Making Photos and Videos Work Harder

image: flickr/aussiegall

Agents are having to become more innovative in the ways in which they use imagery to market their properties online. Videos, online tours, panoramic photos – with the tight market and the competition online, everyone’s getting in on the act and trying to make their listings stand out.

To get fantastic photos and footage you don’t need to be an expert photographer, tech guru, or lug a video camera and film around with you. All you need is a wise investment in some select digital equipment, and some easy to use software.

There are some relatively easy ways to make photos and video work harder for you and there are loads of companies willing to lend a hand, in every region.

We’ve chosen just a few tech ideas that demonstrate the range of help available to assist you turn a few photos into a virtual tour, add a panorama shot of an amazing view, or zoom in on a home’s best selling point.

Virtual Tours

No, you don’t need video to make a virtual tour, just photos! TourFactory run all sorts of marketing packages but specialise in turning photo stills into moving footage. It’s like a seriously advanced PowerPoint presentation.

TourFactory has recently announced “The Ultimate Tour: Elegant Series” will be available in the TourFactory Marketing Engine.

With a large emphasis on photos, TourFactory’s new tour was designed to answer an overwhelming demand from consumers for a presentation that was more property-focused.

There are loads of other providers, and also other leading software providers such as Easypano who originated in China in 2001 and have since created literally thousands of online tours for estate agents.

Perfect Panorama Shots

To get a panorama shot you can fiddle with a fish eye lens, or painstakingly paste your sequence of individual photos together, or you can look for the camera that says it does it all. French company Giroptic claims to have broken new ground in panoramic digital photography and has the world patents to prove it.

Position the digital camera in the centre of the panoramic shot you want to take, and the one-click technology means a perfect panoramic 360° of the surroundings. Sounds too easy.

The 360° panorama can then be uploaded to the web and be turned into a flash-programming based virtual tour using the company’s software.

Once you have uploaded your photograph, clicked and created your virtual tour you can then do with it whatever you like. You can download it and embed it on your website. You can link to it and show it on your website. You can download it and carry it with you in your laptop or PDA.

All you need to do it add the camera to your wishlist…

See it all in close up

The house you’re trying to sell has amazingly detailed period features – how do you show it? The same way you’d see a close up of clothing, or the cover of a book you might buy from an online retailer.

RealBiz360 has introduced VuVista, already used by trulia.com, yahoo.com and oodle.com among others.

iVuZoom technology allows users to view a 360- or 180-degree panorama, stop the picture, then zoom in on precise details – parquetry flooring, fireplace carvings, kitchen cabinets, tiles, whatever! The technology allows streaming of very high resolution images to the Web over any bandwidth. That means you can upload and use the highest megapixel images available from today’s digital cameras.

In a recent interview with RISmedia’s Maria Paterson, the company’s president and COO, Steve Marques, discussed why iVuZoom is such a breakthrough for agents and their clients, and how it might revolutionise the virtual tour business:

“VuVista’s interactive virtual tours hold viewer interest up to five times longer than a typical virtual tour, thus generating more qualified leads for real estate agents. We have clocked it and the average consumer is spending 25-35 minutes using the zoom gallery on our virtual tours. They are zooming in on the stainless steel appliances, on the furniture, on the wood floor. This is about the consumer exploring the home. What we wanted to do, and what we achieved with our software, was to deliver a unique, informative viewing experience.”

What’s more, VuVista’s reports tell you what room people are zooming in on the most and how long they’re in that room. And it will soon be available in mobile format.

Making Photos and Videos Work Harder

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