Property Photography for Holiday Rentals

We are regularly surprised by the varying standard of photography we see property owners using to present their rentals online. Whether they are using an online listing site or even have their own website, we often see badly composed shots or worse, photos that look like they were snapped on an iPhone quickly before they locked up and went home!

In this post we wanted to set the background a little as to why images are so important to promote holiday rentals.

I suspect you may have already heard about the mind-blowing rise of the newest craze in social networking, Pinterest? Well in case you don’t yet know about this phenomenal internet star, the main thing to be aware of is that Pinterest has grown from 700K to almost 20M unique visitors in the last year, which is already half the number of Twitter’s unique visitors.

Pinterest is the fastest growing social media network ever and is also attracting consumers who have not previously interacted with a social media network; 15% of Pinterest users reported that they do not use any other social media sites and even time spent on Facebook is down. Read more about the impact of Pinterest.

Now I am not here to dazzle you with Social Media statistics, what I am trying to get across is that this network is not based on sending out snippets of gossip in 140 characters (Twitter) and is not based on finding out what your friends were up to at the weekend (Facebook), but it is made up of people who are devouring and sharing beautiful images online. Ok, so yes there is more to it than images – people are very creative and pin all sorts of things like quotes, infographics, favourite book covers, etc, but the predominant theme is high quality images which will always be shared above low quality and uninteresting shots.

The key point here is that holiday property owners who have a stock of fabulous property photography will stand out heads and shoulders above the rest. And not only will people be happy to share and interact with your images on whichever social media network you use, but these images can also include a link back to your website (or listing) so you benefit from all that lovely referral traffic and more eyeballs on your property.

Images are also critical to the way your property comes across on any listing sites you advertise it on – consider that there are literally thousands of competing properties on the big sites like Home-Away, Owners Direct or Holiday Lettings meaning you have as little as 5 seconds to impress someone enough with your lead photo to want to discover more. And if you have a website for your holiday property, what do you think would make a more engaging home page? A page full of lengthy text, or a selection of enticing images of your property that immediately start building anticipation happiness for your audience?

For owners who are confident behind a camera then you can get more photography tips from Rental Tonic here and do tell us how you get on. But for owners who are serious about marketing your self catering business but lack photography skills and equipment then Rental Tonic will be happy to organise a professional photo and/or video shoot for your property. We can also include our home staging services to make sure your property is presented in the best way for the photographers to do their bit. Just contact us for more details.