May 4, 2007: Picture this: Digital photos can sell your home in the Valley of the Sun
Here's the brutal truth about the real estate market in the Valley of the Sun: There are nine homes for sale for every motivated, qualified buyer.
So what should you do to make sure that your Phoenix-area home is the one in nine that will sell this month? Everything you can.
For our listings, we're pushing our way up the technology ladder as fast as we can. We're doing custom yard signs for each listing, custom Web sites or Weblogs, interactive floor plans, virtual tours, even video tours featuring interviews with the sellers.
It goes without saying that the homes are priced right, in perfect repair and staged to encourage buyers to move themselves in mentally. Ideally, we want an inspection report, with the repairs documented, and an appraisal to demonstrate that the price is fair -- and that an offer will make it through loan underwriting.
Not everyone can do all this work, but there is a simple technology available to everyone that can make a huge difference in marketing your home.
What is it? Digital photography.
An MLS listing can have up to six photos, but many have only one -- or none. A flier can have even more pictures, and a simple Web page can feature photos of everything that matters in the home. Photography hasn't been expensive since the days of George Eastman, but digital photography is virtually free.
But there is a right way and a wrong way to do everything. Good real estate photos should be taken with the widest-angle lens you can lay hands on. And while multiple mega-pixels sell cameras, for a real estate photo to be useful it needs to be a small file size: 640 x 480 pixels is perfect. Fill the frame, showing what's important, omitting what isn't, and be sure to work with plenty of light.
Virtual tours draw eyes at Realtor.com. People will watch videos, if only for the thrill of watching "TV" on the computer. Poetic copy instills dreams. But nothing sells the buyer's imagination on a home like a wealth of big, colorful, richly detailed photographs.
Greg Swann is the designated broker for BloodhoundRealty.com, a full-service Metropolitan Phoenix real estate brokerage. This article originally appeared in the West Valley regional sections of the Arizona Republic.
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Or: Steal this book: I've written over 200 of these real estate columns. They are consistently one of the most popular features on our blogs. Many of them are dated and/or entirely Phoenixocentric. But many others are timeless and generic. If you want to use any of my columns on your weblog or web site, feel free. Three rules: Don't change my text, credit me as the author and give me a link back to http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/ with appropriate anchor text. Something like this, perhaps:
Am I link-baiting? You bet. The quid pro quo is free content for your site that pulls eyeballs and excites interest.<a href="http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/" target="_blank"> Phoenix Realtor Greg Swann</a> suggested I share this with you:
