About us - Why we understand

Why we Understand

We think like estate agents. Being founded by an agent with 30 years’ experience in sales and lettings, we understand estate agency. We also understand how to make the estate agency business model work, how to analyse an estate agent business robustly and how to make more profit.

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We set up this photography business for a number of reasons:-

  1. We’ve made the connection that drives market share through better photography as a catalyst, a maintainer, as an increaser of market share and profit. In detail, we understand the costs and return on that investment and how to measure it accurately.
  2. Unlike most UK agents and most UK so-called real estate photographers, we understand the refined American techniques so well that, we teach them here in the UK. We have videos made by other members of the real estate photography community (in the USA) about our new techniques that we now pass back to the Americans to improve their skill set.
  3. While we love estate agency, we also love good real estate photography and want to see it used more widely in the UK, like it is in California, where we received our original training.
  4. We do not agree with the £99 model of real estate photography, on a half hour visit, with a ‘Disto’ and a mid-range DSLR which produces a dozen unexceptional photographs, in the hands of an untrained monkey producing a floorplan that is potluck whether it is PMA compliant, or not. We all know which type of agents go this way, and probably don’t have a very high opinion of them. We want the industry to have something so much better that is still very affordable and really delivers the goods and more importantly, gives a return on the investment rather than just fulfilling a basic half-baked, non-thought-out function of mediocre listing. This lesser role can be populated by failed negotiators. Why on this Earth would you want people like that representing your business in a vendor’s home? Even worse you can get failed photographers or struggling photographers, brokered by photography agents who ply their trade by trawling the internet with GoogleAd to find you and taking a hefty cut. General photographers down on their bookings looking for pot-boiler work don’t really care about you or the photographs. They are just taking subsistence money until better paid work comes in. In contrast, we are passionate about what we do and specialize only in real estate listing services.
  5. Being purely commercial, we have put a business model together that makes money and delivers great product at an affordable price for agents. We just want to do more of it and make more money. Profit is not a dirty word, and we understand how to deliver greater profits for you too. Only models that produce profit both ways can deliver sustainable relationships in the long term. It must be mutually beneficial, and we totally get that. We want long-term business relationships with our clients to build our business steadily with proper care. We’re not flash in the pan, take too much on, muck it up merchants, who greedily chase the money and then end up with a bad reputation and a failed business.

California

California is the spiritual home of real estate photography industry in the USA. It is home to the best real estate photographers in the business because there are so many high-end properties which are centred around Los Angeles and Southern California. To put things in context average agent commissions run at about $50,000. That provides lots of capacity to pay the best photographers. They are often paid on an hourly rate to enable them to take as long as they need to capture the correct photography footage to create the finest blended images.

Some of the specialist real estate photographers over recent years have set up training facilities as well as regularly shooting real estate daily themselves. We took 1-2-1 training from the person recognized as the industry’s leading trainer there. As you can imagine, it didn’t come cheap. If you want the best, its worth paying for. We do not subscribe to the buy it cheap, buy it twice mentality when it comes to training.

Very few photographers in the UK are willing to use these techniques because they are so labour intensive. Unless you understand how to photograph and edit quickly and efficiently this method is way too much like hard work to be commercially viable. Therefore, it is not widely offered at a fixed price. When photographers are on a half day rate at £125 per hour then they are more willing. Because we specialize, we can cut the cost by being super-efficient.

Always Developing

We are always adding to the techniques to speed things up in the editing process. We work closely in collaboration with the Americans who developed the skill set specific to real estate photography, in a cycle of continual improvement.

The moment a new technique is being developed; we are so well connected to the developers in the USA that we get to hear way before these new skill updates are put online or in books.