Your photos can get you more listings than all your other tricks combined in presentations. Here's the secret that's so simple, you'll start today once you know it.

Photos can dramatically help you get more listings, especially when you have to sell against “that other agent.” You just have to know how to do it!

Your goal in photo marketing is to shoot, sort and make available a collection of photos showing home exteriors, interiors and realty-related “environmental” views of virtually every kind. If the image shows a big expansive home that you sold, that's the best. That proves that you can sell big homes.

If it shows you being hugged by a grinning client, or an elated couple, that's good, too. It means you produce results that make people appreciate you. If it shows a buyer or seller showing their home themselves, that works famously for you, too.

You can categorize your photos by type of scene or mix them up for added interest. Your criteria, however, should be this: “Photos that convey to others that I produce results and am well liked by my clients.”

Hey, isn't it much better than a text-based testimonial if you can actually SHOW clients of all shapes and sizes liking you? If some of the people shown just happened to be the mayor, a city councilwoman, the police chief, CEO of the town's biggest firm, etc., that's all right too.

A picture of you with such elite, all smiles and buddy-buddy (along with a caption giving proper titles, tastefully describing the home or social setting you're both in, etc.) suffices in the lofty world of credibility building. Be careful, though. Just a bit of this family-crest-waving can be perceived as waaaay too much.

Far better than pedigree-enhancing photos, however, here's a secret:

Nothing sells a prospect better than a photo of a beautiful house you've sold down the street...in which there's the happy down-the-street homeowner grinning ear-to-ear.

Just be sure to get his or her permission to use his or her image in the photos that you'll be showing to other people. You can type up a simple approval form, or get a standard “model release” from a photo store or off the Web and casually have her sign it. In many informal or small town settings, many agents forego this formality. However, when people are asked to sign a “model release” (ah, shucks) they find it immensely flattering.

How do you get started marketing with photos? Well, you likely have a camera already, but it's important to have one that's good enough to take quality photos in almost any kind of interior lighting. Why? Because many of your shots will be from inside relatively dark rooms with minimal natural lighting coming through the windows.

The big fat problem with interior photos is that they often turn out showing the furnishings very dark while the outdoors that shows through the window is perfectly exposed. This is because most automatic cameras have a sensor that tells the flash when to go off and when not to. Or, the sensor “averages” the incoming light, or reads it only in the center of the image to expose the film accordingly.

Normally, this feature helps you take “pretty good” photos, but hardly ever in the case of interior shots when you want the owner (ideally, your buyer or seller) to look terrific.

Fortunately, you can usually overcome this problem by telling your camera simply to fire its flash with every photo you take so that the subjects in the foreground will be well lighted no matter what backlighting you face. In fact, most experienced photographers have their cameras fire its flash for every photo anyway, to avoid shadows that often occur on people's faces, making them craggy, or one side far darker than the other.

Your job of collecting, taking and showing photos of your “trophies” (because, in a way, that is what you are showing, you big-game hunter, you) is easiest if you invest (business write-off?) in a digital camera.

An inexpensive one that records images only up to about 2.0 to 3.0 megapixels is all you need. Simple, but excellent ones in this category are the Nikon Coolpix 775 or Coolpix 2500 (www.Nikonusa.com) or the equivalent from other manufacturers.

Why a digital camera? Because they generally take far better photos in low light environments, plus if you use the flash with one, the pictures nearly always turn out stunning. Additionally, with a digital camera you can actually view the picture that you just took, and, within seconds, make adjustments or re-take it if it didn't turn out right.

Regardless of camera type, you should first do a bit of experimenting taking interior photos around your own house in all kinds of lighting situations and with your spouse, child, or a friend as the “model.”

How can you best “show” prospects these great photos of your stunning sales and famed buyers and sellers? Let us count the ways.

1. Make 5 x 7 or 8 x 10 prints and put them into a handsome gilded, rich leather-covered, photo album. Show the photos to your prospect page by page. Consider making less costly photocopied versions (that look high quality but are far less costly to produce than prints) and leave a few of these with the prospect to show to the spouse-half of the prospect.

2. Create a PowerPoint (slide show) presentation to show on your laptop. To learn how, go see: http://www.microsoft.com/office/powerpoint/default.asp You could also put the PowerPoint presentation on a CD and show it on the prospect's computer if you live in an area where virtually everyone has a home computer. However, you are far more effective and professional looking when you present the photos on your own laptop.

3. Put the appropriate photos into an album on the Web and then give the prospect the Web site address of this album. In such online albums, you can show a few or hundreds of photos for the prospect to view at his leisure. (Plus, it's free to you and the prospect.)

   Since these online albums are free, with little or no size restrictions, you can make scores of them, one for each purpose. Then simply e-mail that album's link to a prospect who then visits the site and sees one or more of the tailor-made albums you've tailor-made.

   You can even add titles and captions to such online albums. Thus, just before a prospect visits an album you've already made, you can RE-tailor it specifically for that person. (Software for most online photo album is free from a camera manufacturer or a film company. The best is at www.ofoto.com, Kodak's huge online album site to which over two million people belong.

Photos help you in selling because they become “tangible proof” (real evidence) that you have “actually” done sales “in this neighborhood” and the homes “looked great” just like “this prospect's home does” and with which your client, the home buyer or seller, “was pleased.”

You can talk all you want about your experience and skill, but nothing proves results like a photo!

Want to know more about how photos can get you listings? Go to these sites to read about photo taking, using digital cameras and online albums:

• General Picture taking: http://photos.msn.com/
  http://www.ulead.com/learning/dphoto15/page1.htm

• Digital Camera Tutorial: http://www.ulead.com/learning/photography.htm

• Basic Photo Tips: http://www.spokanebyowner.com/seller/phototips.htm

• Guide to Online Photo Albums: (We highly recommend Ofoto.com)
  http://www.andromeda.com/people/ddyer/photo/albums.html

• Digital camera comparisons: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sidebyside.asp

• Consumers Reports Online ( www.ConsumersReports.com)

Using homeowners in your photos of past sales effectively is an endorsement of your work.

Additionally, people tend to look longer and harder at photos with people in them than at ones without, especially if it's someone they know from their own neighborhood, or a celebrity, or a community leader.

Now you can see how photos can become a powerful tiebreaker favoring you over your competitors who farm (usurp?) “your” neighborhoods.

Even if you already give presentations using prints of past properties, consider switching over to the incomparable ease and low cost of showing photos taken with a digital camera and displayed from an online album.

You'll also love the idea of seeing the pictures that you take being displayed immediately on your digital camera. (Better yet, your remote relatives, who never send pictures themselves, but are always righteously asking you how come you never send yours, will love the family pictures that you can now post on the web—by the hundreds—in minutes---for them to view from anywhere in the world.

The combination of digital cameras and incredibly simple-to-use online photo albums already do most of the work for you anyway today.

So why not start your effective and profitable marketing of your services with yummy photos this week? They make you stand out from your competitors in a powerful, hey, in an even memorable way.

That old “A picture is worth a thousand words.” was never truer. Especially when your pictures are of “the old Jones' home down the street” or “that mansion that the Wilsons remodeled” or “the mayor's home.”

You talk about such homes you've sold all the time; now back up all that talk with pictures. Your prospects will find it much more riveting than just your well-rehearsed and swellagant, elegant sales talk alone. And, if you do this well, you'll end up being their choice!

Published: April 5, 2002

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

Bill Koelzer is a Web marketing consultant to web-proficient agents nationwide. He is co-author, with Barbara Cox, Ph.D., of the Prentice-Hall books, Internet Marketing in Real Estate and Internet Marketing. Bill is also webmaster of Orange County Real Estate, among the most-awarded known Realtor® sites. Visit his website, Koelzer.com or e-mail him at .