So far in 2018 and what is sure to still be true in 2019, the real estate market has been extremely competitive. There are plenty of truly incredible homes on the market that are just waiting to be shown off on many different real estate platforms. From Trulia to Realtor.com to Zillow to various social media platforms, homes are getting more exposure now than ever thought possible. Given this new wave of potential, it is so important to document the beautiful amenities that your home has to offer.

At Twist Tours, we are constantly adapting to the changing needs of homeowners, builders, and realtors so that their properties can genuinely shine.  From custom videography to high-def photography to virtual tours, we are proud to offer a plethora of options. One of the sites that we believe realtors and homeowners alike should take advantage of is Zillow. According to Statista, Zillow is the leading real estate and rental website in the United States according to monthly website visits. It received 36 million visits a month as of May 2018. Trulia (owned by Zillow) is the second most popular real estate website with around 23 million monthly visits. In the world of real estate marketing, Zillow is a mecca that must be a portion of your selling or buying strategy.  

With our dedicated Twist Tours team in your corner, Zillow can quickly become one of your biggest assets. Here is how we are going to make this platform your go-to for assistance when it comes to real estate transactions.

Exclusive features offered by Twist Tours that no other company can offer!

Re-branded tours –  When you are buying or selling, having your home seen is so crucial, especially on the internet. Time is so valuable to buyers, and because of this, they are hunting for homes online before even taking the time to venture to see a property in person. For exposure, MLS tours are great but they do not do enough to get your home out there for the world to see. They are no more than a portal that holds information about the home and photos that are difficult to come across. With Zillow, searching is a breeze. To make this website even more of an asset to you, our passionate team of Twisters will automatically convert that unbranded MLS tour pulled in from the MLS back to the branded tour so that YOU are always seen. The more eyes on a home, the more potential buyers. The more buyers interested, the greater the chance of a price war. And when a price war takes place, you can see a greater return on your investment.

Embedded video – For those that heavily follow the trends in the real estate market, by now you are without question aware of how important video content becomes when selling a home. Videos give those aching to learn more about your home a brand new perspective. They can visualize more spaces and actually be given the chance to picture themselves residing in your home. To take picturing yourself in a home even farther, we offer virtual tours!

Starting around December 1st, our family of Twisters will have an exclusive new agreement with Zillow to automatically embed automated slideshow video from our tour to the Zillow property detail page as well as our custom video product for FREE. We are the only tour company that can do this! These videos will get your listing higher search placement and you will get the exposure that you crave. Custom videos are not only eye-catching, but they encourage users to see more of the home than they would if there was just a gallery of photographs that can sometimes be out of order and cause confusion. With videos of your home on Zillow from us, the odds of your home spending less time on the market are without question increased.

Keep in mind, uploading photos to the MLS does not give you free advertising on sites like Zillow. However, a virtual tour can if it has your branding! There are no other tour companies that can convert the unbranded tour to branded AND have an automated branded video posted on your Zillow listing, automatically, and for free.

Sound too good to be true? Good! Pinch yourself. Yep, we bet that hurt and also we bet that you have a smile on your face knowing that your home now has the backing that it needs to soar off of the market so that you can move on to the next chapter of your life!

We live in a spectacular world were both buyers and sellers can enjoy the new advantages that technology has to offer. We are proud to be on the forefront of this transition and we look forward to continuing to adapt in order to properly showcase homes on the market!

If you are someone who is on the hunt for extra assistance for selling a home, simply contact us!

Without even having to ask, you have definitely been a victim of bad lighting. When you are all prepared to take a brilliant photograph of a pet, yourself, or a space in your home and then your camera’s lens is completely overtaken by light so that your photograph ends up being a massive white blur. It happens, even if you are a professional. Sometimes the solution to obtaining your perfect photograph can come from turning the flash on, but in most cases finding a suitable solution can be way more complex. Many photographers love snapping pics while utilizing natural lighting while others insist on bringing in massive lights in order to create images that fully encapsulate the beauty of whatever they may be photographing. The first ever camera was invented in 1816 and since then the world of photography has truthfully transitioned into a different dimension. Cameras can now capture points in a room in order to provide developers with images that can be used for virtual reality purposes. We can actually feel as though we are inside of a home across the country while searching for a new location to reside. Oh, how the times have changed, and for the better! Finding a home has never been easier than it is right now and if we remain on a similar path it will only become a simpler process. For those within our industry, this is an exciting thought since we will gain access to new, cool tools that will make harnessing the sheer majesty of homes throughout our country nothing other than a joy.

In 2016, 88 percent of home buyers used websites during their search and 94 percent of millennials took advantage of the online information. Given these statistics, which have gone up since stunning photographs of homes are so very important. According to Anthony Gilbert, Realtor,

“When buyers look at homes for sale, they are trying to imagine their new life in each and every home they visit. Lighting – at its best – reveals a property’s potential. On the other side of the coin, poor lighting can conceal this potential. The same exact room may elicit wildly different reactions from a prospective buyer based solely on how it is lit. A bright living room is inviting and may have buyers imagining hosting company there on weekends, while a dim living room may simply be overlooked as just another room the buyer walked through that day.

The buying process is visual and emotional, and a well-lit home can appeal to both of these thought processes. One of the last things a home seller will want to do after pouring time and money into improving their home is to literally present their property in the wrong light.”

For photographers, buyers, sellers, realtors, and professionals, the right lighting can go a long way and can be the difference between your home flying off of the market and it hanging around for longer than anticipated. Whenever our team at Twist Tours is at a property, we do a thorough evaluation of the lighting to make sure that no details are ever left out of a photograph. Additionally, here are some helpful insights that will help you always capture the best qualities that your home has to offer.

Color Management

The use of lighting can add to or take away from the overall colors of a room or from only those surfaces that the light is meant to elevate. The darker the colors are in a room, the more cramped and small they feel. Lighter colored walls do the opposite. The illusion of space is defined by the way that light reflects off of the walls and surfaces within the room. When taking photographs, it is important to remember this and brighten up those corners that look dark, cramped, and undesirable. For homes with recessed lighting, they add a pleasant downward glow that illuminates the floors rather than the walls, which if they are a bright color will result in a fantastic combination. When it comes to showcasing a home, the brighter the colors, the better. Plus, bright colors will always stand out amongst darker ones!

Take space into account

Natural and man-made lighting will help with the illusion of the space you are looking to photograph. For darker colored rooms, use your creativity to bring in full-spectrum natural light. In rooms where furniture is close together, they will seem more cramped so consider taking out the extra side table or sofa so that the remaining furniture can be spread nicely about. Corner lamps, wall sconces, and centrally hanging lights will help brighten a room and when paired with natural lighting will be fantastic to photograph. If you are a photographer that adores natural lighting, consider shooting in spaces with skylights, large windows, or pushing away drapes that are blocking light from coming in. For those that need help deciding what should stay and what should go in a room, consider staging.

Directional lighting

Lighting in a room will either provide illumination for the entirety of the room or highlight specific elements. Track lighting is known for being positional lighting since the necks of the lights can be pointed at specific elements. Some pictures and mirror frames also have built-in lighting to highlight specific areas on walls. Recessed lighting can be used in floors and ceilings to create incredible vertical beams of light within a space.

When photographing a home, the lighting will completely change the mood of a room just as it changes the perceived size of the room. Placement and type of lighting are important when photographing the interior of a home. A space with proper elements like color selections, size, availability of natural light, and a fantastic furniture can come together and transform a room into a space that is functional, beautiful, and is ready to be photographed.

If you are someone looking to get the most out of their home’s online presence, we offer professional photography services!

Show off the unique qualities of your home that can only be seen from up above.

*Buzz buzz buzz*

Do you hear that? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Possibly even a UFO? Nope! It is a drone taking spectacular photos and videos of one of the stunning homes in your neighborhood!

From showing the entire homeowner’s property to the surrounding neighborhood, aerial photography is so useful! When it comes to buying a home, selling a home, or even just getting great shots for a house tour, there is nothing quite like having the opportunity to visualize real estate from up above. Many real estate agents spend time focusing on the interior of a property with images and capturing the perfect angle, however, a home has much more to offer than the standard living room, dining room, and bedroom. Prospective buyers love having the opportunity to see where their property is located. At Twist Tours, we absolutely love taking advantage of the ability to utilize our aerial photography team to capture the beauty of homes in Texas!

On social media and other digital platforms, video content is extremely important for setting your content apart from others, so what could possibly be better than a video that shows what your potential property looks like from up above, in front, and the entire backyard too?  The more ways you can differentiate your property in the competitive world of real estate the better.

Gain a leg up on the competition

When selling a property with tons of land, aerial photographs are even more important. They allow potential buyers to see more of the property than they ever imagined and elevated shots give them a crisp view of the home’s layout. Both of these qualities are complete game changers. When selling a home, it is so important for the agent, buyer, and seller to feel as though they are provided with a unique opportunity that ensures they are ahead of the competition.

Believe it or not, but 83% of home sellers prefer to work with an agent using a drone!

Agents can benefit as well

Aside from capturing jaw-dropping images of a property from up above, aerial photography can allow you to capture the layout and features of a home plus various angles as well as property lines, which cannot be accurately appreciated from the ground level. When it comes to capturing a property, standard photography is extremely important, but it can’t capture all of the angles that will enhance the look of the property. With aerial photography, it is possible to create a raised angle of a building, which is a unique view that is sure to put a smile on the face of every potential buyer!

With the assistance of drone photography, estate agents can create images of a property and its proximity to various amenities including lakes, rivers, stores, or even local highways that can properly reflect how simple a potential work commute would be. It is these features that will truly impress a prospective buyer and will peak their interest in the home!

Aerial photography

At Twist Tours, we fully understand the importance of aerial photography for a wide-range of applications and can promise an exceptional service to each and every one of our lovely customers. With our highly experienced team and high-quality equipment, we can provide exquisite images that bring every home to life.

For more information on aerial photography, real estate marketing, or virtual tours, just reach out to our friendly team!

Your home may be absolutely flawless in your eyes. It might be your ideal version of stylish, trendy, and have all fancy new upgrades, but unless you are a unique case, your home is not staged. Staging a home for sale is not a brand new concept, but is a practice that has rapidly gained popularity given the super competitive real estate market. We have run into homeowners in the past that confuse staging with decorating and consequently resist the process and recommendations of staging professionals. The reality is that the moment you commit to marketing your home for sale, you must be dedicated to the idea of transforming your home into a place that potential buyers can easily fall in love with and think to themselves, “I want to move in here today.” Commencing this process simply means that the seller must emotionally detach from the home.

To ease the stress of altering your home from the way that you are comfortable with, our team at Twist Tours has come up with some of the more important aspects that go along with staging your home. Both pleasing buyers in person and online are so critical to ensuring that this process is a success!

Allow your home to resonate with buyers 

Your home may be flawless in your own eyes, but what are potential buyers saying about it? Many sellers take the whole process of staging their home very personally, which is precisely the point. Customizing your home is an extremely personal activity, but how we live is not how we sell. The goal when staging a home is to make it speak to everyone else in a compelling and positive way rather than to be so specific that others cannot picture themselves living there.

You may be very proud of your spoon collection and how every single one is very special and unique, however, this collection only draws the buyer’s attention away from the rest of the home. Likewise, the personal photos, overstuffed cabinets, and other treasures may make you happy, but these will be no more than a distraction.

Both buyers and agents tend to label homes, so your home can either be the “house with a gorgeous arched doorways and tranquil pool in the backyard,” or “the house with a bunch of books and knickknacks in the room where the dining room should be.” Evoking proper emotional reactions is so very important when selling a home.

For those that are planning on staging their home to be listed online, which is highly recommended, getting the perfect shots to allow all potential buyers to be impressed is crucial.

Kick out the clutter

It is very common for people to cruise through life and let clutter build up without even noticing. The little stack of mail, loose change, and coupons next to the pile of menus can quickly become an issue for a buyer. All of this clutter will be sending the message that you do not have enough space in your home. Many kitchen counters have a toaster, coffee pot, butcher block of knives, and a bowl of fruit in a decorative bowl. This arrangement is very functional but will show a lack of cabinet space to store these items. If you are hoping to sell your home, cleaning up your act is a must. Once your home is properly staged and these distractions are removed, capturing this beauty and every little extra detail is so important to set yours apart.

Let the stager work their magic

When staging a home, the goal is most definitely not to turn your home into the eighth wonder of the world but to work with what you have by reallocating your belongings, strategically rearranging furniture, and truly putting everything in order to present the property in its best possible light. In many cases, this may mean moving some items into the garage to be stored until the home is officially sold.

Far too often this process is taking personally, but it definitely should not be. Staging is not a do-it-yourself event; only a third party specialist can bring in neutrality and objectivity needed to properly accomplish the mission. You may interpret the message that your favorite piece of art would look much better not visible to a buyer as an indictment of your style and tastes, but in many cases, it is not. Rather than this being an insult, it is the stager’s attempt at making sure that your additions to the home do not upstage the actual home itself.

It may be unsettling watching your life be rearranged, but if selling your home in the shortest amount of time and for the most money is your goal, it is pleasing the buyers that should always be your focus!

5 Real Estate Marketing Predictions for 2018

This past year was absolutely full of excitement within the real estate marketing industry. Realtors began to embrace the awesome power of digital technology like never before. Real estate agents started to part ways with the idea that their website was a business card, and saw them venture into new frontiers as they transformed their small impact on the Internet to full-blown marketing masters. Because of this, we believe that having the correct content online is absolutely crucial. High Dynamic Range photography will provide any realtor with jaw-dropping images and Matterport 3D tours will allow a potential buyer to feel as though they are actually in a home.

Our experts at Twist Tours expect 2018 to be even more interesting. We believe that the ever-changing digital landscape will continue to change. We may not have a crystal ball to predict what this year will hold, but here are 5 predictions that we believe will take place in 2018:

Real estate agents will invest in social media

Social media is continuing to grow on a consistent basis online, and realtors are beginning to take notice. Both Facebook and Instagram now allow for agents to create extremely effective and precisely targeted advertising campaigns that will draw in not only sellers but buyers as well. The opportunity for realtors to grow their presence on social media has been available for years, but now it is imperative to get involved.

In addition to getting involved more in social media, we believe that realtors will end up posting small pieces of information all over different social media platforms. They will spend more time focusing on two or three platforms to completely dominate. For this approach, we highly recommend Instagram and Facebook, but LinkedIn also has the potential for growth as the platform continues to enhance its features. We expect that 2018 will be the year that real estate agents will take advantage of social media.

Sellers will be the focus of content creation

In 2018, low inventory levels across the United States and Canada are expected to continue, as builders cannot keep up with the demand. Simple entry-level homes are quickly becoming a challenge to find and the desire for these homes is supremely greater than what is currently available. It is without a doubt a seller’s market.

To use the market to their advantage, realtors are beginning to get creative in order to sway those within their community that the time to sell is now. Convincing buyers with low equity homes that it is the ideal time to sell will be a genius attempt to find new clients and close deals. Do to the identical market constraints, realtors will also need to formulate new and creative ways to target mid to high-end income earners and convince them that they NEED a home upgrade.

Artificial intelligence

One of the greatest and most anticipated ways for real estate agents to improve their marketing with minimal effort is with artificial intelligence (AI). This year, we expect AI to assist realtors in personalizing a users experience while minimizing their workload.

One of the major advantages of artificial intelligence is that it will do what you teach it to do. If you provide a bot with existing knowledge, it can accomplish repetitive tasks that are nothing more than time-consuming. An effective example of this would be to have real estate chat bots that assist people to sort through home listings in order to locate the home of their dreams, naturally obtaining leads along the way.  As this repetitious work is decreased, real estate agents will have more time to focus on important activities.

Immersive technology will set realtors apart

Buyers want to get as close to a potential property as possible without actually being there. As a result, media such as High Dynamic Range photography, Matterport 3D virtual tours, and drone videography are all on the cusp of becoming wildly popular, all of which we offer.

360 photos and virtual reality are already in existence for real estate listings, but we believe that this year is going to be huge in terms of realtors integrating these options on to their websites. These videos do a phenomenal job of allowing potential buyers to get a legitimate feel for a home from afar. Not only is this media cost-effective, but it will also empower buyers to visualize what houses they would want to see in person. This practice will completely eliminate houses that are of no interest to buyers and will allow all involved to optimize their time.

We expect videography to become extremely popular this year. Utilizing videos of a property is a practice that has been used for many years, but many realtors still feel uncomfortable about sharing videos within their communities. This year will be the year that everything changes. From posting live videos of homes on Facebook and Instagram to simple recorded messages, the right video can truly show off the sheer beauty of a home.

The more success realtors have with regard to visual marketing, the more efficient they need to become. In a world where technology is constantly changing, it is important to utilize organizations that are at the forefront of this change so that you can remain ahead of your competition. Immersive media is the absolute most effective answer to the challenge of boosting consumer experiences.

Mobile optimization

Up until recent times, real estate agents have managed with poor website experiences on mobile devices because people were willing to accept mobile websites that were not exactly perfect. Those days are most definitely over with.

Many realtors have broken the shackles of having bad websites and have started to truly enhance the quality of their websites on smartphones. There are many websites now that can operate perfectly on these new phones and can show off the beauty of a home as well, if not better than on a desktop computer. When on the go, an efficiently operating mobile website is extremely important so that potential homebuyers do not need to compromise on using a desktop. As more realtors elevate the quality of their website, the more buyers will cease to accept subpar website experiences.

In a world where technology is constantly changing, it is crucial to stay up-to-date with where the real estate marketing industry is going. At Twist Tours, we pride ourselves on constantly adapting to industry trends and truly believe in offering the best possible home viewing experience as possible. Not only do we believe in offering unparalleled images and videography, but also we believe in providing customer service that reflects how much we care about our products. Our staff rocks and so do our customers!