In the real estate photography industry, year over year growth can be one of the hardest things that you will face as a business owner. At PhotoUp, we pride ourselves on our ability to help our clients grow and scale their businesses by providing socially conscious editing services that let photographers shoot more and edit less.
To show how we are able to help our clients grow, we gathered data from all clients who have been with us for at least the past 18 months in order to see if they have indeed been able to leverage our scalable editing solution in order to help them grow their businesses. The results were pretty astounding…
Clients, on average, were able to grow 59.2% larger within one year of using PhotoUp’s real estate photo editing service.
The Data
In order to compile our numbers, we looked at credit usage per client using the PhotoUp platform. One PhotoUp credit = editing of one single RAW image or HDR group. For each photographer, we took an average of their credit usage in their second, third, and fourth months and an average of their credit usage in months 14-16 with us – one year later. We divided their “one-year” average by their “starting” average to get their “growth rate”.
What we found is that on average, photographers were able to grow their businesses by 59.2% after one year of using PhotoUp.
- 66% of photographers were able to grow their businesses by at least 25%.
- 54% of photographers were able to grow their businesses by at least 50%
- 33% of photographers were able to grow their businesses by at least 75%.
How are photographers able to grow with PhotoUp?
From talking to our clients we know that there are two main avenues for growth with PhotoUp.
1. Hitting A “Growth Ceiling”
The first is leveraging the editing help they receive from us to help push their business forward. Many of the photographers that come to us find themselves “stuck” when it comes to growing their business. They have agents wanting to hire them for more and more jobs, but they simply don’t have time to shoot all the extra homes, edit them within a reasonable amount of time, and spend any time with their friends and family.
A lot of the photographers who have been able to grow their businesses 75% or more within a year of working with us are those photographers who were stuck at this “growth ceiling”. With their editing taken care of by PhotoUp, these clients have been able to confidently take on more jobs and even hire associate photographers, knowing that the final product will be edited in their style by their PhotoUp editing team. Best of all, many of these photographers tell us they’ve not only grown their business – they’re spending MORE time with their families than they did before!
2. Just Starting Your Real Estate Photography Business
The second avenue for growth is seen in those who are just getting into real estate photography. Whether working in weddings and portrait photography or new to photography as a whole, many photographers new to the real estate space discover the editing required for professional-looking real estate work is a bit more than they can handle.
We love working with photographers who are just starting out and looking to grow their business with the help of PhotoUp. We provide high-quality editing and all they have to do is sell, sell, sell! It’s amazing to see photographers start out shooting 1-2 homes per week and then leverage the power of PhotoUp to be able to shoot 2-4 homes per day!
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How Did We Get This Data?
Why One Year?
Having worked with real estate photographers since 2012, we know that RE photography is a seasonal business. Very rarely will a photographer have the same level of business in June as they will in November. For some, seasonality means peaking in July and August, for others it means peaking in both the Spring and Fall and for our clients from Oceania, it usually means peaking sometime in February or March. When your “peak season” really depends on where you are located.
If we measured growth based on our photographer’s first 6 months with us and they started in January – well, the data might show 300% growth or more – but that’s not real growth – that’s just moving from the slow season to the busy season. So in this data set we’ve measured growth year over year – to compare the level of work in one year to the level of work in the same season the next year.
Why not just measure from month one to month thirteen?
We want these numbers to be as accurate as possible for you to see how PhotoUp can be leveraged as a growth platform for your business. The first month a photographer is with us is often a slower month, as they may still be cautious about using an editing service and maybe not sending all of their work to PhotoUp. Understandably so.
From looking at the data we felt it best to drop the first month from consideration as it might not be truly reflective of a photographer’s “starting point”. As seasonality doesn’t always mean that business picks up every year in May (it might be April some years or June some years) we also thought it best to work with a three-month average to “smooth” the data to ensure those outlier months had less of an effect on the data.
Conclusion
If you are someone who is just starting in real estate photography or have grown your business to a point where you need help in order to maintain your current levels and/or grow further, you have found the right partner. At PhotoUp, our goal is to help photographers grow healthy and flourishing businesses and based on our clients data, we are doing just that.
