Real estate photography trends for 2019
Understanding current trends in real estate photography can help reduce a home’s days on the market and accelerate its sale. Successful real estate professionals, property owners, and investors are those who stay abreast of new, innovative, and sometimes disruptive technology developments in real estate marketing photography.
More and more often, competitive and profitable markets are disrupted by new innovative ideas developed by startups or entrepreneurs that create new, previously unexplored avenues for profit.
When it comes to real estate marketing, keeping up with continuously evolving photographic trends is essential to targeting potential homebuyers. Incorporating one or more of the following trends in your real estate listing can help sellers make their listings more competitive, attract more buyers, and sell a home more quickly:
Make your images and website mobile-ready
Today’s home buyers are not simply looking at homes for sale online; more than 70 percent of buyers use smartphones or tablets to learn more about properties via an app or website. Millennial home buyers, the fastest-growing home buyer demographic, are twice as likely to use a smartphone or tablet as baby boomers.
Google recommends utilizing mobile-friendly websites and images to meet the growing demands of mobile audiences. Unless your images and website are optimized for mobile devices, your listing is less likely to show up in buyers’ search results, reducing the number of potential buyers who see it.
Mobile-ready images are photos that load quickly on mobile devices. Mobile-optimized listings are also responsive, which means their size adjusts automatically to fit the size of any device screen. Images that aren’t responsive will not only take time to load, but they’ll exceed device screen sizes, requiring searchers to scroll or shift the image around to view the entire picture, and may also appear out-of-focus on some devices. Either way, without mobile optimization you run the risk of frustrating device users who will navigate away from a listing or page if it’s not fast loading or needs to be manipulated to view.
Mobile device users expect images, pages, and information to load quickly without waiting around for images to display. Mobile-optimized photos are formatted to load quickly while retaining image quality.
Benefits of mobile-friendly images
Mobile-optimizing the images in your online listing increases its ability to grab and keep buyers’ attention.
3-D virtual home tours and video walkthroughs
Competing with other home sellers to attract buyers today requires more than just two-dimensional images. 3-D virtual tours and walkthrough videos provide sellers with the opportunity to engage potential buyers in an immersive tour of the exterior and interior of the property before scheduling an in-person tour. Including 3-D virtual tours and walkthrough videos in your listing can increase the number of potential buyers reached.
3-D virtual tours convert still images of the home into real-life graphics simulations. A 3-D virtual tour replicates the home in a scaled-down format allowing viewers the ability to navigate from room to room. Potential buyers can navigate and browse through the house 24/7 via computer or mobile device. They also have the option to use a virtual reality headset to experience a tour of the home as if they are walking through it.
Similar to 3-D tours, video walkthroughs allow potential buyers to experience a guided tour of the property in a less interactive way than virtual tours. The property comes to life as the video walkthrough takes the viewer from room to room.
Benefits of 3-D virtual tours and video walkthroughs
Attract more listing views:
• Buyer appeal: Virtual tours and video walkthroughs appeal to home seekers in a big way. A growing number of buyers find them to be extremely useful for gathering information about a property.
• Attract more viewers: virtual tours are especially popular among older home buyers; nearly 40 percent of potential buyers take advantage of online videos to get information about a home. Listings that include virtual tours have a better chance of attracting viewers than listings without virtual tours.
• Economical: creating and adding a virtual tour or walkthrough video to your listing is a low-cost option for maximizing buyer attention. In fact, the cost is often recouped by reducing the time the home remains on the market or increasing the selling price.
• Realtors gain more listings: sellers look for real estate agents who offer all the bells and whistles available to sell homes. Realtors and agents who offer advantageous services like the creation of virtual tours or video walkthroughs increase their appeal to home sellers looking to enlist the help of a professional.
Benefits of aerial images
Aerial photography offers images of the home and the surrounding landscape from above. Using aerial photography adds a complete visual reference for potential buyers. Aerial images provide a bird’s eye view of the home and its surrounding property, as well as nearby amenities such as local shopping centers, parks, churches, area highways, and other nearby public conveniences.
Aerial photography is a new trend that’s growing fast. A recent survey found that only 11 percent of real estate agents are using aerial photography in their client listings, which makes it a service worth offering to sellers that can help set realtors apart in competitive markets and attract more clients.
Capturing images from above no longer requires hiring a photographer and helicopter or plane. Today’s aerial photos are taken by a photographer using a small unmanned aircraft (aka drone) to record photos and video. The remote-controlled drone is armed with a small, stabilized camera for optimal focus and captures 15 images per session.
The drone operator on the ground can view the photos and video as the device records them, which helps to ensure that the property is captured from the most advantageous angles in the best light, for the highest quality images.
Aerial photography benefits
Aerial photography provides many benefits to sellers and real estate agents including:
• An exclusive view of the property: Images and video captured from above deliver an otherwise unavailable view of the house and property that benefits potential buyers’ information-gathering abilities. It provides buyers with a useful perspective of the property’s location in relation to the surrounding landscape and proximity to nearby amenities.
• Increases the likelihood of potential buyers viewing the property. With the volume of online listings competing for buyer attention, adding aerial photography can help your listing stand out, increasing the potential number of buyers who stop to view it.
Virtual home staging
Another new trend in real estate photography, virtual home staging offers the benefits of staging a home to enhance its appeal among buyers without the expense and hassle of hiring professional stagers or locating and moving actual furniture.
Staging a home for viewing can help it sell more quickly and get a higher price. Staging generally requires finding and moving furniture and accents into the home. Sellers who aren’t in a position to stage the home themselves can hire a professional stager to put together an inviting décor that maximizes space and appeals to most buyers. Virtual staging provides all the benefits of home staging minute labor and expense.
Virtual staging transforms an empty home into stylishly furnished rooms that help potential buyers view it at its maximum potential. Using photos of the home’s empty rooms and interior spaces, the seller chooses the photos they want to be used and the furniture style they prefer for staging. A photo editor adds furniture and décor accents to the images and provides the final virtually-staged pictures for downloading and sharing in the online listing and on social media.
Virtual staging benefits
Virtual staging offers sellers and realtors a variety of benefits including:
- A cost-effective alternative to traditional in-home staging: traditional staging, on average, can cost around $400, compared to an average cost of $29 per image for virtual staging.
- Enhance buyer interest: home staging can impact a potential buyer’s perception of the home’s interior spaces and help them envision living in the home. The ability to view attractively staged images of a home online can increase buyer interest and boost their likelihood of scheduling an in-person viewing.
- Helps sell a home more quickly: Virtual staging usually increases interest and demand among buyers, and helps sellers find a buyer more quickly.
Today’s home buyers are searching online
A majority of home buyers begin their search online. More than 90 percent of buyers use the internet at some point in their search for a home. The images offered on websites and in seller listings are integral to attracting interested buyers.
Online home searching is the top real estate trend worldwide. The only changes expected to affect this trend involve keeping up with ever-evolving innovations in real estate photography.
Already, there are multiple ways to use online images, videos, and information to effectively connect with buyers and entice them to view a property.
Using new formats including virtual tours, virtual tours, video walkthroughs, and aerial photography can set your listing apart from competitors and maximize buyer interest. Image-centric listings offer sellers a definitive edge, and inexperienced sellers can easily find professionals to help make the most of virtual real estate photography and marketing technology.
Real estate photography trends for 2019