Not only are floor plans a useful marketing tool for our clients but they are also a great auxiliary service we as real estate photographers can offer to them to make some extra money while we are on site. I believe it's important to be able to offer an array of services to our clients in order to meet their needs and also to boost your earning potential for every booking. This is a subject that I go into in more depth in another video I put out called “Maximizing Your Earnings as a Real Estate Photographer'' and you can see that video here:
Having more services to offer gives you the potential to earn more at every shoot and also I feel it's very important to be a one stop shop for your clients so they aren’t looking elsewhere to book other services. This puts your business relationship at risk because if they find someone else that can offer all the services they need they may just start using that other person instead of you out of convenience.
THE IMPORTANCE OF FLOOR PLANS
So very quickly let’s just get into a few reasons why floor plans can be an important tool for our clients to include in their marketing materials. These points are important to keep in mind so when we talk to our clients we have the ammo to sell them on the idea of ordering one.
Firstly, floor plans are a great counterpart to our photos because it gives the photos context. What I mean by that is that even though we do our best as photographers to illustrate the flow of the house with our photos, it still is confusing to most people which room connects to which and what the layout of the property actually is like by just looking at the photos alone. Obviously almost everyone shops online for a home these days so by giving potential buyers a good view of the layout they can see if the property suits their needs or not and can save our agents’ precious time by avoiding unnecessary showings. Here is a few other facts that CubiCasa points out on their site that may come in handy to know as well:
According to Zillow, floor plans are the 2nd most important feature on a listing and correlates highly with capturing potential leads.
Adding a floor plan to a real estate listing can increase click-throughs from buyers by 52%
With more than 90% of home buyers searching online for properties, floor plans and virtual tours rank highest as the ‘very useful’ features, according to a National Association of REALTORS® survey.
93% of buyers say they are more likely to spend time looking at a property with a floor plan
81% of sellers think a floor plan will help sell their home faster
Including a floor plan in the marketing campaign has been proven to reduce time on the market by up to 50%
So all really good points and statistics there to keep in mind to help us educate our agents with and to help us sell more floor plans.
Now let’s get into CubiCasa and creating the floor plans. CubiCasa is an app that you install on your phone that utilizes your phone’s camera to scan the property and create a floor plan. It’s extremely fast and easy to use. You can literally scan an entire average size house in around 5 minutes. I was previously using Matterport to create floor plans which can take a couple hours to scan the whole house so this is such a better solution and makes me very happy after doing it that way for so long. It’s really quite amazing how well it works.
I also really appreciate the pricing model as well. There are no monthly subscription fees; you just pay about $25 per scan when you sign up with them as a photographer which is absolutely free. I think that is a reasonable price. We can charge clients $125 - $150 for the floor plan and make over $100 in profit for about 5 minutes worth of work. This is a no-brainer service to offer and potentially a great money maker.
I recorded my phone screen as I made a floor plan the other day so you can see first hand what the process is like. To see that demonstration, please watch the video at the top of this post.
After the scan has uploaded, CubiCasa will then process it and get it back to you by the following day so it's super fast turnaround time. I actually got this particular one back later that same day. Once completed, you can just sign into your account and there you can download the floor plans, request a fix or even do some light editing to them yourself. You can download them in different file formats: JPG, PNG, SVG and multipage PDF. All of those file formats are available for download with or without the room dimensions on them. I haven’t yet cross referenced their room measurements with my own but Cubicasa claims 94% accuracy with their scans so that’s pretty good. Alright, now let’s take a look at the finished floor plans:
Alright, so that is creating floor plans with the CubiCasa app. CubiCasa is definitely my new goto way to do it and it yields great results. As I stated earlier, the speed and efficiency of it just makes creating floor plans more profitable for us as real estate photographers. Time is money!