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Nancy O’Brien
Tallahassee, Florida
Nancy O’Brien is a Tallahassee based photographer specializing in photography for real estate and commercial real estate. She has been the proud owner of Sunlight Photos & Virtual Tours for the past 15 years , offering custom, high-end photography to her loyal customers. Nancy brings 16 years of real estate experience and 30 plus years of photography experience to her clientele.
Bringing iGUIDE to her 1,200 photo-shoots a year was a no-brainer for Nancy and her early success has proven it was the right choice. She is excited to see how iGUIDE will help her grow her business in 2019 and she hopes to invest in another camera system and have more of her photographers start offering iGUIDE as well.
A Day Without iGUIDE is a Day Without Sunshine, says Florida Photographer
After working as a professional photographer for decades, Nancy O’Brien has lots of contacts in the real estate photography business.
Good thing too.
About nine months ago a long-time client needed a house photographed for a listing. Nancy’s business, Sunlight Photos, is based in Tallahassee, Fl. The client’s house was in another part of the state. No problem, Nancy contacted a photographer she knew in that area, and he did the shoot.
That photographer used an iGUIDE camera. The client had never seen one before. Nancy had never heard of it. Later, the client showed Nancy the laser-accurate, interactive floor plans and 3D virtual tours produced by the iGUIDE technology.
“I was impressed,” says Nancy.
She is also busy, photographing 1,200 properties a year. So Nancy went right back to work, but never forgot iGUIDE’s 3D tours and interactive floor plans. So when iGUIDE contacted her sometime later during a routine sales call, Nancy was already primed.
“It was automatic: ‘Oh yeah, this is something I want to do.’”
She’s been taking pictures since the Seventies. Architectural photography at first, and then real estate photography. In addition to starting her own real estate photography business, Nancy has been a licensed realtor for 16 years.
When her new camera arrived, she was eager to use it. Nancy was watching a training video for iGUIDE when a long-term client called about a house she wanted to sell.
“She knew I was looking at this technology. And we thought: ‘You know, I’ve watched the videos, let’s just see if we can make it work.’ So we did it.”
So when more in-depth training started, she already had her first iGUIDE shoot finished. The iGUIDE trainer looked at the results of her first shoot, and suggested a few changes. That was it.
“And so it didn’t take but a couple of houses and I was ready to go, and I think it is going to be one of our best sellers in the coming year.”
“I think it is really above and beyond what I have seen in our market, and what other photographers in my area are using. And part of it is really the quality of the images that are on the walkthrough. They’ve got it down to a science. You just use the default settings and you don’t have to tweak very often, which then saves time on the editing end of it for us as well.”
In the Tallahassee area, real estate agents produce a booklet for each listing. It includes pictures and a story about the house. The iGUIDE is a big help here as well because the agent has the floor plans in a PDF.
“And what they are able to do now is take that PDF floor plan and put it in that book. So when somebody is on site and they are talking about the house, they’ve got that floor plan in front of them, and that seems to be one of the things that my clients are enjoying the
most.”
During the second half of 2018, she did 79 iGUIDE shoots. That’s with no marketing other than a single, mass email to members of the board of realtors in her area.
Nancy has relied on word-of-mouth, and real estate marketing is something she never did before. But there is now a big financial incentive to get serious about marketing iGUIDE because she charges more for iGUIDE shoots.
She had the website for Sunlight Photos redone to feature the new technology, and Nancy is both curious and excited to see what happens during the first quarter of 2019.
“So introducing it on the website and pushing it is going to be new for me, and hopefully that will convert more over to the iGUIDE, which will then really push me to maybe get a second system and get one of my other photographers doing it.”
