Table of Contents
- Why Outsource Real Estate Photo Editing?
- What Does a Real Estate Photo Editor Do?
- Additional Marketing Services to Outsource
- 6 Benefits of Outsourcing Your Photo Editing
- Outsourcing Helps You Scale & Grow Your Business
- Where to Best Outsource Your Photo Editing?
- How Much Does Outsourcing Cost?
- How to Get Started With a Dedicated Editor
Are you looking into real estate photo editing outsourcing and want to know what it entails and how much it costs?
68% of potential buyers say that great photos made them want to visit the home. To make sure your real estate photography stands out and captures buyers’ attention, you should consider outsourcing your real estate photo editing to professional editors. Also, outsourcing can help you grow and scale your business at rocket speed.
In this guide, we’ll share everything you need to know about real estate photo editing outsourcing, from what a real estate photo editor does to how much it costs to get started with a dedicated editor.
Before we dig in deeper, let’s first look at why you should outsource your real estate photo editing in the first place.
Why Outsource Real Estate Photo Editing?
Outsourcing your real estate photo editing will help you save time, boost image quality, and allow you to focus your energy where it matters the most.
In other words, it helps you to shoot more properties, create flourishing business relationships, and scale your business.
For example, consider these typical daily roles of a real estate photographer that need to be fulfilled within the 8 to 10 hours of a regular workday:
- Emailing clients and leads
- Negotiating and getting signed contracts
- Driving to the property and setting up for the shoot
- Shooting the actual property
- Editing the images
- Delivering finished high-resolution images
- Posting to social media and maintaining other marketing channels
- Billing your clients
It’s clear that while juggling these tasks, you have barely enough time to do anything else. As a result, it’ll be almost impossible to scale and grow your photography business.
In addition, other important aspects of life such as spending time with family and friends and getting proper rest to take care of your physical and mental health will suffer.
While this may work for a period of time and save you money initially, you’ll soon burn out and the quality of your work will decrease.
Why Are High-Quality Photos Important in Real Estate?
Effective marketing is a contributing factor to any real estate transaction, and professional photographs are the lifeblood of high-quality real estate marketing.
When it comes to selling real estate, photos are the most effective and powerful tool to attract quality buyers to a listing and get them in the door.
With so many buyers conducting the bulk of their house hunting online, it’s a no-brainer why good photography sells homes. In fact, recent studies show that about 32% of homes with high-quality photographs sell faster than those without visuals.
Additionally, top-notch, compelling photography helps brand you as one of the best. On the other hand, if you won’t be able to provide agents, Realtors, or sellers with top-notch images, they will look for someone else who can.
So with this in mind, let’s take a look at what a real estate photo editor does and how they can help you provide exceptional real estate photos next.
What Does a Real Estate Photo Editor Do?
In the last few years specifically, we’ve seen the standard of real estate photography and photo editing move to an incredibly high standard. To sell homes, you’ll have to create stunning images to get people interested and in the door.
A real estate photo editor will work with photographers, sellers, agents, or Realtors to edit photos and create captivating real estate photography to attract buyers’ attention.
In short, the editor’s job is to convert the images to the highest quality possible before sending them back for approval. That way, you’ll ensure that your clients are provided with the best real estate photography possible to help accelerate the sale.
And the better images you as a real estate photographer can provide, the more returning and new clients you’ll get.
Some common real estate photo editing tasks are:
- Color correction and enhancement
- Exposure adjustments
- Brightness and contrast
- Straightening verticals
- Sky replacements
- Cord and clutter removal
- Add fire in the fireplace
- Object removal
- HDR window masking
- Lawn patching and grass greening
- Day to dusk image editing
- And much more.
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Image Editing Delivery Process
Outsourcing is generally fast, easy, and affordable, and frees up time to focus on other areas that can help grow your business.
With a dedicated editor, you can send individual images or multiple batches, depending on your needs.
Typically, most real estate photo editors work within the confines of a delivery system like Dropbox or Google Drive.
However, premium real estate photo services like PhotoUp have built their own proprietary software for uploading and returning edited photos, requesting revisions, delivering to your clients, and more.
Have a look at PhotoUp’s real estate photo editing uploader tutorial to see how easy it is to use our software:
With the help of streamlined systems, it doesn’t have to be difficult to work with a real estate photo editing company.
Additional Marketing Services to Outsource
To grow your real estate photography business, you need to invest time and effort into marketing your services. To put it simply, if no one knows about you, you won’t get any business!
Luckily, some of the more robust real estate photo editing companies also have their own marketing services built right into the platform.
For example, you’ll often find that these companies offer additional services such as:
- Virtual staging
- Photographer websites
- Single property websites
- Video editing
- Floor plans
- Digital flyers
- Custom house portraits
- Virtual house tours
- And more.
Also, the more services you can offer your agent or Realtor clients, the more valuable you’ll become.
Just like you, they’ll need help to take these work tasks off their hands, so they can be out showing more homes. This means that if you can provide these additional services, you’ll have a competitive advantage over other real estate photographers.
6 Benefits of Outsourcing Your Photo Editing
If you’re still not convinced, here are 6 benefits of real estate photo editing outsourcing.
1. Frees Up Time to focus on Other Important Tasks
Photo editing may be a small but very time-consuming task when running a real estate photography business.
More often than not, your clients will demand a timely turnaround on your images, which can be difficult to live up to with time restraints.
By using a photo editing company, you can free up time to focus on more important things such as shooting more properties, replying to client inquiries, implementing your marketing strategies, getting new clients, and simply spending more time with the people you love.
2. Gives You Access to Skilled Resources
When editing your photos yourself, you’ll need to spend time and effort learning the best real estate editing techniques and tricks. Even though you can learn to excel in photo editing, do you really have time for that?
Remember, time is money!
Instead, you can use this time to shoot more properties, establish relationships, and get more clients.
Besides, professional real estate photo editors know all the features, techniques, and functionalities of photo editing tools and software. They have the skills to edit your photos in order to match your style as closely as possible.
3. You Can Provide Quick Service
With a reputable editing service, your process from editing to delivering high-quality, top-notch real estate photography will be much quicker.
In other words, you can offer your clients a much faster photography service.
Most editing services have a turnaround time of 24 hours, ensuring that you get your photos on time. Some even provide rush options when you need your photos to be edited extra fast.
4. You Can Get Work Done While You Sleep
If you so choose, you can give the task to expert photo editors in another corner of the world and in a different time zone.
For instance, PhotoUp has professional editors in the Philippines that operate around the clock.
So while you sleep and dream sweet dreams, your photos are edited to perfection and returned to you before you wake up.
You can relax knowing that there’s a professional team working on your photos!
5. Helps You Leverage an Ecosystem of Additional Services
As mentioned earlier, established editing companies generally offer additional services and have built an entire ecosystem around real estate photography.
Typically, these companies offer an interconnected system of services to help scale your business.
For example, except for photo editing, PhotoUp also offers:
- Custom websites
- Virtual staging
- Photo delivery
- Single property websites
- Video editing
- Virtual assistants
- House portraits
- Floor plans
- And virtual tours – all under one roof.
This will help to streamline your business. Instead of using several service providers, you can use one system for all of your real estate marketing needs and add more value to your clients.
6. Gives You Objective Feedback
Like all visual artists, you are naturally biased toward your work. While that’s okay, that bias can prevent you from seeing what you actually need to improve on.
From extensive photo editing experience, your editor can give you objective feedback and help to open your eyes to a new and fresh outlook.
For instance, they can share innovative and creative ways to improve your photos, shooting styles, and more.
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Outsourcing Can Help You Scale & Grow Your Business
With a team behind you taking care of your editing and admin tasks, you’ll have more time and energy to bring in new clients, hire a second (or third) photographer, and focus on other high-impact activities.
It all comes down to considering the long-term benefits of outsourcing your real estate photo editing.
While you may feel you’re saving money today, imagine how much time you can save which will translate into shooting more properties and making more money.
So, you can either spend your days and nights doing everything needed to run your business. Or, find an efficient, cost-effective, and professional outsourcing partner to help take some of these tasks off of your hands.
Where to Best Outsource Your Photo Editing?
Needless to say, you can find a great photo editor anywhere in the world, especially here in the US. But many of the more affordable real estate photo editing services are located in Southeast Asia, specifically Vietnam, India, and the Philippines.
The impeccable photo editing skills and cost savings, make an overseas editor an affordable option for most realtors and photographers.
But each of the countries of Southeast Asia has pros and cons when it comes to real estate photo editing. So it all depends on what you’re looking for from your editing house.
Let’s take a closer look at the best countries for outsourcing and what they have to offer.
1. The Philippines
It’s undeniable that the Philippines is one of the world’s preferred providers of business process outsourcing (BPO). The country has built a valuable, skilled workforce whose talents are appreciated around the world.
Besides, the people love and understand American culture, they speak great English, and the younger generation is extremely tech-savvy.
Also, their technical education system is world-class and society is geared to make remote work possible and affordable with good infrastructure.
And the younger population is friendly, eager to learn, and extremely loyal. All of these aspects combined make the Philippines a great place to outsource your real estate photo editing.
PhotoUp has a long and successful history in the Philippines, dating back to 2012. We have built a strong company full of skilled employees who are excited about the work they do and always strive to excel in all areas of editing.
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2. India
If we look back a decade or so, India actually invented the kind of digital outsourcing that is now so successful around the world.
With its innovative, tech-savvy, and talented population, Indian companies can offer a wide diversity of skills, specifically in the technology space.
However, one downside might be that it can be difficult for Americans to understand their spoken English. Even written English can be hit or miss as well, making daily communication a bit of a struggle.
3. Vietnam
In contrast to the Phillippines and India, one country that doesn’t get as much attention when it comes to real estate photo editing is Vietnam.
On the downside, most Vietnamese real estate photo editing companies lack a website and instead operate using Dropbox or a Facebook page for transferring files.
Additionally, they typically work during after-hours here in the US, so communication during the day can be difficult or even impossible.
That’s because graveyard shift hours (typically from 10:00 pm – 6:00 am) are not as common in Vietnam as in the Philippines. As a result, revisions can sometimes take 12 hours or more before being completed and returned to you.
How Much Does Outsourcing Photo Editing Cost?
Now, that you know where to best outsource your real estate photo editing, let’s move on to the costs.
Here’s a quick overview of the average cost for photo editing for each country:
| Country | Real Estate Photo Editing Cost |
| The Philippines | $0.60 to $1.50 per image |
| India | $0.50 to $1.75 per image |
| Vietnam | $0.40 to $4 per image |
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How to Get Started With a Dedicated Editor
It’s never been quicker and easier to get started with a real estate photo editing service like PhotoUp and increase the efficiency of your business.
PhotoUp offers the leading full-time and truly dedicated offshore professionals in real estate photo editing.
With our user-friendly software, you can easily send and deliver photos, request revisions, and deliver final images to your clients. As well as tap into an array of additional services to help grow your real estate photography business.
To see how easy it is to get started, watch our tutorial on how to place your first photo editing order with PhotoUp:
As simple as that!
Sign up for a free PhotoUp account today, and let our expert editors edit your images to perfection.
All you need to do is upload the photos you want to edit and make a few comments or suggestions. Then, you can just sit back and wait for the final edits to be delivered in under 24 hours.
Conclusion
We hope this article helped you see the benefits of real estate photo editing outsourcing and whether it would be a great addition to your business. It all depends on your goals…
…if your business is built on your personal quality of photo editing and you don’t plan to grow, then outsourcing might not be the best option for you.
But if you’re looking to grow and scale your business, then working with a real estate photo editing team may be exactly what you need.
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