Save thousands on professional property photography fees

According to Mark Hayward, Chief Executive of NAEA Propertymark, “commission rates are on the floor”, hovering at around 1%, or in cash money terms, around £2,800 – this is despite rising house prices over the last few years. To add to this, the proposed tenant fee ban that could come in and wipe out huge amounts of revenue for letting agents is looming.

Does this mean you cut your marketing budget or double down on things that help separate you from your competitors, things just like professional property photography?

Outsourced professional property photography

If you’re an agent that takes pride in the way your properties are presented visually then hat’s off, we like your style. This is one certain way to stand out from many of the big corporates and the Purplebricks of the online world.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been reaching out via phone to agents all over the country to offer a free trial of our Image Enhancement service and I’d like to say a big thank you to all of you who took us up on that 🙂 If you didn’t hear from us, it’s probably because your receptionist was exceptionally well trained at filtering out sales calls!

We found loads of agents outsource their property photography to a pro who visits the property, shoots the house, does all the editing afterward and sends the shots to the agent. They would also charge between £50 – £100 for the privilege.

It’s not the fee I’m knocking here. Great photos are worth their weight in gold and will certainly help your listing stand out, attract more enquiries, sell quicker and sometimes for more money! It is 100% a wise investment. But are you investing more than you need to to achieve the same premium finish for your property photos?

Let’s go conservative and say you pay £50 to a pro to head out and shoot each property, let’s also say you list 10 properties per month, that’s £500 per month = £6,000 per year on photography fees. If you’re selling more, say 25 properties a month, then this figure jumps to £15,000 per year.

If you’re visiting the property anyway…

If you – the agent – will be visiting the property anyway to meet the vendor and to get to know the property for writing the description, then why not take the photos yourself?

All you need is some basic know-how, and the right camera and lens. It really is incredibly easy to take a blinding set of shots yourself. Sure, the camera gear will set you back around £600, but you’ll make that back in no time in saved professional fees.

A quick read of our Ultimate Guide to Property Photography will have you and your team clued up in no time, and it’s FREE. It condenses my years of experience as a pro photographer into the essential simple tips you need to know in order to capture sensational shots. Give it a read and you’ll see how easy it is.

If you were to shoot the property yourself, it would take you or one of your team around 15 mins, so that is a small block of time you would need to factor in.

You could then do the photo editing yourself in Photoshop and Lightroom but many agents find that is not the best use of their time, or they are not too clued up on the magnetic edges lasso tool.

Outsourced photo-editing

Here’s where the big savings come… send us your shots for the wow factor treatment. We specialise in photo editing for the property industry, you specialise in selling houses. Let’s both stick to what we’re good at.

The average Image Enhancement order will set you back around £10 (here’s more info on our Pricing). For this, we perform a full suite of edits on a complete set of property photos, and we’ll have them back with you in around 3 hours. Sound good? Try us out for free if you’re interested.

Back to some figures…

• Sell 10 properties a month and that’s gonna set you back around £100 to get the professional finish for your shots, that’s £1,200 per year and a saving of £4,800.
• Sell 25 properties a month and your monthly spend would be around £250, that’s £3,000 per year and a cost saving of £9,000.
• Put another way, we offer an 80% cost reduction.

“No brainer”

Not my words. Often when I call up a new client to welcome them to our service, this is how they describe it. So, to answer the question.. should you cut your marketing budget or double down on things that help separate you from your competitors? Here at Elements – we’re offering a solution that can help you achieve both.

If you’re spending big on professional property photography and would like to try us out today, get your team to read our Ultimate Guide to Property Photography and send over some shots. You’ll get 3 free orders using the promocode BLOG25 to try us out and see if we’re right for you!