While words are explicit in advertising something, we can leverage multimedia for finding a tenant without explicitly saying anything. A high-quality relevant picture is worth 1000 words, while a poor picture can destroy your branding almost instantly
Onsite Showings
While words are explicit in advertising something, we can leverage multimedia for finding a tenant without explicitly saying anything. A high-quality relevant picture is worth 1000 words, while a poor picture can destroy your branding almost instantly
Pictures
Quality pictures of rental properties can generate 139% more clicks on your listing; HD, eye-pleasing pictures of your rentals are extremely useful. You don’t necessarily need to hire a professional photographer to shoot things for you, but if you are doing it yourself, know your way around a decent camera.
Stage the suite for a show. You can rent content to use from specialist companies or use your own. Whatever you decide here, everything needs to look perfect. If there are marks on couches or furniture that are visible in pictures, either edit them out yourself; freeware software such as GIMP can be useful for this, or hire a freelancer from sites like Upwork.
Now the camera! Get a camera with great ISO performance for the low light of internal spaces. Use lenses of 10-22 for full frame sensor cameras and 16-35mm equivalent lenses for cropped sensor cameras. A tripod will be required, cheap plastic ones will be fine just don’t expect them to last. Flash boxes and pop-ups are useful for shooting in a bad light. You may decide to use a remote control for the camera to reduce camera shake, but for a static scene, it may not be needed. Remember that if needed, you can pick up cheap second-hand digital SLR cameras on auction websites.
Note that most people will take care of their camera equipment so the risk is reduced that you will get a lemon! Also, know that SLA cameras do not need more megapixels or take pictures of animals so a camera made even 10 years ago will still do comparable to a newer or more advanced camera.
To save money you can buy non-branded lenses for the camera that usually work well but ensure that they have compatible autofocus to save you time trying to manually focus each picture.
Make sure to capture all important parts of your property and remember that it is easier to take a few more pictures of each than having less that don’t give you many options to select for marketing later. Also retouch photos paying particular attention to vertical correction, cropping, HDR, and white balance. You don’t want an out-of-focus fishbowl and most applications can automate the process.
Create a Video Tour or Make 360-Degree Picture
These days you can use 360-degree pictures to give a viewer an immersive virtual tour of the property. Videos can also be used and while they can take more time to set up and do well, the property video tour is an updated method of the open house.
These processes are particularly useful for people looking for rental properties outside their home state or city. For them, attending an open house might be the biggest pain point due to the distance and time between other viewings. You can easily address this by creating a quality video tour.
You shouldn’t be afraid of new technology or methods, but learn them well and use them when needed. This may mean trying them out at home or reading up on technical settings or watching videos on the media used. Remember to shoot perks of your rental property, if you can walk to local places around the property, show the view and describe it in content to what they may be doing daily.
Once you’re done filming, take advantage of video retouching and upload your video on YouTube and attach the link to your listing or upload it directly to the rental website that you use. The payoffs will be huge while also being a moment of fun and technological discovery.
If you’re not a filmmaker and don’t want to get a freelancer to do the work for you, consider making some 360-degree pictures. It’s easier and less time-consuming, yet still immerses the view more than just images alone. What’s more, no special equipment and skills are required; grab your phone, download an app like Cycloramic and five minutes later and you’re done.
