15 years ago and to a lesser degree 5 years ago home buyers and rental hunters chose their living accommodations by a process of qualification.  They had a wish list of  features that they sorted out based on realtor description, newspaper advertisements and some magazine publications.  They started with a short list of choices and filtered those choices through description, a few available images and visual appraisal.  The choices were frequently dictated by filtered delivery through a property manager or realtor..  While the process in theory could go on forever, in practice the efficiency of looking at a significant number of properties was outweighed by the urgency to find your next living accommodations.

A social network strategy is a plan that businesses should have in place to communicate with their clients and followers.   This plan should address the strengths of the various online social networking sites as each site offers different values that can be leveraged by business.http://www.exposureelements.com

A recent comScore report highlighted these statistics:

        -Social networking accounts for 1 of every 6 minutes spent online
        -As Facebook reaches market capacity (reaching 157.2 million visitors and 73% of the total U.S. Internet population each month), its growth has not been limited. Facebook has increased average U.S. visitor engagement from 4.6 hours to 6.3 hours per month over the past year
        -LinkedIn, Twitter, and Tumblr have grown at impressive rates

A Sept. 13, 2011 Mashable publication said according to Nielsen Americans spend almost a quarter of their time online on social networking sites. The most popular social network is Facebook, followed by Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Apartment communities have many unique photography challenges that require specialized attention, experience and post processing in order to deliver photography that separates your community from the competition. 

The Exposure Elements virtual tour reporting system is an invaluable weekly sent reporting tool for real estate agents and businesses that guages the activity of the property tour.  It provides several benefits that position the reporting system as a must have tool when selling or sharing a property with the public as it reports on a) the number of visits to the virtual tour by day during the previous week, b) the number of visits to the virtual tour by week for the previous weeks of the tour up to 10 weeks, c) where the visitors are coming from, and d) a summary of the most viewed images of the virtual tour.

It all gets packaged up into a colorful, graphical page that is emailed from Exposure Elements to you and your clients each monday.  The report includes all of your information and even space for a logo or image should you want to share it with a business partner or listing client.

“Over 15 percent of apartment seekers are using a mobile device today and the growth is accelerating,” said a key executive at MyNewPlace.  “We expect over 50 percent of apartment seekers to be using a mobile device by 2014, making a mobile-optimized website a critical part of the mix for apartment marketers.”

Due to the faster adoption rate on new technologies the Silicon Valley can be as much as 2 years ahead of the rest of the country.  The on the go lifestyle here requires being connected all the time.  In order to be comptetitive and meet the needs of mobile savy tech workers that spend more time away from home and need to utilize on the go time apartment communities need to provide communication tools that allow access while their tenants are between desktop computers

Since the inception of Exposure Elements two years ago we have been committed to the growth of the mobile aspects of our marketing programs for Realtors.  We started off by getting committed vendors that saw the vision of mobile and the growth potential.  Both RTV and TxT2Look, our primary software partners exemplified this vision with their outstanding mobile direction.  TxT2Look had a special commitment in developing the first mobile app I had seen specifically for Realtors and one of the early players in an increasingly competitive market sector.  Their initial offering was significantly better than the "other" solutions in the market place with true mobile pages instead of a resized desktop page and integration with an SMS texting platform that made the app access easy and the delivery speedy.  At a time when Realtors were just starting to think about mobile TxT2Look had a mobile product that was basically where most of the competition is today.

Fast forward 2 years to today..

Realtors have unique requirements for the exposure of their listings.  Our Exposure Engine is designed to facilite this need for a period of six months.  Our Exposure Engine is offered in pieces or as a whole with the whole being comprised of the Realtor.com portal posting the listing virtual tour to 80+  real estate sites.  We extend this by posting images and details to another 98 sites through our own exclusive portal  interface, developing a YouTube video, a tour QR code and an HTML posting to Craigslist.  The power of this program, though, is that we will keep our exclusive postings up for up to 6 months or untl the property listing is sold whichever comes first.  We will also repost the Craigslist advertisement every 15 days for the six month listing support period on your request.

Exposure Elements recently signed an agreement to be a preferred partner in their Century 21 M&M and Associates Connections program.  Century 21 M&M and Associates is the largest real estate brokerage in Northern California with 26 branch offices and over 1250 Realtor agents distributed across the northern half of California.  Exposure Elements agreed to initially support seven offices with the closest proximity to our office in San Jose.  Those offices are as follows; Berkeley, Tracy, Los Banos, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, San Jose and the corporate office in Oakdale,CA. 

1) What are the benefits of adding an Exposure Elements YouTube Video to the marketing package?

2) How do I get the most benefits from a Exposure Elements YouTube Video?

3) How will this marketing tool hlep my marketing plan?

4) Is YouTube a safe marketing option for my family?

Below are Exposure Elements' answers to these questions.

by Kacie Conaboy

JPEG and Raw file formats are pretty much identical at a visual standpoint. But there are serious technical differences that should be noted.

Make the most out of your virtual tour by making sure your property looks its best! A virtual tour is an online open house, so get rid of the clutter, and make it sparkle! Here are some tips to look your best and get our photographer done on time:

By Raynor James

To market your property, you are going to need to have some choice photographs. Before whipping out the camera, however, you need to give some thought to the process.

Why Photographs for Your Listing Are Important
 

HDR Photography Makes Eye-popping Images

In an earlier blog I wrote about the need to do editing to enhance the dynamic range of an image.   There is a new way to solve the dynamic range challenges of a camera lens. It’s called HDR Photography. While the end result is an photograph with outstanding dynamic range it is definitely more than just photography. 

In the area of image presentation realtors and businesses tend to focus heavily on composition of a photograph and less on other just as important areas of presentation.  Some of these areas are tonal balance, saturation of color, level of detail and effective contrast of an image.