Consumers expect real estate professionals to market their properties as best they can. To this end many real estate professionals go to great lengths and great expense to market listing in a variety of media. Often we are asked questions such as: What can I do to make my listings stand out? What can I do to generate more traffic? What can I do to generate more leads? These are question I am sure that all real estate professionals are interested in hear answers for. I can assure you that there are more answers then there are questions. That said if a listing agent were to ask me this question I would, without hesitation, offer one simple answer – “Take more pictures”.
At P2 we have the benefit of observing the aggregate flow of millions of web visitors against hundreds of thousands of listings. Recently we observed millions of visitors over a 30 day period to www.point2homes.com . I have attached a screen shot of a listing page. Pay careful attention to the thumbnails of each listing. You will notice that we display the number of photos each listing has. It turns out that this small number is a very important one. In fact, I would say, it is the most important number in your listings marketing. You don’t have to take my word for it, either. The attached graph clearly shows this to be the case.
Let me explain the graph below. The vertical axis is the number of photos a listing has. The number inside the grey bar is the number of views by the visitors that the listing received. The number on the end is the number of visitors that turned into leads. This is to say we captured their email address some way – they requested info or downloaded a brochure or some such activity – and passed it on to the listing agent.
Clearly, you can see that those that added 20+ photos generated nearly 10 times the number of leads and 3 times the number of views. Adding photos is simply the best (and I would say easiest) thing you can do to help market an sellers property. So get clicking!
