Doctor Photo's Property Photography Blog

Property Marketing Vs Corporate Marketing

Photography can be really important when it comes to winning instructions to sell your town's best homes. Here's why.

Perhaps the most basic requirement of any estate agent is that you should get your homes noticed by the best buyers for the right reasons. Fail in this and there could be several consequences:

a) your homes might sell for less than their optimal value

b) your homes might not sell at all

c) you could waste thousands on advertising (because your photos aren't attractive)

d) your brand will suffer (because you'll look as though you don't care enough to get it right)

e) your potential vendors might not consider your agency as suitable' for their properties

The idea in this first article is to help you to become aware of the importance there is in making sure that all of your houses create the very best first impression when you put them in front of your buyers.

Why would you want that Well, we all know that first impressions count, but evidently not all agents appreciate that the very first impression that anyone has of the houses they're selling is created by the photos on their particulars, in their advertising or in the beauty parades that are Rightmove or Zoopla etc. Fail to make your houses stand head and shoulders over the competition and the chances are that you'll not attract the interest of those who would otherwise have paid their optimal price.

Once buyers enter their search criteria into a portal's database they're presented with hundreds of property photos. The question is this: which ones are they most likely to click on If you agree that attractive images are likely to increase your click-through rate then you might wonder why there are websites that are dedicated to bad estate agents' photos; and you would be right to. You might even want to look at your own photos and consider whether you're doing an outstanding job in that area or something less than that in what is now a very competitive world where average' is no longer likely to be good enough!

One of the issues with doing less than a brilliant job photographing your properties is that today, people are looking at your images on 50 screens and HD mobile phones. You're effectively pumping thousands of pounds annually into online and print advertising that won't work because some of you are promoting your homes with photos that make them look like the lower deck of Noah's Ark following a nasty storm. If that's you, then what does it say about your brand and about you If you were selling your own house where you'd spent £70k on a new kitchen and hand-printed wallpaper, would you seriously want your agent turning up with a compact camera and no idea how to use it

I know from experience that any mention of the word, marketing' to an estate agent instantly conjures up thoughts of corporate folders, clever adverts and even vinyl stickers on the sides of your cars. BUT the most fundamental job you have - one that is ignored by a good 80% of the UK property industry - is to make sure that you get your properties noticed for the right reasons and by the best potential buyers. Do that brilliantly and I'm certain that the people with the best homes locally will include you in the mix of agents they're looking to instruct.

Hopefully you'll see very clearly from this that property marketing and corporate marketing are not in competition with each other, but very much inter-related. The better you become at property marketing, the more your brand will benefit!

So - how can I help

Over the coming weeks I'll be writing about the following:

Getting the vendor to play ball and prepare for the photos

What's the best kit to help you achieve stunning property photos

Tips - a couple of things you could do right now to improve your property photos

Post-processing - making your images better

Builder's toilets, skips and cars be gone!

Training - what new skills can you learn

The Drones are coming - Aerial/mast photography. A different perspective

Where does lifestyle photography fit into your property marketing

What to look for in a professional photographer

Ever thought about night photography

What you can be doing now in preparation for the winter

John Durrant was a partner in an award-winning agency in Woking. He's been featured on the BBC and in the Sunday Telegraph. John wrote the 12,000-word Guidance on Property Photography for the RICS and today he photographs some of the finest homes in Surrey and West Sussex. Additionally his Doctor Photo business edits/optimises thousands of estate agents' own photos each month and he travels the UK teaching photography workshops to estate agents.

See: https://www.durrant-associates.com/