Everything to do with using your own website to advertise your rental property. Design, usability, hosting, getting listed on the search engines, optimising your site, pay-per-click, etc, etc.
I have never been very impressed by aerial photos and didn't give them much mileage until today. However, we did have one done over the summer. The helicopter had been booked by a real estate agent friend who had several properties to sell, (not rent), so the opportunity presented itself for us to jump on board for $200. Although we were given about 10 shots from different angles, I didn't particularly like any of the results and filed them away. Then, about 4 weeks ago, while updating one of the listing sites, I was bored with the usual photos, threw one of the aerials in and forgot all about it.
Trying to work out today why that listing site is working so much better for us than anything else right now, I suddenly noticed the aerial. The response has been significant. The site is Perfect Places. Coincidence? Possibly, but it got my attention, not least because my real estate friend tells me that aerials are very effective for sales. They only do them for high end properties, so now I'm thinking that shot may be adding a certain "quality by association" that other listings don't have, at least that's the only theory I have so far!
Here's the photo I used. The reason I didn't like it (or any of them) is because it's high tide (not much beach showing), the grass around the house looks like burnt toast (no rain for 2 months), and the water looks dark and murky (which it isn't). Interested in what you think about aerials in general and ways to improve the photo.
I don't like the photo either, Joanna.
How long have you been with perfectplaces? Can you compare their booking rate now with the same period in 2004?
If not, I can't think of a reason for increased bookings as a result from the photo. Do people feel secure with a road so close by? Clutching at straws.....
I think aerial photos are a good idea and I would love to have one done for my house, but not sure who would do this and how much it would cost.
But regarding ways of improving the image, I think I can help...
I have pasted your image into Photoshop, and tweaked it slightly. I changed the colour balance of the grass around your house, and lightened the sea a little. Took me about 5 minutes (I love Photoshop, what a useful piece of software).
Some people may say that manipulating an image before putting it on a website is dishonest, but I disagree, as long as only subtle changes are made. For example, I would never create false grass on an area of gravel - but if your house is normally surrounded by grass and it is usually green, then what is the harm in making a few changes to an image that was taken at the wrong time of year?
I am interested to hear what you and others think. For example - is there a breach of copyright here? I have manipulated a few of my images on my website, but they were all taken by me, so no copyright involved. But any wider implications of image manipulation on a website?
Catherine,
Wow, thank you! I don't have photoshop, and my expertise in photo manipulation can be written on a pin head. I'd love a copy of this by email to myname AT propertyangels.com, or click the "contact us" link at my website. That would be great.
I think I can help regarding your copyright questions. It doesn't matter how much manipulation you do to an original image, if you don't own copyright in the original, you are breaching copyright. For this reason, I only use photos I take myself, or in the case of the aerials, that I paid a photographer to do. His fee includes buying the copyright from him, so I now own all rights in the aerial photo, therefore I can manipulate it however I wish. For example, I could ask you to add a swimming pool in the back yard or the odd rabbit, it would not affect my copyright.
However, if I did add a swimming pool, and my tenants arrived to find none there, I could be sued for misrepresentation. The same could not be said of the rabbit, since we have many, many rabbits on our property and strategically placing one in an otherwise rabbitless photo would not constitute misrepresentation. Therefore, Alexia is quite correct that making the grass green is perfectly acceptable and a very small change compared the manipluations I see going on every day by Real estate Agents. For example, I have seen trees added to the garden of an aerial photo to block out a neighbor's swimming pool because the house she is selling doesn't have one and she doesn't want to draw attention to it. I have seen gardens relandscaped with additional shrubs because again, the photo was taken at the wrong time of year.
To have an aerial done of your own property, my only suggestion would be to look in yellow pages for a photographer who does this all day long for a living for the real estate agents and ask him when he is next going to be going up in your area. The day that mine were taken, he had 4 or 5 other jobs to do at the same time, so the cost of the helicopter, pilot, fuel, photographer would have been around $1,200 - $1,400. I have no idea whether that is a good price or not since I have not done this before, I was just told that my share of the bill was about $200. Actually, now that I have said that, I may be underestimating the real cost because I now remember that my friend and I also horsetraded a bar stool at the same time, so maybe the real price was more like $300 each, and the total for the shoot more like $1,500 - $2,000. This doesn't help you much to estimate cost, sorry.
I'm going to answer Alexia's concerns about the road separately.
alexia s. wrote:Do people feel secure with a road so close by? Clutching at straws.....
Alexia,
I don't understand what you mean, sorry. How is a road insecure? It's not a main road, or a through road, it's just a small side road that leads to the public beach top left of photo. Past that, it goes in a circle around a small peninsular of residential housing. Maybe it looks bigger than it is, so I'll have a look at some of the other photos from different angles, and try cropping it out altogether.
I'm not sure that Paolo really wants me to post lots of thumbnails here all at once, so I'll get them onto a webpage later, then give you the URL.
Feedback very much appreciated as it's so hard to see what others see.
I too wondered what Alexia meant about how a road could bring a feeling of insecurity. Roads can be quite useful when one wants to gain access to a property.
I concluded that she means that a busy road could detract from the attractions of a property and could be an easy means of unobserved access for uninvited guests.
What "clutching at straws" might mean is anyone's guess but I'm sure Alexia will explain.
I took Alexia to mean that being near the road might make people think, "oh goody, I'm on the beach but still fairly close to the real world, so that if there's an emergency I can get asprin or water or whatever, easily."
However, I really have no idea.
I quite agree -- the photo looks much better with bluer water and greener grass! And if that is the way it actually looks when clients are there, I think that's perfectly fine.
Joanna wrote:
I'm not sure that Paolo really wants me to post lots of thumbnails here all at once, so I'll get them onto a webpage later, then give you the URL.
Not at all, I like pictures breaking up all this text - the more the merrier.
CatherineS wrote:Some people may say that manipulating an image before putting it on a website is dishonest, but I disagree, as long as only subtle changes are made. For example, I would never create false grass on an area of gravel - but if your house is normally surrounded by grass and it is usually green, then what is the harm in making a few changes to an image that was taken at the wrong time of year?
I think you have to tread carefully here. Where do you draw the line on the colour of the water for example? I guess the closer to aquamarine it gets, the more enquiries you will get, but you have to make it a true reflection of the actual colour of the water.
The grass - well, yes there are times of the year when grass is a beautiful, inviting, rich green. But those times tend to coincide with the rainy weather of spring or autumn. If you are showing that grass in high summer, when the trees are fullest of leaf and the water at its most inviting, wouldn't it invariably be dry and more brown than green? Is it right to make a photo of your home a sort of 'greatest hits' pastiche incorporating its best features from around the calendar? Mmm - hard to know where to draw the line isn't it?
Thanks for your feedback Paolo, and yes, I agree, it is very hard to know when to draw the line! There have been some photos where I have cloned out the weeds, or a child's bike that was left lying around on the gravel and wasn't moved when the photo was taken. We now have a regular gardener who comes every week so there are rarely any weeds when we have guests, and my daughter's bike will not be lying on the gravel when they come up the drive....
In Joanna's photo, I changed the colour balance of the grass to add more green, and I used "levels" lighten the midtones of the water - so I was careful not to change the colour balance (as you said, it was very tempting to change it to a lovely caribbean-looking aquamarine - but I have no idea whether the water ever looks like that around Joanna's house so I decided to just stick to very slightly lightening the actual colour balance of the original photo).
Now here's a moral dilemma:
On my website I had loads of good photos of the exterior of our house, but when we were out there at half-term we painted the walls pink and the shutters a pale sludgy green and we think it looks really smart. But all my photos still showed the house with dirty cream walls and dark brown shutters. Rather than retake all my photos (which I didn't have time to do whilst I was there) I just used photoshop to alter the images. I would be interested to hear what people think - am I being dishonest? I don't think I am - after all, my photo is an accurate rendition of how the house actually looks right now, even though it was originally taken two years ago...
In my opinion, if there is at least an 80% chance that a sane and rational holidaymaker will arrive at your house and say, "oh good, it looks just like it does in the pictures," you're good to go.
(The other 20% chance is reserved for those weeks of downpour/drought/mudslides/other-acts-of-mother-nature.)
So if your grass is only green for two months out of your six-month high season, don't photoshop the grass green. But if it's green for 5 out of 6 months, you're right on the line of propriety.
Long Island Sound/the Atlantic being Caribbean aqua? That would be great! However, not so realistic. So good choice there!
Catherine also has a good point -- if I had a property in Seattle, where it rains an ungodly amount of the time, and all my photos were taken on sunny days, would that be over the line even if the photos weren't altered?
OK, here's the raw footage, untouched, uncropped.
The last one here is the same shot as the original one that I posted, except I had already cropped out the other houses for obvious reasons.
The water is definitely not caribbean aquamarine, as Brooke says (she's close enough to our water to know!), but equally, it is not the murky green/ brown that these aerials portray, rather a clear dark blue. I've taken a couple of shots from the ground over the last week or so, which I'll add next to these as a direct comparison.
OK, here they are. All these photos were taken on the same day 2 weeks ago, late afternoon, but they make the point. Anyway, while pulling these ground photos together to show what it REALLY looks like, I suddenly thought about making one of Brooke's still video tours using one of these aerial shots as the floorplan and adding some arrows to indicate where the views from the ground had been taken. Unfortunately that's way beyond my skillset right now, but it would go something like this:-
1) view from the road into the driveway entrance.
2) view from the end of driveway looking towards the house
3) view from kitchen door looking towards the deer hang-out place by the flagpole
4) view from bridge looking into Goose Creek, with our beach on the right. The dotted white lines in the water are The Cornell Institute's scallop seed bed program. They take the seeds periodically to repopulate the bay. Peconic bay scallops are a rare delicacy, harvested only 2 weeks of the year and priced at $25 per lb, if you can find them. Cornell chose our creek because it is in pristine condition (scallops need super clean water to thrive). This is why we do not touch the landscape. To fertilize the grass would contaminate the water with run off when it rains and interfere with the ecosystem. Our "grass" is not like lawn grass at all, it's predominantly wild flowers, sand, cactus and dirt and we wouldn't have it any other way!
5a &b) view from bridge looking into Southold Bay. Two shots almost make the panorama with the public beach on the right. These are the beaches that appear at the top of the original aerial photo.
6) standing on our beach looking under bridge to Southold Bay
7) standing on our beach looking into Goose Creek, (see Alexia, no footprints finally!) See, clear water!
So good choice there!
See, clear water!