Tips 1 and 2 For Creating Better Real Estate Videos

Have you ever browsed a website and seen images that appear stretched out or compressed like a fun house mirror?  How about viewing videos or slide shows with these types of images in them?   That’s caused by images being uploaded without them being resized for the website in which they are viewed.    Many of you may be familiar with this concept on your home TV.  You may have a widescreen TV, which has an aspect ratio of 16:9, but are viewing a TV show shot in traditional, old-school 4:3 ratio.   What does that mean?  To fit your widescreen TV, the show is stretched wide to fill the screen, and throws off the appearance of the show.

Tip 1.  Preserve Aspect Ratios

Well, in online marketing, preserving the aspect ratio is key to avoiding the distortion that can occur.   According to the real estate photography pros at the RE Snapshot blog, preserving aspect ratios in PhotoShop is rather straight forward.   Click the “constrain proportions” in the Image Size tab (under ‘Image’ in the top navigation).

Tip 2 – Resize Photos

Another important step is to resize the image to the dimensions for where its going to be used.   This too prevents the web browser from resizing the image to fit its location.   Resizing photos can be done with PhotoShop and other photo editing tools.   For your PropertyPreviews videos, for example, the minimum size of photos we accept is 640 x 480 pixels, but 1024 x 768 pixels is preferred.

See For Yourself

Try taking two sets of images, one set in their original format and another in a resized format to compare the difference in quality.   Taking the time to do these steps will improve the quality of your marketing materials, and increase the perceived value of your listing.   That may be just enough to get a prospect to act and contact you for more info.

Is Video the Answer?

I  just finished reading an article on how using video to market properties can increase lead generation for properties.  Some of the results are quite fascinating.

According to an article by For Rent Media Solutions, taken from Adpropertyguru.com,  video marketing has been shown to increase leads for property managers by “an average of 30 percent and as much as 309 percent in some markets.”

One might attribute the staggering increase to advances in mobile media, allowing more and more people to gain access to such content, as video, right from the palm of their hand.

Check out the rest of the article here:

http://propertyadguru.com/2009/09/using-video-increases-leads/

Video Interview with Jeff Harris, General Manager of PropertyPreviews.com

Jeff Harris, General Manager of PropertyPreviews.com, gives a brief overview of PropertyPreviews.com, and chats about the value of using social media on the Web to market real estate. The video is hosted by Joe Zekas on NewHomeNotebook.ning.com.

See Jeff’s interview here.

You can find many more videos at NewHomeNotebook.