Episode 16: Professional Photography and Drone Videos

Scott Williams: Sweet Home Santa Barbara, where the skies are so blue. Sweet Home, Santa Barbara, what’s worked for me can work for you.

Jonathan: Welcome friends to another episode of Sweet Home Santa Barbara. I’m your co-host, Jonathan Robinson and with my friend realtor and co-host-

Scott: Scott Williams. Howdy there, Jonathan.

Jonathan: Nice guy. Good to see you again. Today’s subject is photography, which includes drone photography. I’m kind of curious about because that’s a new development. The whole area of having professional photographers photograph their house is pretty new, isn’t it?

Scott: Absolutely, Jonathan. Back in the day, I was the photographer, and every realtor was the photographer for probably the first 30 years of my career. It started out, we take only one picture of a house, that was it, ne shot of the outside.

Slowly, we get 2, 5, 10 15, and now 25 to 50 photographs are just standard

Jonathan: The times, they are changing. What’s the result of all this? How do people use it? Is it worth the money to hire somebody who’s really good?

Scott: Well, there’s quite a range in photographers. They’re artists and they range from $10 a photograph to $100 a photograph. That’s a pretty big range. Obviously, if you’re shooting 25 or 30 photographs of a house, that means it runs from $250 to $2500 and it depends on the value of the house and what you want to show but it can make a really big difference.

Jonathan: When you suggest that people do this, I’m wondering who pays for all this?

Scott: This is generally a realtor cost. Although, in very fancy expensive homes occasionally, there’s a negotiation over a budget for marketing. What I think

is important for the people listening to know is that there are studies that have been done by Zillow and realtor.com and some of the big purveyors of real estate listings. You get more than twice as many people who will look at a listing that has 25 or more photographs than a property that doesn’t have nearly so many photos of it. So, you want to have a good robust number of photos.

Jonathan: Do you recommend specific photographers or do people look them up on Google? How’s that operate?

Scott: Yes. You have to have somebody recommend their own photographer to me. I know a fair smattering of the local photographers. Young people often times get into the photography business, and they find it adventurous. Some of them are really good. I do keep my eye out for someone who really knows what they’re doing though.

Jonathan: What else are some of the details of what to look for in a photographer? How to you use this information?

Scott: We’ve gone right straight into the professional photographers. Let’s pause for just a moment and say you still see real estate agents shoot with their own iPhone the house. You can really tell the difference. I find this most commonly someone who’s not full-time in the real estate business or maybe a property manager, or somebody new or sort of retired out of the business. They’ll just snap a few photographs, and you can tell the difference and so can the public.

Jonathan: Yes. Any other useful tips as to what to do when the photographer comes over? Do you do stage your house in a particular way or are there any subtleties that the average person might miss?

Scott: The answer to that is yes. I always want to be at the property when the photographer is working. There are just little subtleties of the light and the way, “Let’s shoot the front door inside outside.” Oftentimes, it will take a few shots of the house,  through a like sliding glass doors. We’ll set up on a tripod and we’ll shoot that shot and then we’ll open the doors and shoot that shot. Sometimes we’ll come back for the morning or for the evening and we’ll set up the same tripod at the same place and shoot that with morning light, with the sun or the sun setting so that we can take these people through the romance of the home. How beautiful it is in the morning, and the evening, and the twilight with the windows open. You have to think yourself

through the process to do that.

Jonathan: Very interesting. How do you use these photos? Where do they go?

Scott: All of the websites, the multiple listing service is the starting place. When people first encounter the property in my websites or other local websites, or even out there on realtor.com, Zillow and all the big national ones. They’re all going to use the same photographs from the multiple listing service. I want to be entirely in charge of what the public sees. That’s really important.

Jonathan: Before we go into the whole area of drones, is there anything else about house photography that people should know?

Scott: Well, we find that not all realtors are willing to spend the extra money. As we talk about some of these more expensive add-ons that make for even better marketing, we’ll discover that a homeowner needs to be interested in what their realtor is going to do. How much money they’re willing to spend? There is a direct relationship between the eyeballs on the page in the marketing and how extensive the marketing is. That’s intuitive, but it’s absolutely true.

Jonathan: I know that you pay for this. Do some realtors, they just try and get away cheaply or how what’s the difference between a really good realtor and a not so good realtor?

Scott: Let’s move it on into past the photography. First of all, you wouldn’t want to hire an agent who isn’t going to hire a professional photographer. Let’s move on to the next levels. The next levels are the drone shots and the floor plans. These are add-ons that come as part of their services. We know right now in the United States that roughly 50% of realtors think that drone shots are great and there’s about another 30% of realtors think that in the near future, they’ll get interested in drone shots and about 20% of realtors have no idea what drone shots are and don’t have any interest in them.

It’s penetrated to the halfway point in the industry. That’s worth noticing. You want to be sure that your realtor is in that group that says drone shots are great. Well, you spend for it.

Jonathan: Yes, probably. A hundred percent of home sellers benefit from them, so you want a realtor that understands that.

Scott: Yes. In Santa Barbara, you want their drone to be 50, 60 feet up in the air, showing you where the water, the Pacific Ocean, the downtown, all those other little landmarks around here. You want that as part of your marketing. Somebody might be looking at this house from Peoria, Illinois and they need to know that this house is so many blocks from the ocean. The more you show them that, the more they’re like, “Oh Marge, that’s great. Let’s go see that house.” That person in Peoria can just pick up their iPhone or their Android phone and call me up and say, “Would you walk me through?” They don’t even have to come to Santa Barbara, and they would still be a legitimate showing of that house. We need to catch that kind of person.

Jonathan: Yes, that’s a great idea. Let’s go a little bit into the drone situation. We talked a little bit about how common they are and that not all real estate agents are using it. What do you look for? First of all, are you using the same photographer for drones or are they two different things?

Scott: It started out as two different things, but now a good photographer realizes that this has to be part of what he’s offering you. The drone is the gateway to two different technologies. First of all, of course, those nice photographs that we put in the multiple listing service but it’s also shooting a video. The video is really essential to telling the story of a home. I’m going to tell you a quick story about that. Just a moment ago, I talked about opening up the doors and shooting a shot through there. I’ve been in houses where we open up those doors and we take a drone and set it inside the house, pull it up in the living room, shoot it out those doors and then up over the house. We can shoot that even in reverse or in forward. It’s either this dramatic moving away from the house or it’s even more dramatic coming down out of the sky, coming down into the backyard and then going into the house. All in one video shot.

Jonathan: We’re talking Hollywood production there.

Scott: Hollywood production. Just flying the drone in circles around the house a few times, going over the neighborhood, doing a few things like this coming in and out of the windows or the front door. You can get a minute of video that is pretty spectacular. A decade or two ago, what it cost you tens of thousands of dollars. You would need a helicopter. You couldn’t even do some of this stuff and here you can do it for, it’s hundreds of dollars. Let’s put it that way or a thousand dollars, maybe. Just blow people’s minds with this house. Make it sing and dance, and really perform.

Jonathan: Is that part of your service in a traditional way or is that standard now or is that something extra?

Scott: It may be becoming standard but I’m a little bit ahead of the curve on that. I think this is great because I heard this week that about 80% of searches online these days end up in a video somewhere.

Jonathan: People like video.

Scott: People like video.

Jonathan: Any last words about photography drones or anything that we didn’t cover?

Scott: Let’s see. I pay for this. I think this is really essential. I think you should have a realtor who does this for you and knows what they’re doing.

Jonathan: Always nice to have experience and somebody who knows what they’re doing, especially when dealing with big transactions like selling their house.

Thank you, Scott. Always useful information and thank you, listeners. Please come back for our next episode of Sweet Home Santa Barbara.

Scott: Thank you all.

Scott Williams: Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to our podcast on your favorite app. If you know someone preparing to sell their home, please tell them about the podcast. Visit Scott Williams.com to contact me and download the two free E-booklets, “Is My House Saleable Now? and “How Not To Buy A Money Pit”. Thank you for listening.