I've been doing website design and teaching IT classes at our local college for a couple of years now. I then started doing virtual tours for a non-profit organization, and by chance happened to do one residential tour for my next-door neighbors.

After that last tour, I decided to possibly get into the business of doing tours with stills/panoramic, or both.

I have completed three demo tours, at no cost to my clients.

Now that those are done, I'd really like to come up with a resonable pricing package.

For those of you who are real estate agents out there, would you mind looking at my demos and telling me what you think they are worth?

I would really appreciate it!

Sincerely,

Sarah Woods

www.oregontoursonline, go to portfolio.

Have a great day!

Are you charging the customer for your photography service or a tour service? I guess I don't get it... you're using BuildATour.com, which costs $9.95 - the agent can do that themselves - it's just a consumer product.... so your particular service would be to just take the photos and upload them? I guess I don't get what you're trying to do or what you're trying to charge for....

Right, we are using Buildatour, and charging the 9.95 to the agent for it.

We are also going to the property, taking professional photographs, optimizing them for the web in Photoshop (which does take time) and then hand delivering a cd that has both the high resolution and optimized for the web images on it.

Additionally we are wanting to wrap into the package other website options, including but not limited to a secure contact form, a sub-domain, high quality printed flyers, and 'mini-websites'.

Sarah,

You should probably check out Voyager360.com.
Yes, I'm affiliated with them, but other than that I won't do any sales pitch here.

I did check them out, in fact we have a demo sitting here. However my partner is having financial difficulty in starting out his web design business, and cannot afford to go in on purchasing that particular system. I can't remember off the top of my head how much it is, but he seemed to think it was too much for us as we are just starting out.

How soon do you think it would pay for itself?

If you have the hardware, its only 50-100 dollars a month. So I'm not sure where the financial difficulty is. Marketing locally is where your major expense is. That would just be cold calling realtors, and going to local commerce events to showcase your company. If you don't want a custom web site developed, we can iframe the pages on your web site to show the listings and tours.

I can't answer how quickly something pays for itself because its based on how ambitious the individual is. The quality of there tours. How much networking has been done.

Regards,

Jim Beauchamp

The big ???? is how much are agents willing to pay? I find that most realtors are not willing to spend much money on expensive tours... (many won't even pony up for their own digital camera, and still use the 'office' 1 megapixel camera that stores photos on a floppy disk!).

I do video tours, and it's very difficult to charge what it's worth in time and equipment, as most agents will not pay. You might squeeze $99 out of some for a virtual tour, but that's about it. Considering video tours take 3-4+ hours in photographing, editing, voice overs, compression, etc... you can't work for free. I find a few of the smart agents 'get it' and see the value, but most don't. They'll do the bare minimum and the cheapest option available....

Very true REWG. I've heard horror stories from our client base about how agents stiff them after tours, slide shows, and brochures have been completed. On the other end of the spectrum we do have customers making six digit incomes. Depends on the market sector, business plan, competition, etc.

If it was a bad business to be in, no one would be in it.

Regards

Jim Beauchamp
www.voyager360.com