SPEAKERS’ CORNER
What makes a great Estate Agent?
asks John Durrant,
photographer, former estate agent and a bit of a Victor Meldrew.
Y
ou’re a great estate agent! You’ve got all the moves and can negotiate the skin off a rice pudding. You work from
state-of-the-art offices with a cafe- style ambience, free Coca-Cola and a 90-inch plasma in the window. Your clients are the most important people in your life; family’s a close second. Life would be nothing without selling houses; and yet, you’re not firing on all cylinders. A loving public isn’t beating a path to your door. You’re certainly not attracting the best homes to sell. There’s something missing! I’ve met you. I know you better than
you know yourself. You’re the agent who forgot that the most important job you have to do is to make your properties the stars. The properties you’re selling are, right
now, in a beauty parade on any number of portals. Your first, and dare I say it, most important job, is to make them stand head and shoulders above the competitions’. Once they’ve defined their search (bedrooms/price/type) potential buyers will choose from hundreds of houses. If you fail to make your properties stand out, your happy surfers will look elsewhere. Fail to make your homes shine and you
fail as an estate agent. You’re failing to recognise that you’re in the marketing business. In fact, you’ve unwittingly helped form the only industry that would have the bald cojones to market a product costing £100,000s with pictures taken on a handbag compact camera – the sort of equipment you’d use to photograph your mates; definitely not the best kit for photographing, for purposes of sale, the most valuable asset your clients own. Even cornflakes come in brightly coloured boxes but as a consequence of your failings, your
30 MARCH 2010 PROPERTYdrum
the difference between a good photo and a bad one. Everyone else might know there’s a difference, but they won’t be able to explain it – which is why you get away with it. Even the non-visually sophisticated person will be more attracted to a good photo than a bad one. They just won’t know why. Put yourself in the shoes of someone
Dull, ugly, would you fancy this house? Clean, crisp and very tempting!
photos have the appeal of an unpeeled banana covered in mustard. It’s true that the public lets you get away
with it. They expect that estate agency marketing will be poor to average, they don’t understand that their bottom line is affected. If just one person doesn’t view a property because of its poor presentation, to potentially lose the buyer who would have paid the best price. Only one person will do that. Your job is to find him or her and grab their attention. Simples! But not every client is so careless.
About 20 per cent do understand the importance that marketing plays in their quest. The visually-sophisticated people who spent a fortune on making their homes stunning, who want their agent to pull out the stops to present their homes to the buying public in a way that’ll show off their homes – and them. They can tell
who’s just forked out £60k for a state-of- the-art kitchen, and decorated with made-to-order wall coverings. Who would you want to market your home? An agent with a compact camera and no idea how to use it, or one who cares enough to equip themselves so the photos will grab the attention of any passing surfer so that they won’t look at any other house? Would you be bothered with a half per cent commission when the cheaper agent’s photos make your home resemble the lower decks of Noah’s Ark after a particularly stormy night? A good property photo is sharp, not too
dark or too light, it has a deep depth-of- field (everything close to you and further away appears in focus), the colours look good (whites look white, not orange or grey), it’s a good angle and shows an elevation or room to its best advantage. In short, a good property photo looks like someone has crafted it, taken time to get it right. Bearing in mind that your whole business revolves around your ability to market property, don’t you think it’s time you ditched the compact camera and equipped yourself with something that’ll enable you to do the job professionally?
John Durrant teaches property photography. www.Doctor-Photo.co.uk
Add your own opinions to the debate:
www.propertydrum.com/articles/speakmar
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