This week we met with Amy Latka of Dream Home Media a Media Marketing Company for Realtors. It was a great talk about why photography is about so much more than the listing.

Podcast Takeaways

  • Make sure your Drone Operator is both licensed and insured. This can be done at the FAA website. FAA Registry
  • 3D Tours are a great way to show the space of a home.
  • Photography is a part of your marketing. It is proof that you know how to position a listing to get the most out of it.

Photography – It’s All About Marketing! Podcast Transcript

Adam Small: Hello and welcome to the Real Estate Marketing Minute. I’m your host, Adam Small, and with us today in the studio is Kimberly Small. Hi, Kim.
Kimberly Small: Hey, how are you?
Adam Small: Doing well, thank you. Today, we have a special guest in the studio and that is Ms. Amy Latka from Dream Home Media. Hi Amy, how are you?
Amy Latka: Hey, I’m good. Nice to be here. Thanks for having me.
Adam Small: Yeah, thanks for joining us today. You’re with Dream Home Media. Dream Home Media is a photography studio, right?
Amy Latka: Well, yeah. More of a media marketing company for realtors than a studio. We don’t have a physical location, but we specialize in real estate photos. We are going out on location to the listing and doing all of the services there.
Adam Small: Okay, cool. Before we dig into the podcast here, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into photography, and owning your own company, and Dream Home Media?
Amy Latka: Let’s see. My dad was a photographer and owned a camera shop in the town in Southern Wisconsin, where I grew up. Just always made sure that wherever I was going, I had a camera in my hands. Never in my life did I think for an instant that I would make a living as a photographer or that I would want to be a photographer, if you’d asked me when I was growing up.
Amy Latka: I chuckle as I look back and like, “Oh no, I tried to do something else and I just kept coming back to the camera.” Specifically for real estate, I had been an event photographer for a long time. With the onset of digital technology, things really changed in the event world. It was harder and harder to make a living. I was looking for some other way, and I got hired to shoot the inside of a church that had been renovated. I made some pretty good money. I was like, “Oh, let’s maybe this interior, maybe there’s something to this, this interior thing.”
Adam Small: This might just work out.
Amy Latka: This might. And turns out there is this whole other genre of photography that I didn’t even know existed. I just kind of fell into it.
Adam Small: Well, there are worse things that could happen than falling into a nice job, right?
Amy Latka: That’s right.
Adam Small: And falling into a good career and business. So …
Amy Latka: That’s right. It’s something that you love to do. I really wanted to make a living with a camera and I get to do that. I’m so lucky.
Adam Small: Cool. So things have changed a lot in the last several years, making it easier for people to take quality photos and video. Even with that, an amateur is still not going to be able to capture the quality of photos. Wow, and impress both buyers and sellers, ’cause the seller one matters too. They want to know that the product being put out there looks good. Right? So what are some of the things you and your team are able to do with photography that a typical agent wouldn’t be able to do?
Amy Latka: Preparation of the home is a big deal. I will say for us, we train our agents and if I can use that word, to have the homes ready for us when we’re there, which makes our job so much easier. But really the biggest thing, I think one of the bigger differences that’s going to be between us and an agent taking the picture aside from the fact that we’re using a professional camera is the ability to control the lighting in the situation. it’s really huge. As of yet, there’s no way for an agent to have a flash connected to their cellphone and to come in and light a situation.
Amy Latka: It’s one of the things that makes real estate very challenging is that we don’t really know what we’re getting ourselves into when we arrive at a house. I mean, we have some idea, but the lighting could be very dark if the home is painted dark or if it’s more of like a cabin type home where it’s filled with natural wood and-
Adam Small: Or just poorly lit, right?
Amy Latka: Or just poorly lit, right. So really the difference, that that’s where you’re going to see the difference is that your professional real estate photographer should be able to come in and make that home look light and bright and beautiful regardless.
Kimberly Small: Is there any situation where an agent should take their own photos maybe at a certain price point or if it’s a extreme fixer upper?
Amy Latka: I hate to give business away, but at some point, yes, I have shot a couple of homes that were supposed to be flips. They were awful like I didn’t even want to be in them, like moldy and just nasty.
Adam Small: To clarify, it’s not that they flipped it and just did a bad job. It’s just that they didn’t get it done.
Amy Latka: Well, the idea I think was that it was going on the market as a potential flip house and as an investment property. if you could say that. Or maybe it had been partially flipped and was unfinished because whoever owned it and had run out of money or whatever the case may be. We don’t do very much of that kind of work.
Amy Latka: That may be a situation where the agent might want to take their own photos. But again, it really depends on the property. If this is a home that’s maybe going to max out under one 50 then I don’t know if it’s worth it for them to invest in professional photos. But if the home, well for example, we shot one a number of years ago now on Pennsylvania in the Meridian Kessler district that had been neglected and abandoned for a number of years, and was in pretty rough shape. But we went in and shot the entire home, warts and all. They listed this house for like $600,000.
Adam Small: Wow. So even in bad shape.
Amy Latka: Even in bad shape, because of its location and the lot size, and the good bones of the house, it was absolutely worth it. Then the house was sold and renovated and is now absolutely stunning. But again, that’s a much higher price point.
Adam Small: Right, right. So it sounds like honestly that a lot of it comes down to is it worth the investment of photography? Right. Really that’s going to be subjective to the agent and the seller. Right?
Amy Latka: To the agent. Absolutely. Although we did have done a ton of business with a couple of agents who specialize at that, like 150 to $200,000 price point. Every home that we shoot for them is immaculate. It’s staged, it’ straight out of Pinterest. It’s been …
Adam Small: Right. Well, and that’s the thing is that with professional photography, one of the benefits is is that you bring out the best in the home. Right? Even if it’s in poor condition or whatever-
Amy Latka: Absolutely.
Adam Small: You still bring out the best of it and display what it could be.
Amy Latka: That’s it. I think is that a really good real estate photographer has in the back of their mind what could this property be and how can I best showcase it.
Adam Small: Right.
Amy Latka: That’s my job is to go in with that vision and help them sell that vision of what this house could be.
Adam Small: Right, right, right. So along those lines beyond pictures and photographs, what about HD video and aerial imaging as opposed to on the ground taking it with your camera? Are you guys doing some of that? Are you seeing a shift towards that? What about licensing and insurance requirements, and stuff like that? All of that stuff.
Amy Latka: Yeah, we do both HD video and drone, photography and video. For the video, it depends on the property. What we find when we hand the finished product over is that the agents are using that as kind of a sneak peek or we have this listing coming soon, take a look at this video. That it seems to work really well with social media marketing, not necessarily traditional MLS listing kind of stuff. If an agent is really doing a lot with social media marketing, the videos grab a lot of attention.
Adam Small: Right, right.
Amy Latka: Regarding aerial imaging, yes. We have seen a huge upswing in this. If the property has any kind of size to it or if it’s got a great tree line or if it’s near a reservoir or something like that, absolutely. I mean hands down get aerial photos. We do have some agents that every single property that they list, they do aerial photos as well.
Adam Small: Wow.
Amy Latka: Video with the aerial is a little bit less common. Although when we do the HD videos, we tend to ask our agents to think about whether or not they want 30 seconds blended in, 30 seconds of aerial footage blended in-
Adam Small: Blended into it.
Amy Latka: To that video because it’s really going to help showcase the lot and the location of the home. We find a specially like homes on golf courses and things like that, they can fly up the golf course to the back of the home. Just to give a perspective that you don’t get from the ground for sure.
Adam Small: Right. So what type of equipment do you guys use for that? I mean obviously you’re using a drone of some sort, but is this like the drone that anybody could buy off the shelf there or is it a little higher end?
Amy Latka: That’s a great question for my drone flyer because I do leave that to him. To get back to one of your earlier questions or bring it back to that, he is licensed. He has PER 107 is insured. It’s important, I’m going to point this out to you, anyone can go to the FAA’s website and look up your drone flyer to make sure that they are licensed appropriately and insured. If they are not on there, even if they have insurance, my guess is that that insurance is not going to cover them if they crash their drone into your property or hurt someone.
Adam Small: Right. Because they’re operating illegally. Right?
Amy Latka: Exactly.
Adam Small: So one of the things that we’ve kind of touched on, you are in fact for commercial purposes, required to have a license in order to do drone footage.
Amy Latka: Absolutely.
Adam Small: For commercial purposes. Right?
Amy Latka: Yep.
Adam Small: If you’re not on there, like you said, even if you’re insured, you’re engaging in illegal activity. Insurance tends not to appreciate that.
Amy Latka: Correct, correct.
Adam Small: Yeah. That’s really an important thing to look out. So a piece of advice for the realtors would be, “Hey, make sure that they are in fact licensed and verify it.”
Amy Latka: Yep. Verify it. You can look it up, like I said, on the website and on the FAA. FAA’s? FAA, yeah.
Adam Small: FAA.
Amy Latka: FAA’s website.
Adam Small: We’ll put a link to that in the description section of the podcast. Right?
Amy Latka: Perfect. Perfect.
Adam Small: So that all our listeners can see that.
Amy Latka: They do a search for the name of their pilot is who they would be searching for.
Adam Small: Cool. So what other types of things that are coming out here soon. 3D tours is one of them. So where do you see that going from a photograper perspective? What do you think of it?
Amy Latka: We like it. We do offer Matterport, which creates a 3D rendering of a home, kind of a doll house view. Then you can zoom in and move around the home. We think it’s really cool. The agents that use it obviously think that it’s really cool. Aside from being in a property, it’s the best way to see how a property flows, how a floor plan flows. I do think that some homes are easier, the more modern homes are easier to do a 3D property tour in.
Adam Small: Is that because they are more open?
Amy Latka: Yeah, because they have a more open floor plan.
Adam Small: Right.
Amy Latka: The older homes just get to be a bit blockish. And not that you can’t do them, you absolutely can. But that’s where, again, going back to the idea of a professional versus just having someone, some agent offices have a Matterport-
Adam Small: Have a device, right. Right.
Amy Latka: And then the agent goes out and does it, I think especially in those homes that don’t have as open a floor plan, having a photographer who specializes in thinking about a property in a 3D way is going to help you create a 3D tour that makes more sense visually and as you’re moving through, the way that they’re set up, you have to have good spatial recognition of a space because you’re moving the camera along. Every place that you move the camera along to, there’s a little circle in the floor.
Adam Small: Kind of like that hotspot. Right?
Amy Latka: It’s like a little hotspot that they click on to move around the house. If you’re not thinking about the property spatially and how would I be moving through this property if I were just walking through it, it can be very confusing when you’re looking at one of those 3D tours.
Adam Small: Right, right. That had never actually occurred to me. I knew what the circles were in so far as that’s how you move through it, but it never occurred to me that that was something, as you’re taking the photos, as you’re creating this tour that you need to really take into consideration, ’cause I imagine you could end up with some goofy spots.
Amy Latka: You can.
Adam Small: All throughout. You’re just like, “Okay, what’s going on here?” I want to go over there. I don’t want to be in the corner over here.
Amy Latka: Absolutely. We found that we can always tell when there’s someone who’s new to using, to creating a Matterport or any of the 3D options that are out there. When they first start, we can tell when we look at their tour is that they’re not used to doing that because-
Adam Small: You’re new to this.
Amy Latka: You can kind of get stuck in a corner and not be able to get out or get into a room and not be able to see the other dots once you’re in that room. It can be kind of confusing.
Adam Small: Interesting. Very interesting. I’ll have to hunt some of those down.
Amy Latka: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I can send you some good examples of good, of good Matterport. So yeah.
Adam Small: Okay, okay. Let’s not pick on anybody, right?
Amy Latka: That’s right. That’s right. We don’t need to name any names.
Adam Small: No, no.
Kimberly Small: So you’ve talked a little bit about the different, like the Matterport and the aerial images and that what. When an agent’s just thinking about what they should do for a property or what they should do in general, because some agents, this is, this is how … In their listing presentations, this is what I’m going to do for your property. I’m going to do the same thing every time regardless. So as they’re thinking about that, what should they be thinking about for their investment for those different things? Should they highlight, “This is what I do for properties of in this price point and this is what I do for other properties,” or how should they look at that and determine where to invest?
Amy Latka: That’s a really good question. I think one of the things that we offer our agents, whether they realize it or not, is a marketing brochure of all of our services. We use it both to market our own services when we go meet with a new agent. We also can hand them a dozen or a couple dozen of these and have them use them for their listing appointments. Because what it does is it sets down a full color spread of all the services that we offer and examples. In that way, they can sit down with their client or their potential client and say, “Here are all the services that I can bring to the table to sell your property.” Maybe we’re going to start with photography and aerials. If we need to move on to a 3D tour, we can or whatever the combination is, that’s the right combo for that property. But that’s really it.
Amy Latka: Photography and the services for the listing is, yes, about getting that current listing. But it’s about branding for the agent. It’s about them being able to come back to a future client and say, “Listen, here are the services that we offered. You might pay me a higher percentage rate, but I’m going to bring in a professional photographer, professional videographer, professional drone flyer. We’re going to market your property in XYZ way, and be able to sell it.” They will have all of their stats for how quickly they’ve sold homes in the past doing that. So it’s not about the one time listing and getting that. It’s about them building the system so that in the future, when they’re meeting with future clients, they have all this proof to back up their results. Does that make sense?
Adam Small: Right. They had data. Right? It’s a measured and metric thing where they can literally say, “Because I do these things, I’m able to sell the house in this much faster amount of time or get you this much higher-”
Amy Latka: Right. For a higher value.
Adam Small: Amount.
Amy Latka: Exactly.
Adam Small: Then the professional photos are a portion of that, are part of the reason for that.
Amy Latka: Absolutely. So did I answer your question?
Kimberly Small: Yeah. It’s just I know agents talk about the different technologies and trying to justify aerial photos or video or the Matterport and all of that. Just trying to figure that. There’s no mathematical equation to figure out. They’re going to have to figure out what that is.
Amy Latka: I do think-
Kimberly Small: But you as a photographer can talk to them and say, “With this property, certain things would be better showcased.”
Amy Latka: Absoluteley. Sometimes when I get there, an agent might have an idea that they want to do a twilight photo of a home, which would be the evening photos with the sunset in the background and the windows are all glowing. That can really make a home look stunning. But you got to consider what does the front of the house look like? Is the front of the house the showcase or is the back of the house the showcase? Are there any other exterior lighting? Have the sellers put in landscaping that includes night lighting? Because all that’s going to make a difference. If it’s kind of a basic home and they don’t have night lighting, then maybe a twilight isn’t a great investment for them. Maybe they should use that money elsewhere. We’re happy to talk to them about that.
Amy Latka: When we get to a property too, if they haven’t ordered aerials, we may just give them a call and be like, “Hey, the property looks amazing. You might want to highlight this one with a drone if you haven’t already.” If you’re not using somebody else, we noticed you haven’t placed the order with us, which is fine, but make sure you get drones for this property.
Adam Small: Right.
Amy Latka: Sometimes, depending upon the time of the year, obviously they may be waiting. So if it’s late winter or early spring, they don’t really want to invest in the drone property if the home sells right away. So they might wait for the drone photography until the property greens up a little bit.
Adam Small: Right, right, right.
Amy Latka: That’s just timing.
Kimberly Small: Any new technology on the horizon that you guys are exploring or that you’ve seen that …?
Amy Latka: Not right now. We haven’t, I mean there’s a couple of new 3D technologies that are coming out, but nothing that we feel at this point is a good replacement for Matterport. So yeah.
Kimberly Small: Now, I know a lot of agents have favorite photographers, comparing that to stagers, they accommodate their customers, but they have their own personality, and their own sense of style when it comes to a home. Would you say that’s the same for photographers that are specific in real estate?
Amy Latka: Absolutely, absolutely. Everybody has their own kind of vision for how to capture a room. One of the things that I like about how our website is set up is that when an agent comes onto our website to place an order, they can select a photographer and then see examples of their work. I think that that helps the agenet. They obviously then have a better idea of what they’re going to get as a final result. But yeah, absolutely. Everyone has their own style and maybe sees it a little differently. Holds the camera at a different height whatever, whatever that might be. So there’s going to be subtle differences, but generally, there should be a pretty good baseline of what our photos look like.
Amy Latka: We do like to say that we’re interchangeable, at least on my team. So that one of the things that makes our business powerful, Dream Home Media powerful is that we have a team of photographers. So if I’m not able to be there, one of my other photographers probably is able to step in and photograph that listing. It should be pretty close to what I’m producing.
Adam Small: Like you said, you all have a certain baseline of skill and ability.
Amy Latka: Right, skill.
Adam Small: Like you said, you train your photographers earlier. I just did air quotes even though you’ll never see that. But you did, you said you trained them, so you all have this-
Amy Latka: Well, we train our agents.
Adam Small: You train your agents.
Amy Latka: We train the agents to have the homes ready for us in a certain … We want to make sure everybody’s on the same page of what photo ready is when we get to a house.
Adam Small: Right. The photographers know what that is too though, right?
Amy Latka: But the photographers do also. Absolutely. The photographers are trained. I mean our team has, we’ve all been doing photography, real estate photography for at least 10 years.
Adam Small: So you know what to do, you’ve been around the clock.
Amy Latka: So we have a pretty good idea about what we’re doing. Yeah.
Adam Small: So if I’m a new agent or I’d moved to a new area, that sort of thing, what are some of the questions that I should ask a photographer when I’m looking to find somebody to … It’s really a partnership to work with them.
Amy Latka: Absolutely.
Adam Small: Because I want them to take good photos, I want it to look good, I want it to be effective. So what are some of the things I should be asking you before I decided to work with you?
Amy Latka: Well, I think the main thing is about booking. How quickly can a photographer get booked and what’s the turnaround time? It does no good for the agent to book a photographer if the turnaround time in this market is even 48 hours. That could be too long. That could cost the house a sale.
Adam Small: Right. Right.
Amy Latka: So those are really important. I think looking at the value for your money is important. What are you getting, how many photos are you going to get from your listing? How much are you going to spend for that? I’m not a fan of super ultra low pricing, but you do need to be competitive for what you offer. So obviously, that’s important. Agents are definitely interested in knowing how much a photo shoot is going to be, the base price is going to be and what all we’re going to get for that. Another question would be, does that photography service include professional editing? Whether it’s the photographer who’s doing the editing or are they sending it off to another editor to make sure that those photos look as good as they can.
Adam Small: Put some pop on it, right?
Amy Latka: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Kimberly Small: We talked a lot about training agents, but that trickles down to training the seller as well.
Amy Latka: Absolutely.
Kimberly Small: So what tips do you have there for agents who are, because obviously they need the help of the seller to get ready.
Amy Latka: Absolutely. Well, we can always tell when an agent hasn’t been able to effectively get their message across to the seller as to what is ready. We provide on our website a link to a home preparation cheat sheet. We encourage our agents to use it.
Amy Latka: Some of them actually print it off and put it in their folder for their listing presentations so that everybody’s on the same page and because prepping the home, I mean it does no good for us to come and photograph the home if it’s filled with a bunch of personal clutter. Making sure that the home is ready for us to photograph and everyone having the same understanding of what “ready”, in air quotes again, is really important.
Adam Small: Yeah, defining ready is the key probably, right?
Amy Latka: Absolutely. When we get a new agent in, at least for me, if I get a new client to shoot for, I intentionally send them a little welcome message with a link to the home prep and say, “You may already have something like this, but we just want to make sure we’re all on the same page. Please feel free to share this with your seller.” That way our expectations are all the same of what the home will look like when we arrive. We’re on a tight schedule. It’s not uncommon on a nice day, especially with this weather pattern that we’ve been having to shoot six or seven homes in one day. That’s not going to happen if when we arrive, the sellers are needing to move stuff and get the home prepped. All of that needs to be done before we get there.
Kimberly Small: Right. Sometimes it’s easier to hear that from somebody else as well.
Amy Latka: Absolutely.
Kimberly Small: An agent that has already met with their seller, and they might have their ideas of what they need to do, but hearing it yet again, it’s almost like you tell your kid something until they hear it from somebody who’s everybody else, they’re not going to do it.
Amy Latka: Exactly.
Kimberly Small: So since we’re talking about photography, you guys don’t do head shots. But I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of head shots. Any input on that?
Amy Latka: Well, yeah. I definitely think agents should have professional headshots. I think having a more modern and fresh look personally would be my preference. I still see a lot of the kind of classic black background or a gray background. Just forgive me for saying it, but really boring professional headshots.
Adam Small: Right, right.
Amy Latka: Don’t make yourself feel uncomfortable, but give yourself a fresh look for sure.
Adam Small: What about recency? I see somewhere, you asked for forgiveness song, I’m going to have to ask for forgiveness too. It looks like the photo is 20 years old.
Amy Latka: Exactly.
Adam Small: You can tell in part because of the style and the layout of the photo or the hairstyle or something, or because you’ve met this person and you know they don’t look like that anymore.
Amy Latka: Right, absolutely.
Adam Small: So I think recency is probably a big factor too, right?
Amy Latka: Absolutely. There are plenty of other photographers that specialize in portrait work and headshots that can hook you up and probably hook up your office. If there’s anybody out there who needs that, we’d be happy to make some referrals for you. So someone who can come into your office and give everybody a new headshot update. We’d be happy to make that referral.
Adam Small: Cool. Very cool.
Kimberly Small: But you work primarily in Indianapolis area, but I’m sure you know photographers all over that you can … The people who are listening to this.
Amy Latka: We do. I mean, it’s just like any genre of life really. Photography is a small world. So if there’s someone else that’s located outside of the central Indiana and they need something, feel free to reach out. We’d be happy to make whatever referrals we can.
Adam Small: What would you say to somebody who’s looking to get into photography or real estate photography? Any advice or get out, don’t come in, what would you say?
Amy Latka: So as an event photographer, I had experienced going into places that I hadn’t been before and being able to make adjustments on the fly to get the photos that I needed. But real estate photography was really different. I mean to get a quality image that was the quality that agents were used to seeing from other professional real estate photographers really was a change of skill and a change of equipment for me.
Amy Latka: I do shoot with specialty equipment that I only use for real estate photography, that does not apply really to any other areas of photography that I use. I absolutely had to increase my knowledge of lighting an area. When I had a studio space, the lighting is consistent. I never had to change it. I knew what I needed to do to make the images look a certain way. Generally, it was all within a very small window of settings.
Adam Small: But now you’re having to walk into any number of places to figure out how to-
Amy Latka: Right. Any number of places and figure out how to light it. Where do I need to stand?
Adam Small: That means you’re bringing lighting with you, doesn’t it?
Amy Latka: It does. I bring lighting with me. I’m now at a point where I can walk into a house because I’ve been doing this for 10 years, and know where the shots are. By that, I mean like I know this is where the camera needs to be, this is probably where the light needs to be. It might take a couple tweaks to get the image that I want, but I don’t need to shoot as much. I don’t need to take as many frames. Where when I started, I was just taking frames from every single angle I possibly could to make sure, because I really didn’t know where, what the final image was going to look like in my head.
Adam Small: What was going to come up good.
Amy Latka: Right.
Adam Small: Yeah, yeah. So it sounds to me like for a new photographer or somebody looking to get in real estate, probably some of the bigger things that you’re talking about is A, it’s entirely different framing than it is with taking portraits or wedding or whatever.
Amy Latka: Absolutely, absolutely.
Adam Small: Just because … It’s funny, we’re friends with a couple of photographers on Facebook, some of them are wedding photographers. They’re beautiful images and you’ve got the couple in the front and all that. The background’s all blurry and all that. So they really pop. But you don’t do that with real estate, right?
Amy Latka: Right.
Adam Small: So it’s an entirely different mindset and all that.
Amy Latka: It is, it is.
Adam Small: So it sounds like the framing is is big and then the lighting.
Amy Latka: Framing and lighting would be the two biggest challenges. It might not seem like much, but I offer the challenge of anybody who’s thinking about it to photograph your own home, see what it looks like.
Adam Small: I’ve tried. It’s not pretty.
Amy Latka: See what you get when you do that and how much your settings change, and where your lighting needs to be. How it being a sunny day versus an overcast day affects all of that.
Adam Small: Right.
Amy Latka: So yeah, that’s-
Kimberly Small: Front angles of a room and all of that stuff.
Amy Latka: Absolutely, absolutely.
Kimberly Small: Can come out very differently than what.
Adam Small: They can. I wasn’t kidding. I have tried to photograph my own place. I like photography, but purely amateur. Occasionally, I’ll get a good picture and be excited about it. Right? But I have tried taking pictures of my home, outside is easy enough. I shouldn’t say easy, but it’s easy enough to where it’s like, okay, I can live with that one. But inside, I just can’t live with pretty much anything I’ve taken on the inside. So I understand the challenge there. It got the better of me, that’s for sure. So I appreciate your work is what I’m trying to say.
Amy Latka: Thank you, thank you.
Adam Small: So before we wrap up here, is there anything else that you’d like to add that we didn’t touch on? Anything related to it at all? Final thoughts?
Amy Latka: Gosh, I mean regardless of whether or not someone is using our company, they really should be using a professional real estate photographer just as part of their team. You had mentioned teamwork earlier. We just think it’s so important not just for this current listing as I mentioned, but as they’re building their brand. Right now with this market being so hot, I think some of the newer agents especially don’t really think that maybe the investment of professional photography is worth it. But I tell you what, when the market turns and it will-
Adam Small: It’s going to be an issue.
Amy Latka: It’s going to be an issue because when they sit down to when that next listing and all of their previous work that they have to show that listing agent is photos from their phone or from their little point and shoot, or even if they went out and bought a more expensive camera, and they’re going to compare that to another agent that this seller might be meeting with who does offer professional photography or has a professional photographer as a partnership.
Amy Latka: Gosh, they’re really going to have a hard time. The ones that aren’t doing professional photography right now are going to have a hard time winning that listing once the market turns.
Adam Small: Right, right.
Kimberly Small: It’s similar. I always cringe when I hear an agent say, that business is really good right now. I don’t need to market.
Amy Latka: Yeah.
Kimberly Small: It’s like-
Adam Small: Well, and that’s how you get in that feast and famine cycle. Right?
Amy Latka: Absolutely.
Kimberly Small: Of themself.
Amy Latka: Well, it’s all part of the branding. If they’re not building their brand right now with professional partnerships, whether that stagers or photographers or whatever, they’re not going to see the results if they wait to start until the market turns.
Adam Small: Right.
Kimberly Small: That’s right.
Adam Small: Kim, any final thoughts?
Kimberly Small: No, I think that’s it. This has been good.
Adam Small: It has been good. So here’s my final thought. Amy in her final thoughts said “Even if you aren’t using us, you should be using somebody.” To me, that tells me that she believes in what she’s saying. She believes in the power of real estate photography and that there’s something there because she’s saying, “Even if you aren’t using me, you should be doing this no matter what”. So that’s my final thought. I think that lends a lot of weight to everything she said here today. Thanks so much for listening guys. We do appreciate it. We’ll see you next time on the Real Estate Marketing Minute. Have a great day.