Retouching real estate?

[fstr21]

While I was asking around about the best ways to try to make some side cash with restoring / retouching a friend of mine suggested retouching real estate agents' pictures of houses before they put them on their respected sites. anyone have any thoughts on this? I cant imagine it would be anything that would be misleading but maybe lighting, shrubbery removal satellite removal or whatever. Thoughts?

[Steve13]

Would have to be expensive houses to justify the effort.. Most of the Realtor pics I've seen are point and shoot out the car window.

[Mike]

I can just imagine a realtor trying to explain just how the photo of the house without a big shrub relates to standing in front of the same house with the large shrub in the yard! Maybe just a really quick growing shrub?

You might want to investigate the "truth in advertising" concept.

[TriniK]

I actually saw a job on Monster looking for just such a person. It was a full time in house job though, and realtors most definitely do use retouchers. Quite often what they want you to do is to change the time of day. i.e. they seem to like houses shot later afternoon close to twilight, so anyone who thinks that they don't retouch their images needs to think again. Sometimes it is not bushes or satellite dishes, it could be a garbage can that was in the way, or a dead plant that they planned on moving anyway. A million reasons why this would be, so don't be discouraged and go for it!

[skydog]

I do a little real estate retouching on the side..green grass, blue sky, a touch of HDR, a pop of color... definitely makes for a better photo.

[eraanexact]

My fianceé and I recently moved into a new apartment and helped our former landlord rent out the new one by creating the listing for it, retouched pictures of the apartment and all. Everyone who came to see it commented on how great the pictures were in the ad. We got it rented in about two weeks.

I was mostly correcting angles, things that architectural photographers do in camera via tilt/shifts, etc. and balancing color. I think you absolutely could make some extra money on the side doing that. Probably not much, but it's not unheard of.

I knew a girl in Atlanta who worked on those free real estate magazines you can get at grocery stores. Not sure if it was through the realtor directly or something that their printer folks threw in. My guess is the latter.

[fstr21]

Great, I wasnt sure if this was a market that even existed. I guess time to get those emails going out.

[eraanexact]

Ugh, meant to say "renting out the OLD one."

[SilvaFox]

"Take out trees. Let house show."

[Quantum3]

Originally Posted by Steve13

Would have to be expensive houses to justify the effort.. Most of the Realtor pics I've seen are point and shoot out the car window.

"out the car window"... Haha... Nice expression!

[Mike]

Out the car window is about right. Back in film days when I had a film lab, one of my customers was a woman who shot for one of the freebie listing publications.

She went from house to house, usually only exteriors, 1 or 2 shots, on slide film. She had to pay for her own film and processing, gas for her car, her area was about 100 miles north to south and maybe 30 miles east to west, on a good day maybe 25 houses for $5.00 each.

When the company decided to go digital, they lowered the amount payed to $3.00 since she didn't need to buy film anymore.....

She became a waitress, made more in tips in one day than driving around shooting houses.

[Steve13]

"out the car window"... Haha... Nice expression!

Yeah, literally, some pics had the outside mirror in the bottom corner.

[fstr21]

So what do we think, worth getting some examples together and sending out a lot of emails?