Outsourcing image editing allows real estate companies to realign their focus on business growth and customer engagement. Operational issues such as fluctuating volumes, quality, timelines, technology upgrades and resourcing, are best addressed by outsourcing service providers.
High quality property photographs are critical to rope in real estate buyers. With 79% online home buyers treating property photos as a key to their home-buying experience; it is critical for real estate images to be captivating. Real estate photographers often end up capturing improper shadows, dusty walls, shabby color and harsh surroundings that weaken property photo quality. Image editing & retouching becomes a mandated post processing step to enhance color, remove improper shadows, improve lighting, fix walls etc.
Given the time, effort and resources that need to be pumped in to get best image editing results, outsourcing of this crucial process is fast gaining acceptance as a viable business model.
The Do It Yourself (DIY) approach: Is it really worth it?
The Do It Yourself approach may have some takers, but business experience across the globe suggests that in house post-production operations may save you few dollars, but distract you from core business goals such as demand generation and customer engagement. Consider this:
- Your photography team works on image editing processes vs focuses on business critical function of capturing voluminous property images.
- You dedicate scarce and skilled resources to meet need for quality property images vs you channel resources to business critical functions.
- You spend significantly on infrastructure and technology needed for in house image editing operations vs investing on business growth.
The constraints of in house post editing processes clearly tilt the scales in favor of outsourcing real estate image editing services.
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Outsource to us Now »What are the benefits of outsourcing real estate photo editing?
Photo retouching from a business perspective is a low growth activity if compared to business promotion activities. Hence, it is best outsourced.
Lets walk through five key benefits of outsourcing real estate image editing that businesses globally have experienced.
1. It is cost effective
Managing an in-house image editing team is not only time consuming but a costly affair too. It is a proven fact that labor costs in developed countries like the USA, UK, and Australia are higher as compared to developing countries like India. An outsourcing model helps real estate businesses get work done at minimal cost, and invest the resultant savings on better photography infrastructure, trainings and workshops etc.
HabileData helped a top real estate marketing service provider in USA to bring down its advertising expenditures by 30% to 40%. Property photos edited by image editing experts increased the leads and conversion ratio manifold for their property managers, investors and private property sellers too.
Photographers in real estate business can save up to 60% of image editing expense, if they outsource image editing tasks.
2. You get high quality and enhanced images
When it comes to real estate purchase, Instagram styled pictures dont work. Real estate photography editing experts working offshore don’t just remove unwanted objects, adjust brightness, correct contrast and replace colors. They also assist real estate photographers with clipping path, still image enhancement, color cast removal, twilight enhancement, perspective corrections, photo blending, image stitching etc.
Photo enhancement experts deliver finest high quality HDR real estate images to generate 3x detailed views and 2x leads.
3. You get the business scalability and flexibility advantage
Outsourcing companies, with a ready pool of multi-skilled workforce, are well positioned to handle fluctuating work volumes. Outsourcing their image editing services empowers real estate companies to incrementally add or reduce image editing professionals according to project requirements. The onus of scaling up the infrastructure and resources is on the outsourcing service provider. Outsourcing also provides operational flexibility as contracts even incorporate project termination clauses to accommodate shifting business needs.
HabileData deployed more than 25 photo enhancement experts overnight, to help a Real Estate Imaging Company in New Zealand to expand in an efficient manner. Outsourcing the project increased the Image editing and processing capacity from 1 Million to 3 Million a year, for the imaging company. Having so many experts to process and retouch a mix of raw files from the camera to multi exposure and high dynamic range images, otherwise, was a costly time consuming and challenging proposition.
Outsourcing to a company with 100 times your capacity is easier than investing to grow your capacity 100 times.
4. Turnaround times are reduced
Outsourcing image editing ensures faster turnaround and timely project completion. Time zone differences play a major role here. Photographers in the US or UK can conveniently assign images to editing and retouching teams in India at end of day and expect to receive high quality processed images first thing, the next morning. The time zone differences from -5:30 (GMT) through to -12:30 (PDT) allows real estate photographers to attain more in a normal work day.
HabileData edited, enhanced and delivered more than 3000 images every day to a real estate HDR photography company in the USA. Time zone difference was the key contributor to faster project delivery. Photo enhancement experts worked on tech-enabled workflows, which ensured that not more than 30 minutes were spent on any of the images. Outsourcing provided an agile 24 hour image editing and retouching cycle; alike our other clients across the UK, Europe, Australia, Canada and the Middle East.
Outsourcing works for real estate photographers; as their post-production studios are operational 24*7, 365 days.
5. Access to latest tools & technologies
Property enhancement experts leverage latest tools including Photoshop, CorelDraw, Lightroom, Adobe Illustrator, etc. to deliver the best real estate images adhering to industry standards. Outsourced photo editing companies use technology backed workflows and digital asset management tools like Adobe Bridge. It improves the output of editing drastically without extending your budget; while enabling sharing of images in formats such as JPEG, CAD Drawings, TIFF, DWF and DXG files, and PSD.
Real estate images edited by outsourced photo editors are ready to print and does not blotch the photographers name.
Conclusion
The business case for outsourcing image editing is very strong with real estate organizations globally turning to this model. The key factors driving this growing trend include access to skilled resources, cost benefit without compromising on quality, scalability, flexibility and faster turnaround times.
Most importantly outsourcing allows realtors to focus on crucial business processes. As with every business approach, there are risk factors which can be mitigated by a rigorous vendor screening process. Demonstrated expertise and experience in real estate image editing along with company strength are key factors to look out for. Professional and seasoned real estate image editing companies such as HabileData are your go to business partners to help you stay competitive.
Enhance real estate image quality
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