Estate Agents Photography

It's fairly common for estate agents to take their own photos, often with compacts. You'll find it time consuming to do as a seperate business (to do it properly) theres more to it than just popping in and getting a few pics, lighting can be tricky, theres often no power in the houses, and sometimes they are a mess, you'll also do a fair bit of milage, plus doing the outsides can be a nightmare with weather and lighting problems.
Good luck if you can make it work. Wayne
 
Funny you should mention this but last week we put our house on the market and I had a bit of a competition with the agent as to who can produce the best pics. It was a sunny day and the shadow monsters where out to play. Needless to say (armed with my Siggy 10-20) that I won hands down and all of the websites and papers now have my pics in.

With that said, and after having a chat with the agents, they really aren't fussed about paying a pro to get the pics. 1) They've got to attend the houses anyway 2) If they don't feel they got a good picture out of the dozens they take, they just won't use them. 3) Pics on their own rarely sell a property and in fact if you give too much away, there won't be any mystery left. ;)

Don't mean to rain on your parade, but down here on the south coast I don't think you could make any money out of it really, unless you were doing the EPA assessments at the same time and thus saving them a trip out.
 
When we sold my grans house a couple of years ago, the estate agent had an SLR which he took a picture of the house with. I don't think there's any money in this sort of thing unfortunately :(
 
danieljamesphoto said:
I potentially am looking to take the new Sigma 10-20 on the road and do some photography for estate agents, for the brochures etc.

My question is, does anyone have any experience in this? and if so how much did you get paid or charge? per house? per photo? etc

thanks :D
Click to expand...

I toyed with this idea after seeing the awful pics the local agent produced for a neighbour's house, but it would appear that unless you can offer to produce something like 360 degree "virtual tours" for fifty quid a house then you'll have a hard time parting any estate agents from their money....
 
I have a 10-20 and am suprised you consider it suitable for 'architectural' work as I don't think I have seen a straight vertical or horizontal with it yet! :)

My 12-24 is much more suitable.


I did some pictures years ago for estate agents and builders. Loads of driving about, waiting for people to turn up often late, difficult lighting, awkward and small rooms, cars parked in front of houses etc! Only positive thing now I can think of would be the speedy availability of pictures with digital!
 
My wife worked as an estate agent for a while.

They company had no concept of what a good photo was, and when pointed out that they could be improved, they seemed unconcerned.

Furthermore the firm scrimped over spending a pound, never mind paying a photographer a wage.

Good luck!
 
i worked as an estate agent for a while

you want to target local independent offices that deal in prestige property

and then convince then that using you is going to increase their sales in this tricky time

bear in mind that they got by without you before

good luck
 
I shoot some architectural photography for a couple of architects. To do it very well (and I'm not saying I do) is technically challenging. For architects you are trying to emphasise the features they consider important.So, if space is a feature you use a wide angle etc.

For estate agents (I have had several discussions with a few friends who are agents) there are different requirements. The problem they all raised is that there is no cash in the pot for better photography on the typical sale and to break into the higher end of the the market is very difficult. They also have a problem with potentially misrepresenting the property and the use of very wide angle lenses is an issue as it can make a room look far larger than it in fact is.

When selling my own property I did do my own photography but used a 50mm lens in portrait orientation with a panoramic head (for the interior shots) and stitched the images to get the wider angle whilst still maintaining a representative perspective and size for the room.

You will notice that many info sheets for properties use a couple of exterior views and for the interior views tend to frame and focus on features. This avoids the problem of trying to get the whole room in a single shot and possibly misrepresenting the size of the room. Use a 12mm lens in the average UK lounge and you can make it look the size of a town hall committee room.

A lot of estate agency photographs are very poor but unless you can show that better images will result in more sales they will stick with what they have got. I was also warned that estate agencies can be very slow payers and will probably only pay if/when a property actually sells. The kind of money they were talking about for photographing a property would not cover the cost of doing it once you took into account travel costs, equipment costs, insurance, processing time etc. When I looked at it, after costs, I would be working for less than the minimum wage and in some cases it would actually cost me money to do.

Don't let me put you off though :) If you can find a way of getting them to pay a reasonable rate and pay it when you photograph the property (not if/when they sell it) then you might be able to make a go of it.

John
 
Save your time and try something else, no money in it unless you target the top end of the market. Estate agents will usually do it themselves to save a few pounds.
 
:agree:

Waste of time I'm afraid.

Remember that agents don't get any money unless they sell a house so they won't spend a penny on it of their own cash if they don't need to. As only about half the houses that come on to the market actually complete they already waste loads on marketing costs.

The top end agents, Saviles, Knight Frank etc will use photographers but the guys they send in are pro's and will also do the floor plan and now even EPC's at the same time. There's quite a few companies that offer this so might be worth speaking to one of these if you're really determined.

Sorry :)
 
our estate agent sent round a photographer... can't remember much about the pics or the kit I just remember it had a flashgun (a few years ago before I was into this stuff)
 
lets get this straight
Our house is on the market - and an estate agent wanted £4700 for the pleasure of selling our house. He said just like 3 other estate agents, demanding the same price..

A. they get 70% of thier business online
B. They shoot with a compact
C. Houses would be mainly marketed on rightmove, as the paper had no effect on sales any more

So we looked on Rghtmove - the writeups and photography are shocking. Remember this accounts for 70% of thier enquiries, so it would be nice to see £3290 of effort

Mrs K is a very visual person - after asking me to "sort 20 images" in photoshop, just so we could see the rooms that these "estate agents and thier compacts" are trying to sell, we decided to market our own house, and do our own photography. We brought 2 boards from e-bay for 6.99 each + 6.99 postage, had the HIP pack done ourselves and produced a top notch website with photography

I am sure there is a market for decent websites with decent photography to sell premium housing. Anything must be better then the poor quality seen on the online estate agents

We will let you know how the sale goes - we have been marketing for a week, and we nearly have an offer!
 
very true, a lot of people say that it makes rooms look bigger but there's two things to consider:-

1) you're trying to sell the IDEA to people at first and make them go and see the house from the photos, even if they're cleverly photographed ;) we went and saw a house that looked really good in the photos and was bad in real life. We have also had people say the photos of our house (currently for sale) doesn't do it justice

2) there's sizes on the brochures so people can see the size from that and visualise it roughly
 
There have been other posts about this in the last couple of months I've been here - there are certainly people doing this commercially & successfully. Have a look at the other posts - it's a matter of normal business enterprise & in these times of recession a seller has to stand out from the crowd.
 
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