Instead of popping the champagne after your clients officially become new homeowners, how about setting up a photo shoot to help them document the occasion?
First-time buyers are showing greater interest in sharing their status as new homeowners with their peers online, so many real estate pros are staging photo shoots to help them capture and share the moment on social media. The photos may include props such as a “First Home” sign, or the buyers may pose with their hands forming a heart shape around their newly obtained house keys. Other real estate pros have even captured a couple dancing in the bedroom.
For example, Joey and Morgan Cabibbo, a couple who bought a home in Boerne, Texas, hired a professional photographer a few days after they closed on the purchase. The photographer captured Joey Cabibbo giving his wife a piggyback ride in front of their wooden garage door and stone three-arch entryway. The couple eventually shared on Instagram one of the photos depicting them sitting on their new front lawn with a “sold” sign.
Another couple, Blair Pomeroy and her husband, Matt, did a photo shoot in their new home in Florence, Ky., after they bought it in 2015. One photo showed them testing a paint sample on the wall by drawing an outline of a house. Above the drawing, Blair wrote “home sweet home” and drew three hearts coming out of the chimney. The couple used the photo on invitations to their housewarming party.
Real estate professionals say such post-closing photo shoots are great for their business. “It creates kind of like a domino effect,” Corey Maurice Gilmore, an associate broker at Capstone Realty in Huntsville, Ala., told
The Wall Street Journal. “I see a lot of people—a lot of circles of friends—buy houses around the same period of time because they are seeing their friends make home purchases.”
Source: “Selling a House to Millennials? Bring a Camera, and Fake Eyelashes,” The Wall Street Journal (Nov. 9, 2017) (login required)
