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REALTOR® Emeritus |  |  | | ||
|  Developing a Property Marketing Plan Listing and Marketing Checklist Marketing Media To Consider Advanced tip Property Advertising Techniques Advanced tip Advanced: Getting the Most from Your Advertising Dollars Online Property Marketing Advanced tip Conducting Open Houses Advanced tip Advanced tip Alternative Selling Options Advanced tip Complying with Fair Housing Broker tip Property Disclosure Broker tip Common Property Hazards Broker tip Advanced tip Property Marketing Quiz Bright Ideas: Property Marketing More Resources: Property Marketing Code of Ethics: Property Marketing | ONLINE PROPERTY MARKETING Virtual Tours Online home tours come in a range of formats from a slide-show-like series of still photographs to a full-on 360-degree panorama tour. The options for purchasing these tours include:
Questions to Ask Before You Buy a Digital Tour
8 Tips for Online Home Tours Anne Riley of Coldwell Banker-Burlingame 400 in Burlingame, Calif., has been using digital images to market luxury homes in the San Francisco Bay Area for nearly five years. Here are her tips: 1. Choose your vendor and photographer with care. “Some of the companies don’t have good photographers. They pick up a camera, and they take the most awful [images]. You need someone who has a good eye and who keeps up with the technology,” Riley says. 2. Don’t delay. It’s much smarter to order the tour as soon as you obtain the listing, rather than hoping the home will sell itself in a week, and then getting a late start if it doesn’t. 3. Show the home’s best features, and make sure the tour downloads and moves quickly. “You don’t want the people viewing the home to feel as though their time is being wasted,” Riley says. 4. Be sensitive and sensible about showing the sellers’ valuables in a home tour. Images can be edited, and valuables can be removed before the tour is shot or eliminated from the picture afterwards, if necessary. 5. Shop around. Riley pays $99 per tour. 6. Use online home tours to screen buyers. “The people I don’t hear from who have seen [the tour] are as important to me as the people I do hear from, meaning I haven’t wasted my time or theirs,” Riley says. 7. Emphasize space and scale. “[Virtual tours] are wonderful for showing cubic volume space, scale, and proportion,” Riley says. 8. Use caution when shooting views. Not all cameras are equally capable of capturing distances well. TIP: Use still shots for a small home and panoramas for large homes. “You don’t necessarily want the 360-degree tour for a smaller and less expensive home, and you need to be more selective in the way you photograph a small home. Otherwise, you’ll end up with half a shot and the rest [of the scene] will be a wall,” warns Anne Riley of Coldwell Banker-Burlingame 400 in Burlingame, Calif. Online Property Marketing, next page > | |