One thing that people struggle with as they begin using real estate video tours is keeping it within the appropriate length. Keeping the intro as concise as possible, and that’s good advice, because Internet users infamously have very short attention spans. Even on real estate websites that have a much longer average visit than the norm, people can quickly lose focus and give up on a video if it doesn’t jump right into what they are looking for, which is a video tour of the home.

As a result, you should limit an introduction to about 10 to 15 seconds at the most. Ideally, the introduction will be done with the agent on camera and in front of or in the home. This makes it less likely that the viewer will be lost, as they will be getting a look at the home even in the introduction. From there, it’s still important to keep the video brief. Think about how rarely you watch an Internet video that is more than a couple of minutes long.

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Sometimes real estate agents and real estate professionals notice that their competition is using virtual tours, while they’re still only using pictures. The good news is, you can actually leap frog the competition by jumping right up to real estate video tours. The newest trend in online listings of real estate involves video tours, which have a lot of built in advantages over virtual tours.

Making the Comparison in the Real World
In some ways it is difficult to compare real estate video tours in general, because there is such a wide variety of quality in video tours. This is why it is important to work with someone who has the experience, equipment and ability to make high quality real estate video tours. There are a lot of factors to consider, such as lighting, camera stability, camera quality and editing. In addition, you want to work with someone who has the desire and ability to plan the video well, tapping into skills such as production and directing.

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The most common form of a real estate video tour isn’t the best one, as it turns out. Too many people fall back on something too simple, which is a walk and talk tour of the home. While that works in person, there are a number of issues with it in video form, some of which are addressed below:

Camera Stability
In person, your mind naturally stabilizes your view as you walk and take uneven steps. When you’re sitting stationary watching a video, this same effect is not at play. As a result, video shot with a moving, shaking camera can be very unsettling to watch. It can make some users feel like their head is spinning, or even make them feel sick to the stomach. Obviously you want to avoid this.

While a professional cameraperson who is used to shooting video on the move may be able to hold the camera steady, it’s not easy to do for a newcomer, especially with a hand held camera. As a result, it’s a good idea to avoid using the walk and talk in a real estate video tour.

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Once you get a potential buyer onto the page with a real estate listing, the most important element will be the images. While buyers may read a description, they’re going to pay a lot of attention to the images. It’s up to the photographer, the real estate agent and the editor to make sure that those images put the home in its best light and make it look attractive to potential buyers. That’s why real estate image processing is so important. The right techniques of image enhancement can make rooms look larger and brighter. Below mentioned real estate image enhancement tips can help you spruce up your real estate listing:

1. Balance the Brightness and Darkness in the Photo – The first step is to use Photoshop’s Shadow/Highlight feature in order to adjust the darkest and brightest parts of the picture. You can adjust the sliders in order to make the brightest parts a little darker and the darkest parts a little brighter. This will naturally make the picture look a bit better, eliminating the extremes.
2. Take Advantage of Automatic Features – You can use Photoshop’s features such as Auto Contrast and Auto Color in order to utilize the power of the software to detect what can be improved in the image. This is the easiest step of real estate image enhancement.

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One of the biggest mistakes that people make in real estate image editing is that they do too much cropping of some photos and not enough of others. People tend to cut down interior shots too much, making them too narrowly focused, giving it the wrong feel all together. On the other hand, exterior shots may not be cropped enough. This can have a very bad impact of making the home look smaller than it actually is. Some of the photos and techniques laid out by the realestatephotopro.com demonstrate what good real estate image editing can do for a listing.

Proper Interior Cropping
It is important for interior shots that your real estate image editing process does not involve cropping the photos too much. You want to show the entire room from a corner-to-corner angle, as this will make it appear bigger. That, of course, is one of the main goals of real estate photography. Sometimes people crop a photo down to only show the key elements of a room, such as the furniture. Sometimes they crop it down to cut out part of another room or a doorway, but in reality it is usually better to leave these elements in as they will make the room appear larger.

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Earlier, all it took to beat other real estate listings was to use a few images in your listings. Back when most online real estate listings did not even use pictures, getting to the top of the heap was easy. For a period of time, listings only used a few pictures and just adding a bunch of pictures could get you more attention from perspective buyers. Unfortunately, those times are gone and it is now important that you use real estate image editing to beat the competition. In fact, in many cases you’ll only be keeping up with the competition by using real estate image editing.

According to photographyforrealestate.net, most potential buyers look at listings on major syndicated websites such as Realtor, Trulia and Zillow. These sites tend to allow a lot more photos than other listing services, plus they give potential homebuyers the option to sort the listings by the number of photos included. This puts that much more attention on the real estate images that you are using, which means that good real estate image editing is basically a necessity.

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