why every realtor should own a Canon digital camera

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Jun 17, 2007

My friend Sharon is a realtor in Michigan, and Michigan's housing market is about the worst in the U.S. this year. Sharon has actually been selling more homes than most of her peers, but she said her marketing costs have increased since homes are sitting on the market from six to 18 months or longer, thus requiring longer ad runs. We talked about using her website to advertise her listings, which she uses extensively. She said that online virtual tours are hugely popular with internet savvy buyers, but they hire an outside firm to produce them and they're expensive. While iPix and similar systems produce great results, any realtor can create her own virtual tour with 30 minutes, a $150 Canon digital camera and the free PhotoStitch software that comes with it.

One of my digital cameras is a Canon SD800 IS pocket sized point & shoot. Every Canon digital, even the $150 A550, comes with free PhotoStitch software. PhotoStitch makes easy work of combining a series of photos into a single, wide panoramic picture. A wide, static picture is nice, but not all websites are designed to display photos that might be upwards of 2000 pixels wide. That's ok, because PhotoStitch also supports saving the images as QuickTime VR movies.

I've put together a quick demonstration using a few photos that I took of my back yard. I took these photos with a Nikon D40; the Canon software will work with any photos, but you may have to manually tell PhotoStitch your focal length for non-Canon cameras. It took about five minutes to create this movie file, and that includes the photography time.

Click to download the Virtual Tour (1.5MB)

If you do not have the free Apple QuickTime plug-in installed, you may download it here.

Click inside and drag left or right

These are the phtographs that I used to create the QuickTime VR file.

A quick Technorati search revealed that some real estate agents, like Dave Sulvetta , are already using this method to create virtual tours on their websites.