competitors go the extra mile to network with great real estate photos?

Talk the Talk

What if your photo of an updated kitchen didn’t just show the kitchen but also identified the renovations? Here’s the new Italian marble counter, this is an all-glass backsplash and over here is the sub-zero fridge that comes with the house etc… What if your photo of a music room played music when viewers hovered over the piano? Or linked to a page on your website about the best music venues in your neighborhood? What if site visitors could discover where to buy the curtains shown in your listing photos and your link earned the resulting referral revenue?

New photo embedding tools make it possible to put all of this and more directly in your photos, enabling your images to do the talking (and selling) for you. Free services like Stipple and ThingLink allow users to create interactive images with engaging links that let you tell a story, share a video, present your contact information and more. Interact with the Stippled version of the image below on Twitter.

Your audience can access all of this without leaving the image. Sharing these deluxe images on your website and social media channels just makes sense. Images have a high engagement rate and are more likely to capture and convert clients that plain text or an obvious ad. Now your photos can be more than pretty pictures; transform them into dynamic selling tools.

A World of Possibilities

A thousand words? That’s old fashioned. With today’s rapid advances in interactive photo technology, we predict that 2013 is the year a picture becomes worth 1,000,000 words and then some. We’ve just shown you how to create real estate images that show, tell and sell. We don’t know what’s next on the horizon, but we can’t wait to find out!

How are you using photos to sell or rent your properties? Have you tried any of the above applications yet?

Editors’ note: Geneva Ives is the marketing writer for Point2, a leading provider of online marketing solutions for real estate professionals, including custom websites, syndication tools and prospecting utilities. She will be contributing technology-oriented real estate posts to The Balance Sheet.