BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Photography (page 6 of 7)

June 4, 2007

First thoughts on real estate video production: Stuff that works

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I took the Bert and Ernie movie to YouTube to see how it would translate. I had read that much of the YouTube quality issue, that awful blocky MPEGulation, was caused by the quality of the source video, and I wanted to put it that notion to the test. Whatever B&EbtUSA lacks in cinematic art, it is decent-quality NTSC video. In other words, if you drove it into your television, it would look like TV-quality video. Bottom line: Not great, not awful. YouTube clearly is imposing its own compression on the source video, resulting in a significant loss of quality. Even so, the results are not nearly as bad as we resign ourselves to accepting from YouTube. My guess is that worst YouTube videos are being scaled up from iPod-sized source videos.

I think it’s funny to make a video about weblogging, so Cathy and I had our revenge yesterday at open house: We made a two-shot talking had video about video. It’s actually deeply philosophical, which is what poor Cathy has to live through when she lets me talk. But I haven’t cut it together yet, so that will have to wait.

Another project is to recut the Almeria video to try to make it a little less visually disquieting.

Recall that the original idea behind that film was to come up with an alternative to the “this… is… the… master… bed… room…” style of real estate video. In the film Cathy and I shot yesterday, we spend some time talking about the Greek idea of historia — the notion that history is not just a chronicle of events but, rather, an interpretive context — a story. I believe that real estate video works when it works as a story and not just as a visual summary of the MLS listing.

As a separate expression of that same kind of idea, BloodhoundBlog contributor Doug Quance brings forth A Study In Staging A Home In Atlanta. The home is shown to full advantage, but, by making the film about the story of the staging of the house, we don’t feel Read more

May 28, 2007

Elaborating the video slideshow beyond all reason: Bert and Ernie BlogTourUSA, the movie

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I got Final Cut Express HD for the Macintosh on Friday. Call it semi-pro video editing software, appropriate to folks like me with significant commercial needs but with neither the time nor the talent to make use of a higher-priced spread.

What you get with Final Cut Express is multi-track video and sound editing with cable-channel-like titling and a blue million sound effects. It doesn’t do green-screen superimposition (I don’t think), but the fanatical home-movie mechanic has everything he needs to alienate an entire family reunion in one elaborate film.

What I want, for now at least, it to insert slide-show images over live video, and I spent a bunch of time playing with those toys over the weekend. Today I built what I think will be my final statement on the video slide show: No full-motion video, but loads of fun with transitions.

I have loads to learn, but I think this hangs together pretty well. Give it a look. It’s fun.

May 24, 2007

Making movies: Wrestling with science, commerce and art to sell the idea of a unique and distinctive Phoenix

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I don’t think I’m done with this yet, but it’s coming along. I mentioned last week that I’ve been making a movie in all my spare time. I’ve got about two weeks in the project by now, most of that lost to rendering and FTP. I may start over again tomorrow, but you can see where it stands for now, if you like.

The little idea is to show off how unique, interesting and beautiful homes in Phoenix can be, contrary to our bad press:

Phoenix is sometimes maligned as a vast suburb crawling with tract houses. The complaint is not without some truth, although our tract home neighborhoods can yield some very pleasant surprises. And every home is unique, no matter how similar it might seem to be to its neighbors.

But Cathleen and I get to spend much of our time in Phoenix neighborhoods where every home truly is unique — the historic and architecturally distinctive neighborhoods of Central and North Phoenix, where virtually every structure is a one-off expression of some one artist’s or craftsman’s vision.

The big idea, of course, is to learn how to make movies that will sell houses and us as Realtors and our brokerage.

Technorati Tags: , ,

May 22, 2007

Watermark play: Ten samples for proof

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Using PicMark for the Macintosh, I built a watermark that satisfies my objective: To put a proprietary mark on photos that does not destroy the beauty of the image. I also wanted to satisfy Thomas Johnson’s goal, to put a web address on each photo.

The ten examples below show the watermark I built. It’s not perfect — there is one photo where I can’t find the semi-invisible mark. But if we presume any thieves are likely to steal more than one picture, we have an excellent chance of catching them. Moreover, being so obviously marked, it’s seems at least plausible that they won’t steal our photos at all.


Technorati Tags: , ,

May 22, 2007

The Way of the Rain Dogs: Peeing on your pictures to mark your Zestifarm — and to avoid becoming an unpuppy

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is from mail from Thomas Johnson of ERA Houston, which, among other things, coins the terms “Zestifarm” and “Zestifarming” for the various ways one can pee on the tree in Zillow:

I love the marking your farm analogy. I walk my dog, Sophie, every evening and I have noticed that she marks everything that is of higher than average height: a clump of grass, a twig, a lump of Spanish moss, whatever. I liken that to canine text messaging a quick sniff, squirt and move on. When we get to the mailboxes, it is different. That is much more interesting. There is lots of sniffing and squirting. I guess we could call that pee mail. My takeaway is that there are so many little repetitions that we can use to mark our Zestifarms. And, the price is right.

Less like pee mail, more like Twitter. Even so, I just quoted that part to make the girls squeal. But: Nothing focuses the mind like an apposite metaphor. One theory says that dogs mark their territory so they can find their way home if they get lost. Hence the poor, lost Rain Dogs.

Dog owners know better: Dogs mark to cover the scent left by other dogs. To have your pee peed on is to become an unpuppy:

I spent the night tossing and turning thinking about “marking my farm”. I think that an agent could take over the cyber neighborhood before the entrenched legacy agent/broker even knew what was happening. A while ago, I bought a cheap little program called “watermark it”. It enables you to digitally watermark photos. I bought it to protect my MLS photos, but it was banned by policy. My 4 AM revelation was to watermark my Zestifarm photos with a small web address. It would not hyperlink, but “Kilroy was here”.

This is something that I’ve been thinking about, but I hadn’t done anything about it until I got this mail. As I mentioned before, there is an even better “pee on the tree strategy” than listing homes for sale:

Instead of announcing homes for sale, walk the neighborhoods you farm, taking Read more

May 11, 2007

Video has a place in home sales, but use it wisely

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Video has a place in home sales, but use it wisely

This is purported to be the year of the listing video, but I am not hugely in love with the idea of video tours. I think digital photos do a much better job of selling buyers on the home. Why? Because they’re bigger. Brighter. Of much higher resolution. And because they hold still.

Video has age-of-wonders appeal to everyone, but if buyers want to get to know a house, they are going to study it. Even if online video overcame its muddy, fleeting quality, it would still be a poor medium for touring a home.

There’s more. Realtor-produced videos often have an amateurish quality that is hard to endure: “This. Is. The. Formal. Dining. Room. The. Residents. Dine. In. This. Room.” Even if the performance is sprightlier, the presentation is often an elaboration of the obvious.

But I do want to tap into that age-of-wonders appeal, and we always want to do more for our listings than our competitors can match. And if I can soak up a potential buyer’s time, that’s time that won’t be deployed looking at other houses. The point is, there are good competitive reasons for including a video tour with a real estate listing, even if video competes poorly with photography.

What I’ve been looking for is a video format that makes sense in the context of the listing — video doing a job that photography cannot do, rather than video doing photography’s job badly.

Here’s what I came up with: An interview with the seller. The particular home we tried this on is an extensive restoration. Taking the seller through the house room by room to talk about what was refurbished, what was remodeled, what was created from scratch was a way of turning video into a true asset in the listing package.

This works much better for me, in any case. We’re not depending on the video for high-resolution images, and we are able to take on the story behind the listing in a way that is both compelling and uniquely suited Read more

May 11, 2007

Is Trulia.com the UnZillow? Realty.bot emerges from beta with a new Q&A feature and robust, system-wide automated alerts

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Come with me to the newly-reconfigured Trulia.com, freshly emerged from beta status. Let’s search for an ideal house. The criteria we can use are limited — location, type of structure, price range, bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage — but we can still scare up some results. Plus which, if you really know what you want — for instance, by winnowing the location down to a particular zip code — you won’t have a huge number of listings to sort through.

My search turned up four houses. Not a big number, but all of them are reasonably well-suited to my needs. But: None of them is a perfect fit. Here’s the cool part: I can instruct Trulia to send me email updates or an RSS feed of changed data in that particular search. When a new home matching my criteria is listed at Trulia.com, I’ll learn about it right away. Or, if I like a particular house, but I don’t like the asking price, I can subscribe to get an email notification of future changes made to that one listing.

I can set up any number of tightly focused searches, each with its own email alert or RSS feed. That much is not news to Realtors. We do this every day, with much more robust search tools. But we do it for clients. The clients themselves don’t have direct access to the MLS system. Some added-cost IDX systems permit saved searches with email updates, but then the search is not terribly more robust than Trulia’s.

But wait. There’s more. The new improved Trulia.com, will alert me when the house of my dreams becomes available. This is essentially the complementary counterpart to Zillow.com’s “Make Me Move” feature. Using a database of tax records, you can select a particular residence and ask Trulia to inform you by email or RSS feed when that home comes on the market.

Neither of these features is without problems. For example, where Trulia turns up four homes that match my criteria, either Realtor-listed or For Sale By Owner, the Arizona Regional MLS system unearths 146 active listings for the same search. And, at Read more

May 9, 2007

A ProjectBlogger challenge: The ProBlogger Top 5 contest

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m swamped, probably not all that hard to figure out. As with the Tomato Gang, I’m kinda bored with ProjectBlowhard. I still have work to do, and and I have a couple of big ideas still to cover, but — without intending to insult the proteges — it’s kind of like a rose-growing contest: Activity at the start, activity at the end, a lot of waiting in between.

In true reality TV fashion we might have a snake-eating contest or a nude tug of war in a tar pit — but that might not be dignified. Here’s something contestants can do though: Darren Rowse at ProBlogger is having one of his semi-annual blogging competitions. The challenge is to write a Top 5 list of whatevers, with the prize — selected at random — being $1,001.

Hundreds will enter, one will win, so buy a lottery ticket if you need money and can’t do math. But the big prize from these competitions is getting involved in the great big blogging world — learning, laughing, linking and being linked to. I think every RE.net weblogger should do this, not just the contestants. Deadline is midnight Thursday, so get cracking.

Technorati Tags: , ,

May 8, 2007

A world fit to be conquered: Five steps to total real estate listing dominance

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s the thing: We want to be excellent real estate listing agents. But there’s more to it than that. We want to be so good at listing real estate that no one can compete with us. The idea of selling “by-owner” pales in the light of what we do, but we want to be so effective, and so thorough, that not even our fellow Realtors will be able to compete against us. We want to charge top dollar — take that, Freakonomics! — and we want for other Realtors to get only the work we turn down.

That’s not very nice, is it? We’re not actually mean about anything, but to be the best necessarily implies that everyone else will be less than the best. Plus which, it kindasorta matters to our clients that we get the job done — and we don’t get paid until then, either.

Before I get to my list of five techniques, there are a couple of lists of three to consider. First, a successful listing praxis consists of three parts: Hiring the seller, marketing the home and servicing the transaction. I’ll be addressing marketing tactics below, but note that I said that we hire the sellers. Too many agents think the seller is hiring them, and it leads them into one obsequious error after another. We work with people who know that we know more about selling houses than they do. We interview them very carefully, and we turn down the ones who can’t or won’t do what we need them to do. We can only sell the houses that will sell — and whose owners are willing to sell — so we avoid the others.

Second, contracting a real estate listing actually entails three sales. We work very hard to sell the house with our marketing, but, before we can do that, we have to sell the sellers on working our way. And, as an ancillary consequence of working our way, we are going to sell a certain portion of the neighbors on working our way in the future. We don’t use our listings to market ourselves Read more

May 7, 2007

Pachelbel versus Warhol: Taking desktop real estate video to the streets

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I stand accused of being the “Andy Warhol of real estate video”. I’m pretty sure them’s fightin’ words, but, rather than exacting my vengeance by making a nine-hour film of a dripping faucet, I have chosen instead to assert my classical roots.

Vide: I had planned to do a video for this listing, but it sold before I could get it done. So I did one now for practice. This is just another randomized slide show with music, but it works better for me than the kind of slow, blurry pan and stammer we see too often in real estate videos: “This. Is. The. Formal. Dining. Room. The. Residents. Dine. In. This. Room.”

But: I’m learning a lot by playing with this software. I have this same slide show in a rock video-style presentation, Ken Burns-style fauxtion with angled cuts and dissolves — completely MTV-creepy. What I want to learn how to do is supplant the images from recorded video, retaining the audio, so that the kind of interview I put together last Friday becomes more visually appealing and more informative.

This is doable. As with high-end graphics production, the software is takin’ it to the streets. Neither desktop publishing nor desktop video are necessarily as high in quality as a professional might achieve. But the price is right, and, most often, close enough is good enough.

Technorati Tags: , ,

May 5, 2007

The Almeria Files: 318 photos in 60 seconds

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I made another short movie to demonstrate that real estate videos don’t have to be small and crappy and void of colorful details. Better than this, it seems to me to illustrate the real life of the wired listing agent. Believe it or not, the film features every photo we took for the Almeria listing — in 60 seconds.

This is for your eyes only. I’m not sharing it with potential buyers. If I can impose a theme upon it, it’s about the accelerated crush that goes into putting one of these listings together. I think the music — Midtown by Tom Waits — sets just the right tone…

Technorati Tags: , ,

May 5, 2007

Renovation Project

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

Never one to sit idly by, Greg has come up with another of his “Insanely Great Ideas”. A video tour essentially hosted by the seller, to me, is shear genius. The fact is, we are selling not a bunch of sticks and stucco but a lifestyle each time we market a property. What better way to make it personal than to bring the potential buyer into the home through video, not as someone panning and zooming their way through a bunch of lifeless rooms but as an invited guest to a conversation over coffee?

Now, Greg’s video deals with a renovation, so it is hard to achieve the warm-and-fuzzies where this particular home is concerned, but I think the possibilities are exciting. The problem for me becomes one of time and time management.

I would venture a guess that most of us here have a hard time with delegation. The fact that we are participating on blogs would suggest that we have some grasp of the power of the technological tools at our disposal, and anyone with a feedreader knows that forty-seven hundred (give or take) new spiffy ways to advertise our properties and ourselves are born every nanosecond. Unless I am a Realty.bot with an arsenal of tech geniuses at my disposal, I have to value engineer my way through the maze of exposure opportunities.

Take the process and importance of having killer property photos. I finally had to acquiesce and admit that photos taken by a true professional are superior to any I can take with my own, albeit very expensive, digital camera. All of our properties, from the one-bedroom condo to the multi-million dollar estate now enjoy professional photos. True, there is an added cost involved, and I still cling to the notion that given the right equipment and time commitment I could achieve somewhat comparable results, yet there is a cost savings… of time. My forty or so photos are now delivered to me within 24-hours in hi-res and web-sized format. No more resizing, no more hours on end of Adobe fun, which frees me to do other things. And Read more

May 4, 2007

Not-ready-for-HGTV: My alternative to the listing video

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I am not hugely in love with the idea of video for listings. My problem is simple enough to state: I think photos do a much better job of selling buyers on the home. Why? Because they’re bigger. Brighter. Of much higher resolution. And: Because they hold still. Video has geek-appeal to geeks and age-of-wonders appeal to everyone, but if buyers want to get to know a house, they are going to study it. Even if video overcame its crappy, fleeting quality, it would still be a poor medium for touring a home.

However: I do want that age-of-wonders appeal, and we always want to do more than our competitors can on our listings. And: If I can soak up another twenty minutes of a potential buyer’s time, that’s twenty minutes that won’t be deployed looking at other houses. The point is, there are good competitive reasons for including a video tour with our listings, even if video competes poorly with digital photography.

So what I wanted was a video format that made sense in the context of the listing — video doing a job photography cannot do, rather than video doing photography’s job badly.

Here’s what I came up with: An interview with the seller. This film was made this week — and, yes, I know: I suck as a videographer. The particular home is an extensive restoration, so taking the seller through the house room by room to talk about what was refurbished, what was remodeled, what was created from scratch — this is a way of turning video into a true added-value asset in the listing package.

The next time this seller refurbs a house, we’ll shoot video all along, memorializing the major changes. It might be slick to mount a web-cam from the ceiling to snap a picture every five minutes while work is going on: Time-lapse remodeling.

This works much better for me, in any case. We’re not depending on the video for high-resolution images — there’s luck! — but we are able to take on the story behind the listing in a way that is both compelling and uniquely suited Read more

May 4, 2007

Picture this: Digital photos can sell your home

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Picture this: Digital photos can sell your home

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 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 Read more

« Older posts Newer posts »

Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

Media Contacts