By David Gewirtz
Last week, we ran an interview with Web designer and photographer Kelly Thomas. In that installment, we talked about taking 360 degree real estate photos. In this installment, we continue to talk with the fascinating Kelly, but about how to make money. As topics go, you gotta like that!
David:How do you make your money off your site?
Kelly:This is the best part. I read online about photographers who can't seem to make a buck doing virtual tours and it's not been a problem for our group.
"There is nothing like repeat business."
I presume that most photographers shoot a property, burn a CD and hand over the images to the agent. The problem then is that the agent has to figure out what to do with the images. Many real estate agents are not exactly tech savvy and even sending an email is way to much for them to deal with. As a sales agent, their time is best spent with people anyway, not messing around with computers. You'll often see top producers hiring their own assistant to answer the phone and do paperwork.
So, we make it a hands off process for the agent and upload the images to our Virtual Tour Machine Web site, creating the consumer listings you see at SIHomeTours.com. We've streamlined the process and it's possible for us to shoot a large number of properties in one day and have them all online that evening.
My photographer shot nine properties last Friday and probably 25 last week total. We shot in one week what most other virtual tour photographers shoot in a month. In Cape Girardeau, MO, they routinely shoot 8 to 18 properties a day, every day of the week. We'll probably make between $100 and $300 for each property.
Working full-time and developing your market, you can now understand how we've seen operations gross over $200,000 a year with one photographer. Net from a mature operation like that is well over $120,000. I work part-time at my site and I'm not at that level but I gross more in a year than many people make working a full-time job. It's great part-time income.
And the expenses are very low. Once you have paid off your camera, just about all you have as expenses are a small hosting fee, the gas in your car and your time. I personally do very little paid advertising and I've never spent more than $40 a month on keywords.
We usually have over 70,000 unique visitors every month who generate over 500,000 pageviews. Other operators will spend more buying billboards and print advertising to promote their site to consumers.
Real estate agents are our customers. We accept no FSBO (For Sale By Owner) property. This helps to make the agents happy. Most FSBO's are not going be buying or selling a house again for more than several years. FSBO's are not professionals and can be a lot of trouble.
Real estate agents are repeat business and once they are sold, they'll almost always continue to buy our photos and they'll tell their agent friends and we'll get more business. There is nothing like repeat business. Agents abide by a specific code of ethics and can be reported to state authorities for certain actions and risk losing their license. They really are good clients.
That's the long answer. The short answer is that we provide an outstanding value to the real estate agents by creating this regional Web site for consumers and drawing in the buyers to look at the property. We do all the work to help the real estate agents match up the buyers and sellers. And we keep our expenses low.
David:How do you find visitors for the site?
Kelly:David, that is another one of the great things about this business. Would you like to be in a business where other people pay your advertising bill every month? This is it! You can get the realtors to purchase yard signs with your URL. They'll stick 'em in the yard. They'll advertise your URL in their print advertising in all the real estate magazines.
I show the agents and office staff how to make links to our listings and they link all their Web sites. I set up custom subdomains for free for each agency and sometimes agents. All this drives buyers to our site to look at all the photos. SIHomeTours routinely serves over 500,000 page views in a month to 70,000 visitors. Our sister site HouseviewOnline.com serves something like five times that amount.
You can take it a step further and advertise yourself. I like s simple cheap three line classified ad in the newspaper but those are getting expensive. Billboards and other traditional advertising usually works well. What do you want to spend and how fast do you want to grow?
Links are important and a part of our strategy from day one. We don't link out. We're like a culdesac on the Internet. It's a little arrogant but I feel there is no reason to visit any other Web site if you are looking to purchase real estate in our region. We have more photos and they are always better. If a listing is not at SIHomeTours.com, it's not seriously for sale. Other sites are nowhere as content rich as ours so there is no point in linking to them. Especially when they are more than willing to link to us.
David:That's the opposite of our strategy here at ZATZ. We constantly give link love to thousands of other sites (like yours, this week) and it always seems to work. I've always felt there's more than enough link love to go around.
Kelly:The cool part of links is that the realtors will create links at their Web site to their listings. They'll create links at their corporate sites like http://www.century21.com and http://www.coldwellbanker.com to my site. We've now a Realtor.com authorized virtual tour provider and we can add links to listings seen at http://www.realtor.com. And of course, agents will put links in their MLS database so that other agents can tour their listings online.
Our site is optimized for search engines and is very content rich. Many operators would easily dominate the important search terms for organic listings after their first year. Previously, I purchased keywords but I don't anymore.
David:How many people do you have working on the site?
Kelly:Of course, it started with just me. I wanted to continue my state job for a few more years for benefit reasons so I found a subcontractor who also does wedding photography and owns a portrait studio. She takes the photos now. This lets me concentrate on marketing and billing, while she makes us look great. The Virtual Tour Machine office that I lease the software from has a number of support staff.
David:Here's a more general question. Doesn't pretty much anyone have a camera? How does someone distinguish themselves as a real estate photographer from a typical high school kid with a camera?
Kelly:The secret really is the Web site. It creates a bonus for the real estate agents and brokers that other photographers do not have. You are no longer just a photographer; you will own an important advertising media and the agents are buying advertising from you.
If you are any kind of a trained photographer using professional equipment, I'd expect your photos to be equal to or better than anything else anyone can offer. You are not only taking great photos, you are matching up buyers and sellers and driving these people to the agent. And all an agent has to do is call and say, "Go shoot this place."
David:Is building a real estate Web site a valid way to go out and make money?
Kelly:Yes, but not just any Web site will work. We have a tested system that has been proven in various markets. No one who has started has ever quit. A couple have sold their Web site and others have moved in and expanded the market but everyone who has started is still doing it. It's the future and it's growing.
Like I said previously, working full time in a mature market, we've seen operators gross over $200,000.00 in a year. As a part-time operator, we annual gross is more than most people make in salary in a year. That's going to depend on your rates and your coverage and penetration in the market and you. We're not in some big city with thousands of listings.
Get a Google Map of Carbondale, Illinois 62901 and you'll see we're in a middle of nowhere, nothing but empty coal mines and corn fields here. We've got some of the lowest property values in the country. We drive and shoot from Mt. Vernon, Illinois to Kentucky Lake. It's a huge area. But this model also works well in larger markets. HomeTourHQ near D.C. converted their existing business to a Virtual Tour Machine a little more than a year ago and haven't looked back. Property values in that area are astronomical in comparison and the business model works well.
David:What's the sales process like? Do you pitch to real estate agents?
Kelly:Mostly, it's face to face. Real estate agents are skilled sales people. You'll have to have the courage to go out and talk to them about what you'll be able to do for them. You can't mail a flyer or hang out an office sign and expect them to beat a path to your door. You have to build that relationship and over time you'll be like a partner in their sales team.
As wonderful as this sounds, a business with repeat customers, no employees, where you can operate from your home with no studio, low expenses -- it's not for everyone. If you are an outgoing people person, who likes to be active and involved, if you want to own your own business and set your own hours and chart your own course, you'll very likely enjoy great success.
David:The real estate market seems pretty volatile. Can you comment on that?
Kelly:Historically, changes in most real estate markets are slow so it should be easy to adjust your business for the market. In the last few months, I've been hearing in all the national media that the real estate market is cooling off with higher interest rates. Homes are not selling as fast as they once were.
This means that agents are having to learn to correctly and efficiently market a property. This is great news for our business because we're the best value and our listings are information rich. I'm already seeing business pick up. Today, as we talk, Melissa is out shooting ten properties. Friday she shot 9 homes. And she's got a full work week already scheduled. This media slowdown is helping our business and it's got to be a great time to get started.
David:Finally, anything else you'd like to share with our readers?
Kelly:Each Virtual Tour Machine is an exclusive territory, there is no competing with each other. So once an area is bought up, it's gone.
And we're evolving with narrated tours as an add on sale to the virtual tours. The narrated tours are stunning slide show built using the worlds best synthetic voice technology to create something like a TV commercial, but online. Few can tell that it's a computer talking! Agents can even record their own voice or get a professional voice talent if they desire.
Scott's ultimate goal is to build a big site like http://realtor.com, but backwards. All the regional sites, still owned and operated locally, are linked to the same database and will feed buyers and sellers into other regions. We hope to blanket the country. So every time we grow, the regional sites get stronger. And each region will have it's own URL so there isn't the lengthy drill down like you have to put up with at the large national sites.
And thanks again David, for having an interest in what we do and sharing it with your readers.