What’s the best scheduling platform for Real Estate photography?

After being in the industry in a focused way for the past four years, we believe that Acuity Scheduling is by far the best scheduling platform for real estate photography. This is mainly due to its robust features at a very affordable price point.

Acuity Scheduling is a platform that is utilized by many service-based industries. Just think about the days that you are at a special event. Maybe it’s a birthday or a wedding and you get a call from a prospective client. You have to take the call or else you may miss a huge opportunity. In a moment where you should be celebrating, you find yourself huddled in a corner with your phone to one ear and your finger plugging your other ear to drown out the background noise. While on the phone, you try to get as many details as you can from the client but inevitably some things are missed. After a few minutes of trying to be polite, yet hurry up the conversation, you both agree to start an email conversation. This is where you enter into, what Acuity, calls “email roulette.” If you are like us, you know how this feels. The truth is every new agent increases the revenue on a monthly and quarterly basis. As Acuity expresses on their about page, they help assist you in not getting trapped in “email roulette” with your clients.

Ever since we switched to Acuity Scheduling we no longer have to capture all the details over the phone or have to go back and forth emailing clients. We simply direct them to the scheduling page of our website that has the Acuity Scheduling integration built-in. This is huge because it makes the process super simple for the client but also trains them that every time they need to schedule a tour they can easily do it online.  

In this article, we explain some of the key features and how we apply them to our business model.

Appointment Types

One of the key elements that we have loved about using Acuity Scheduling is the ability to have different types of appointments available to our clients. With many of the alternative scheduling platforms, you can only have one appointment type. But with Acuity, you can set up different types of packages that a client can choose from. In real estate photography, this is really important because it allows you to offer a variety of services with different price points. For example, we offer a photo tour that does not include drone images and a package that does include drone. We also offer a variety of video packages as well that an agent can choose from. Another great feature within the appointment types is the ability to include add-ons.  With each appointment type, there is an overall price but as the client is scheduling they can choose from a variety of customized add-ons. As a business owner, this is a great opportunity for us to organically increase our revenue per listing. Imagine trying to do this manually by calling, texting or emailing for each listing. With Acuity, it’s seamlessly automated for you. Some examples of add-ons we offer are rush delivery and virtual staging.

In-Take Forms

Now imagine yourself at the wedding hiding in the corner plugging your ear so you can hear your client on the phone. Think of all of the questions that you need to ask them. Things like what is the address? Is the homeowner going to be there? Is there a lockbox? If so what is the code? It’s a nightmare trying to retain all that info on the fly. Now, this is all automated for you! When a client chooses an appointment type on your scheduling page they are taken through an intake form. This form is fully customizable so that you can have them supply you with all of the critical information that you need to do your job effectively. In our opinion, this actually provides the client with a much more professional and quality experience.

Integration with Google Calendar

Here at Atlanta Real Estate Photo, we operate our whole business on the G Suite platform. Everything from emails to spreadsheets. A key element of how we run our business is we utilize Google calendar to schedule all of our photographers. Acuity’s ability to integrate with Google calendar makes it ideal for our business. As soon as an agent books a tour with us, all of the information they included on the in-take form seamlessly hits our Google calendar. It automatically creates an event on the calendar and adds all the info that the agent entered in the notes to the calendar event. If you are a solo photographer then there are no other steps you have to take. If you’re like us and run multiple photographers at a time, all you have to do is simply can go into the Google calendar app and send an invite to one of your photographers. Many of the other scheduling platforms that might integrate with Google Calendar don’t have the ability to have different types of appointments or don’t have the in-take form. Because of that you end up with only the basic information from the client and have to follow up with them via phone call or email.

Reports

Because Acuity Scheduling allows you to create different types of appointments, it has a built-in reporting system. You can generate reports that show you the amount of each type of appointment scheduled over any time period. You can pull reports on a daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly basis. This a great way to keep track of your numbers and your overall growth. You can also utilize these reports to track your total gross revenue. Check out the below image to see an example of what the reports look like.

Integration with Wave Using Zapier

Not everything is all peaches and cream with Acuity. One complaint that we have about using the platform is that it has limitations with its built-in integrations with invoicing platforms. For a while, we decided to use the invoicing platform Xero because it was one of the only invoicing platforms that Acuity integrated with. Xero is a great program but is pretty in-depth and is way overkill for the needs of a real estate photography company. Recently we discovered that using the app, Zapier, you can build an automation between Acuity and the Wave invoicing platform.  We like Wave a lot because it is simple and it covers all of our needs. Whichever invoice platform you decide to go with, one great thing about using Acuity is that as soon as a client schedules it automatically creates a ready to send invoice. This is a huge timesaver especially if you’re doing 10 to 15 appointments a week.

As you can see, we are pretty excited about the Acuity Scheduling platform. The level of customizable automations that it offers is ideal. It has really helped us save time and allowed us to be able to focus on building our business. We believe that we are able to provide a better experience for our clients and grow a stronger more efficient team. If you are interested in trying out Acuity Scheduling, you can sign up for their Freebie by clicking here.