Side Hustle: Real Estate Photography with Kirk Voclain
Professional photography is the single most important thing that can be done to sell real estate. It is the new “curb appeal.”
The real estate market is very competitive and professional photography is a simple thing that will mean the difference between making a sale or not. Professional real estate photography could be a great side hustle to add to your photography business. Most professional photographers already have everything they need to do real estate photography, like a tripod and a wide-angle lens. But the real magic comes in marketing, selling, and getting business. The great thing is, it will not interfere with anything you are currently doing.
Real estate photography is not something you do if you are interested in producing “art.” Instead, you produce images that are designed to sell a home. You are going to photograph something that is designed to be lived in. The challenge is real! One of the first things you will notice when looking at real estate photography is how terrible the general images are. Just open up Zillow and start looking around and you will see some horrible images. This is what really got me into the business. I was looking at Zillow and frankly, I was shocked at how bad the images were on half-million-dollar homes!
So, I conducted a test. I made an offer on Facebook to photograph someone’s home for free. The criteria were that the home had to have been on the market for a long time and the images were not done by a professional photographer. In exchange for taking the images, I wanted the rights to the bad images so I could use them in marketing. I did tell the homeowner that if the house sold, they had to pay me $250, but if it did not sell, they could keep the images. The house sold in 30 days! This only added fuel to my fire!
