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Best Options to Scale Your Real Estate Photography Business

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How to Scale Your Real Estate Photography Business

Real estate photography is an excellent business model to scale. Unlike some other businesses that have lots of barriers to scaling, real estate photography is a nearly ideal situation.

This article will outline several steps you can take to scale your real estate photography business and achieve higher profits.

 

Table of Contents

Why You Should Scale a Real Estate Photography Business

There will come a time in your real estate photography career, assuming that you’re running your real estate photography business successfully, where you will simply not have enough time to keep up with the demand for your services.

At this point you’re likely making a solid amount of money, but have little to no free time. And since you don’t have anymore time, the profits from your business can no longer increase.

Some people choose to stay at this stage of business for a number of different reasons…

Maybe they enjoy their current workload and make more than enough money for their needs.

Maybe real estate photography is a side hustle and they don’t want to develop the business past that.

Or maybe they’re unaware that they have several options which would help continue their real estate photography businesses upward trajectory.

No matter the reason, I personally don’t think that we should sacrifice all of our free time in order to keep our business running. There are many options that you can choose from to open up more time on your schedule without sacrificing your business.

Having more free time and a growing real estate photography business is absolutely achievable. Here are some of your options to make that happen.

Raise Your Prices

The easiest, fastest, and most successful way to free up some of your time without sacrificing any revenue is to raise your prices.

Now, I can already hear the real estate photographers out there saying that they’re either competitively priced or the highest priced in their market. Or that they don’t want to lose clients. Or that they’ve already raised prices a few times.

I know it can feel like a bad idea, but it’s really as simple as supply and demand. If you are so in demand that you no longer have free time, then you are literally out of supply. You need to raise your prices, even if it’s only a $10 – $15 bump across the board.

Raising your prices will lead to 2 possible situations:

  1. Some clients will leave, which will free up more of your time to service your other clients that are now paying more money. This means you’ll be working less for roughly the same profit.
  2. No, or very few, clients will leave and you’ll have greatly increased your profits without increasing your working hours.

The important thing to remember here is that you are very much in demand. Your schedule is packed full and you don’t have the time to take on other clients that might want to work with you.

Increasing your prices will either free up more of your time, or show you that you probably should have been charging more already. Either way, it’s a win-win.

 

Outsource Your Editing

Outsourcing your editing is a very common thing to do amongst real estate photographers. It definitely has it’s pros and cons, but if you find the right editor or editing firm to work with, it can be a real game changer.

Here’s an article that will help you choose the right editor to work with: How to Choose a Great Real Estate Photography Editor

If you’re on the fence about whether to outsource your editing, here’s a good experiment to do which will help you make a decision:

After you’re back from a job and at your editing work station, set a stopwatch and clock the amount of time you spend editing a job. Stop the clock once all the editing has been completed and record that amount of time on a piece of paper.

Do that for every job you have for a week, then add up the amount of time you spent editing. Chances are, if you’ve never done this before, that number is going to be larger than you might have thought.

Now that you’re aware of the exact amount of time you spend editing, consider other ways you could spend that time and how that would change your business or your current lifestyle.

Then weight those changes against how much you value being the one to edit your own photos. This is going to be the difficult part because every photographer feels somewhat differently about the editing process.

Some photographers consider their editing process to be unique and extremely important to their personal look and brand. It’s a lot harder to give up editing control if thats the case, and it’s completely understandable.

It’s up to you to decide if the amount of time you can save would be better allocated someplace else and if you are ok with having someone else edit your images.

If you do decide that outsourcing your editing is the best move to scale your real estate photography business, then you’ll be tasked with having to find the right editor for you and your style.

This can be a hard part of the process, and you might need to try out a handful of editors before you find the right person, but it will absolutely free up tons of your time once you have the process set up properly.

Hire Another Photographer

Hiring another photographer is likely the most involved option, but also the one that can help your grow your business the most. More photographers just means more availability for clients, both current and future.

Hiring another photographer will immediately free up more of your time since you will have another qualified individual to send out on jobs. It will also allow you to build a larger client list since you’ll be able to take on more work.

However, much like outsourcing your editing, the hardest part will be finding the right person for the job. You’ll have to conduct a search, hold interviews, and try to find a photographer that is both capable and professional.

This can be a challenge, but once you have the right person working for you, the possibilities really start to open up in terms of revenue.

Add More Services

If you haven’t already, adding on additional services is a great way to increase your average profit per job without adding more houses to your schedule.

Add-ons like drone photography, floor plans, or slideshows are quick and easy ways to charge more money per job.

Although this option doesn’t address the need that you might have to free up more time in your schedule, it does offer a way to increase your profits without taking on more clients.

A single drone flight only takes about 15 minutes to capture 5 – 10 quality images and you can add a solid sized price tag to that service. 15 extra minutes on site for an extra $100 is a quick way to grow your businesses overall income.

Use Real Estate Photography Software

If you’re spending a bunch of time sorting and resizing photos, creating and sending invoices, scheduling your shoots, and all the other backend tasks that come with a real estate photography business, you might be shocked at the amount of time all that eats up.

Luckily, there is a simple fix that can free up a lot of the time you’re spending on the backend side of things. Use a piece of software that’s made to handle those tasks for you.

Now, yes, I’m writing this on Aryeo’s website, so of course I’m going to recommend that you use Aryeo to handle all of these tasks. But it’s also legitimately the best option and absolutely will save you time and energy.

Having a system that ties together so many of the backend tasks we need to perform every day all in one place is a major time saver. It also helps to give your business a more professional look since you’ll likely be a lot more organized.

Aryeo offers a free trial so you can see if it’s the right software for your business.

Recommendations

The best part about scaling a real estate photography business is that you have a handful of options that can help you achieve your goal.

Don’t want to hire another photographer because you prefer to work alone? Outsource your editing to free up more of your time and start offering add-on services like drone photography and floorplans.

Don’t trust someone else to edit your images? Raise your prices and start using a software like Aryeo. You’ll make more money and free up more time to spend on the photography side of the business.

All of the options listed above can be used alone or with each other. If you want, you could slowly implement all of the options above into your business and create a truly scaled up real estate photography company without needing to work 100 hours a week.

Weigh your options and then implement what’s best for you and your business.

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About author
Matthew Digati is a professional Real Estate and Architectural Photographer. Matthew has worked as a Real Estate and Architectural Photographer since 2015 and has photographed properties and projects all over the United States.
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