The Internet has not only opened an avenue for buyers to shop for homes, it has also broadened the creative marketing strategies of agents who want to market homes in new exciting ways.

Until recently, the feature sheet was the star marketing tool for presenting listings, but they have always been and still are expensive to produce. Not only do they require a 35 mm camera and skilled photographer to capture a home's most flattering angle, but the development costs of the film including multiple copies of one photo remains prohibitive except for jumbo mortgage-quality listings. For this reason, most feature sheets only contain the front view of the home.

Thanks to digital camera technology which is becoming more affordable than ever, the feature sheet has reached a new level of sophistication. Not only can the feature sheet contain as many photos as the agent wants to include, they can cover such features as interior rooms, swimming pools, gardens, and even the surrounding neighborhood, shopping centers, recreational facilities, and schools. This enables the buyer to get a complete capsule view of what living in the home as well as the neighborhood will be like.

Under a $1000, is the Kodak Digital Science DC220 and DC260 zoom digital cameras, the first of their kind to use the Universal Serial Bus (USB) interface. This is significant because it allows much faster transfer and downloading of images compared with the use of serial or IrDA ports.

They also feature a Motorola PowerPC 800 series processor to speed image processing and add functionality. Each camera provides high quality million-plus pixel image capabilities which delivers enough detail to compete with a photo-realistic image.

The DC220 can digitally zoom in to 4X the optical image, and offers a number of point-and-click customer-pleasing capabilities such as next shot availability, and real time OS background processing. This gives the typical speed and image quality of a 35 mm camera.

Images can be given more personality with a moveable watermark, scripting and labeling capabilities, and audio feedback to record sound with images. Transfers from the camera to the computer are seamless with IrDA 1.0 support.

The DC260 offers all the features of the DC220, but with a zoom power of 6X and the ability to capture three consecutive photos before pausing for the images to be written onto the memory card. Also, a flash synch feature lets you connect to an external flash, as in a traditional camera, for those overcast days, or dark rooms. Autofocus retains a focus range of 8 inches to infinity.

The cameras include photo processing software from Adobe PhotoDeluxe and Adobe PageMill, as well as an 8 MB Kodak Digital Science picture card, AC adapter, serial and USB cables, and audio/video cables. Additional accessories kits were just made available in June.

If you haven't been introduced to the ease of digital camera marketing, encourage your office manager to purchase a digital camera, or take the plunge yourself. It's your marketing tool of the future.

Published: August 14, 1998

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