anyone shoot videos for realtors?

ugafan

ugafan

Looking for a woman
either interviews or videos showing houses? if so, how much do you charge and how many of them do you do a week?
 
Hi. I actually am a Realtor and happen to know that unless they are selling very high end houses (say $2M+) they probably don't want to pay you what your time is worth. ESPECIALLY with the real estate market in the shape that it's in.

It's a lot of work to do it right. I have seen some $6M houses set up for still photos for 2 days before shots were taken and I know they charge couple thousand dollars. So video, with proper lighting can't be any LESS than that.

Usually they just want a quick-ie virtual tour and that's it.
 
i did a quick shoot for a friend and i can tell you that it's harder than it looks to make it look right. for one, unless the place is a mansion, plan to use a really wide lens or fish-eye adapter or some such cause it's hard to show scale when the rooms arent very large. this also makes lighting a bit difficult cause you want to set up lights, but dont want to see them (especially difficult if there's reflections in furniture and tv's and such).
also it would help to have some sort of stabilizer device to get nice walk-throughs or up-down stair shots.
since this wasn't for a realtor, i dont know how much work it would be to please them:) the shoot I did took a few hours but i probably only got 1/3 of the house covered
 
I do some producing for a company on occasion who does these. And what they do now is you high resolution stills, and pan and zoom in the picture a la Ken Burns ish. No worries about low light, and wider lenses are usually available.
 
I charge my regular rate. This weeds out most realeastate, special event and wedding gigs.
don;t lower your regular rate but if you are just starting out and can go shoot a property for 100 bucks, it's a great way to build some skills, contancts and confidence.
 
A friend of my son did the realtor home video tour thing for a couple of years. He charged very little and was recently replaced by a high school student with no experience that was willing to do the job for less. At the low end of the market that's to be expected - price is the sole consideration for your services. Let the high school kids and hobbyists have at it all to themselves.

Also, from what I was told the repetitive nature of the work causes it to become a mundane assembly line process with no creativity whatsoever. Oh boy, when can I start?
 
the truth is, even the most glamorous gigs become mondane in repitition.
There is a long line of people chompin at the bits to take my place when I stop making videos for Anheuser-Busch. It all gets old.
...or we keep getting newer. Regardless, a fresh outlook and eagerness for the job is what'll keep us all billable.
that said, as mentioned, leave these gigs for the happy newcomers.
 
I've been doing real estate tours for a little over two years. I charge $300-$400 a pop. And I'm very, very busy. If you know how to do it right, keep your price reasonable, workflow quick... and know how to market - it's a great business.
 
It's interesting to hear this is such a bad market, that's kind of discouraging.

We are hoping to break into a higher-end segment of this type of work, i.e. virtual tours for apartments, hotels, resorts, etc. We are doing assisted living properties next month, 12 of them, and it'll be a lot more fun than houses because each one is fairly large and has quite a lot of stuff to film. Not to mention I think each one will present a challenge on how to show it best within the time we have, etc. We are being paid well enough for our time, considering our level of experience as a company, but we intend to do this right, team of four people total, porta-jib and dolly coming along on the trip, etc. It won't be super elaborate but it has to be professional work.

Whether there will be more work like this in the future I don't know, but real companies will pay real money. I just don't think residential real estate is a good option for making money. Plus we aren't shooters, so whatever we do we have to hire a cinematographer, camera operator, etc. as part of the team to make things happen. That eliminates any low budget work for us, because we don't do anything less than pro work that requires a production company. If it doesn't require us, I'm honest with clients and tell them the best way to go is hire an individual with a camera. I know I have to tell them that most of the time anyway because whatever price we quote won't be in line with what they expect.
 
I have to disagree with most of the statements in here that this is not a lucrative market. I have branched real estate videos off of my main business of corporate and wedding videos because it is the most lucrative for me when you boil it down to a per hour rate.

There are caveats: You have to be in the right market in the country, you have to charge a high-end rate, and you have to do the videos the way the realtor likes them. We've established a great system for doing these videos and enjoy the business very much. Right now, we are doing about 10 per week and average $450 per video. The average time it takes to shoot and edit these is about 4 hours.

My business website is: http://www.lastcuthomes.com if you would like to see our pricing sheet. To be honest, we actually charge lower than some videographers around the area, but it's because we have a very good system of how we put these together. Plus, having employees do all the editing really streamlines it.
 
I normally let people get by with a lot of stuff that they say on forums, but that's a pretty insensitive comment considering the world we live in now. Kids making threats to blow up schools, people machine gunning down innocent victims in malls, people being killed for no reason.... it's not a view that should be laughed at or made light of.

Please refrain from making inappropriate suggestive statements like that in the future.
 
I thought it was funny, come on, too much political correctness there. A joke is a joke, and it's funny especially if it's insensitive. I guess you don't like South Park probably. ;)
 
Everyone should be careful when they charge a ridiculously low rate to do work that involves a lot of time and effort. I have done this type of work before and was unable to continue it because a lot of videographers were charging hardly anything just to get the job. If we all undercut each other by not charging what the job is worth we lower the bar and make it harder for all of us to make a decent living.
 
JonathanLB said:
I thought it was funny, come on, too much political correctness there. A joke is a joke, and it's funny especially if it's insensitive. I guess you don't like South Park probably. ;)
Click to expand...

I enjoy SouthPark very much. That really doesn't have anything to do with the comment. Even Trey Parker and Matt Stone draw the line on certain things....

However, when you have a friend (who happened to be a realtor) murdered for their wallet when they hold an open house, comments like that just become incredibly moronic. There have been other crimes against realtors here such as rape or tying them up to steal the contents of the home.

Let's say Quirk said, "I prefer to shoot people with guns in schools rather than video", right after the Virginia Tech massacre. Do you think that would be something ok to say then? It's the same thing.

I really don't want to hijack this thread with political correctness on a stupid comment, so this is my last post about it.
 
Dude... Name one time that South Park didn't cross a line. As for your friend, I am sorry if my comment hit a sour note. It was intended merely as a play on words, and not meant to be a hate crime against realtors in general.
 
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