Boosting your property marketing in a slow market (part 2)

For more information, please visit Part 1.

By Helen Clarke, General Manager, Marketing & Franchisees, Top Snap

3D artist impressions
3D artist impressions, generated from detailed building plans by special 3D software, are perfect for bringing yet-to-be-built residential or commercial properties to life in a highly realistic fashion.

An effective way to combine your photographs and floor plans is through an online interactive floor plan. Symbols on the plan indicate the angle a photo was taken from, allowing buyers to easily navigate through a home by clicking on each photo, giving them a great feel for its flow and layout. 

360 degree virtual tours
360 degree rotating virtual tours are a powerful online marketing tool, allowing buyers to virtually inspect a property prior to the open home.

A cost-effective addition to your online marketing, virtual tours can be taken by the photographer when he or she is already on-site shooting your photographs. A special virtual tour head is mounted onto the camera, which rotates 360 degrees taking up to 10 images of a room from one position, the images are then retouched and seamlessly stitched to create an uninterrupted 360 degree virtual tour.

Virtual furniture
Images of empty properties are not as appealing as those with furniture, and give buyers very little idea of perspective and size, making it difficult for them to imagine the possibilities they could create in a home.

If vendors don’t want to invest in property staging or hiring furniture, both of which can be prohibitively expensive, then a much more affordable option is to virtually furnish rooms. With this cutting-edge technique, images of real furniture are dropped into a room, then rendered with the appropriate shadowing and perspective to ensure they look 100% realistic.

Just remember that with such flawless results you may want to pre-warn buyers so they don’t get a shock at the inspection!

Online property tours & videos
Online property tours are an affordable way of offering buyers a ‘video’ of a property, using a moving image slideshow set to background music or a voice-over.

Usually you can select the order, speed and direction by which images pan and transition, as well as choosing background music and including voice-overs and written descriptions.  The finished tour is provided as a URL to load to your website or other property portal.

The beauty of property tours is that you get to use the professional photography you’ve just invested in, avoiding the need to pay for a full-blown video production, which may be out of reach of the average vendor’s budget.

Other types of property videos range from professional property ‘films’, featuring an agent walking and talking viewers through a tour of the property, to more modest productions featuring an image slideshow, ‘topped and tailed’ with lifestyle or local area footage at the beginning or end.

Professional copywriting
If you struggle to find the right phrases to describe a property, or writing is not your forte, another option is to use a professional copywriter.

Not only does this help avoid those tired real estate clichés that usually elicit groans from the general public, it also gives you the peace of mind that your brand is not being compromised by grammatically incorrect or poorly worded advertisements.  Most importantly, it is professionally written to captivate and engage your target audience, leaving you to get on with what you’re best at - selling properties!