How Real Estate Photographers Can Double Their Shoot Capacity Without Hiring Extra Staff

All good real estate photographers are reaching the same impassable wall. You're already fully sold out, realtors are clamoring to see you and your pay has stagnated. You can't just walk up to another property, shoot and deliver the final images in the standard 24 hour turnaround time. It's after hours.

The standard rule of this phase of business development is to obtain a second shooter or hire a full-time person to edit your photos inside your company. But they both entail large overhead, complicated payroll taxes, management challenges and tedious and stressful ways to keep an employee occupied during slow times. Thankfully, there is a much more streamlined route to scaling. By strategically using professional real estate photo editing services, the solo real estate photographer can easily double his or her daily shooting ability without hiring an additional person on his or her staff.

Post-Production Is Quietly Limiting Your Business Growth

First you need to know where your time is really going to know how to double your capacity. If you are an average real estate photographer, you will probably be in the middle of the pack, with a ratio of one-to-one for every photograph you shoot, you edit one. Once the pictures are taken from the ground and the drone, and the interior is shot, another three hours of sitting in front of your computer can be expected. You're killing, merging HDR's, fixing straightening the verticals, masking windows, removing unwanted objects from lawns.

When your hands are stuck at the keyboard, your business can't grow. Your most important asset to your clients is behind the camera and on location with them. If you are using white balance and color corrections whenever you have a color cast, you are not doing something that will get you more money. By collaborating with a committed real estate photo editing services, you can free yourself of the tedious post production procedure.

Why Hiring an In-House Editor Isn’t Always the Smartest Move

Many photographers take the next logical step and assume it is time to hire a in-house editor when the workload becomes too great. This sounds good in theory, but is a money trap in reality. As an employee, you have to pay your employee for their hours worked, software subscriptions, computer hardware, and training.

In addition, the real estate market is a very seasonal one. During the spring and summer seasons you may have enough work to keep a full-time editor busy. However, when listings dwindle in the middle of winter, what does that mean? Still paying the salary for that employee. That's the reason it's best to outsource real estate photo editing. This allows you to move away from a fixed payroll cost and towards a variable ‘per image' cost, meaning that you only pay for the exact amount of work you need, when you need it.

Also Read: The Ultimate Post-Production Checklist for Real Estate Photography

How Outsourcing Editing Can Instantly Increase Daily Shoot Volume

Let's do some math. Suppose you are a realtor who has to shoot a couple of homes and edit the photos to ready them for the next day's deadline. Up to 2 houses per day.

Now, picture a workflow where you sidestep those four hours of editing. You shoot along with your first two homes in the morning. You don't need to drive home to edit pictures, but you will upload the RAW files directly from your car or a local coffee shop to the top real estate photo editing service. You've now got two more properties booked for your whole afternoon, so you can do it without any pressure. You've doubled your income every day. When you come across the screen the next morning the photos are edited, polished and perfectly blended and ready to be sent to your real estate client's happy inbox.

Can You Outsource Editing Without Losing Your Signature Style?

The one biggest thing that keeps photographers from delegating their post-production is the fear that they will lose their style. You've been working for a number of years to create a certain style, be it bright and airy “flambient” or moody, high-contrast, “HDR”. It's a danger to give that to a stranger.

But premium real estate photo editing services are not like one size fits all filters. They have highly trained digital artists that are specialized in duplicating each photographer's style. You will usually be given a sample of their previous work and given instructions about what kind of window pulls, shadow recovery and colour grading you prefer. Once you have had this calibration period, the results that you return to you will be close to – and sometimes better than – your own manual edits.

Unlock Higher-Paying Services Without Extra Editing Work

Once you're past the fundamentals of color correction, you can add new services to your repertoire, too, without mastering new time-consuming software techniques. Professional real estate photo editing services offer professional manipulations such as virtual staging, day to dusk twilight real estate photos and digital decluttering. These high-margin add-ons can be assured to be sold to realtors with the heavy lifting done behind the scenes.

Conclusion

You don't have to be the employer or sacrifice evenings and weekends to Adobe Lightroom to scale a real estate photography business. You get back most of your working day by outsourcing the post production process. That free time can be spent on additional property photos, building more relationships with higher tier brokerages or simply enjoying a better work-life balance.