Quicker with Flickr 

By Rick Broida

You've no doubt heard of Flickr?, the Web's most popular site for storing and sharing digital photos. But have you used it? More importantly, have you put it to good, productive, business-boosting use? Michael Pulskamp has: The Amador County broker (http://activerain.com/blogs/mikepulskamp ) relies on Flickr not just for storing his photos, but also for previewing homes for his clients.  

"For the mild cost of under 30 dollars a year," he says, "I can give my clients dozens of pictures that they can look at, download, and share easily, all without sending huge e-mails that take forever to download or perhaps get filtered out because of their size." 
 

That capability is just the tip of the Flickr iceberg. Let's take a look at how to get started with the service and put it to work for you and your clients. 
 

Flickr Basics 
 

Start by signing up for an account (www.flickr.com ). Doing so won't cost you a cent, though keep in mind that free accounts limit you to 100 megabytes (MB) worth of uploads per month. If each digital photo you snap results in a 3-MB file (about what you get from a 5-megapixel camera), your account won't accommodate more than about 33 photos monthly. 
 

For most REALTORS®, that isn't nearly enough, which is why it's worth splurging on a Pro account ($24.95 per year). Benefits include unlimited uploads, unlimited storage, ad-free photo sharing, and so on. 
 

After you sign up, spend some time poking around Flickr. Search for terms like "real estate," "realtor," and "property listing," just to get a feel for how the service works and see what kinds of photos other users have posted.

Now it's time to upload some photos of your own. The fastest method is the Web-based interface, which lets you browse your hard drive and choose the desired photos. However, Windows and Mac users should consider installing Flickr Uploader, a simple utility that lets you drag and drop photos from your PC. 
 

Of course, both of these options require you to be sitting at your PC. If you're in a hurry or away from the office, you can add photos to your Flickr account via e-mail from another PC or even from your camera-phone. All you need is the special e-mail address Flickr created when you signed up (it?s listed in your account settings). Add it to your phone's address book so it's always at the ready, then snap your property photos, attach them to an e-mail, and send them off. Presto: They land in your Flickr account. 
 

Even better, you can configure Flickr so that photos sent from your camera-phone go straight to your blog. The service supports most popular blogging services, from Blogger to LiveJournal to WordPress. All you do is supply your blog's username and password, then perform a few additional set-up steps. Now, any photos e-mailed to your special Flickr-account address will automatically appear on your blog in the form of a new post. You can even elect to use the body of your e-mail as the text content for that post. 
 

REALTOR® Applications

Let's paint a real-world scenario: You head out to visit a just-listed property that you know will attract a lot of attention. You snap half a dozen photos on your Smartphone, and then e-mail them to your Flickr account (which in turn publishes them on your blog). The body of the e-mail contains a few bon mots about the property and the photographed features. In a matter of minutes, you've created a new blog post, complete with pictures and information. Not too shabby. 
 

If you want to add your photos to a blog or site not directly supported by Flickr, or you want to embed a slideshow rather than a single photo, take a cue from Pulskamp: He uses a free service called flickrSLiDR (www.flickrslidr.com ) to feed Flickr photos to his ActiveRain site. 
 

There are also steps you can take within Flickr proper to draw attention to your photos. For example, whenever you upload photos, you'll have the option of assigning "tags." These are simply descriptive keywords used to help organize photos and make them visible to searches. 
 

Suppose you just uploaded a batch of photos for a property in Half Moon Bay. One tag would be the name of the town, of course, but others might be "duplex," "landscaping," "beach," and so on. Flickr also encourages you to create photo "sets," which are simply collections of photos great for keeping individual property-listing snapshots separate and categorized. 
 

Cooler still, use Flickr's Map function to connect photos with a specific location like, say, St. Joseph Avenue in Half Moon Bay. 
 

Finally, you can use Flickr to connect with photographers who specialize in real-estate photography. They're part of a specialized Flickr group, the aptly named Photography for Real Estate (http://tinyurl.com/2qttc5 ). If you'd rather find someone else to shoot your properties, this is an excellent resource. 

Bits & Bytes 
 

Roost.com Migrates Leads to Brokerages 
 

How do birds find their way north in the spring? Intuition, of course, and that's how visitors to Roost.com navigate their way around this fledgling real estate search engine. 
 

From a consumer's standpoint, Roost.com is very intuitive to use. Visitors can simply select and adjust search parameters with a series of sliding scale controls and zoom in on new homes; with a few clicks, they can narrow in on school districts and more. 
 

Your brokerage, on the other hand, receives an IDX-compliant and co-branded site on the Roost platform. "We rotate local broker IDX sites," says Alex Chang, Roost CEO, "and send that traffic to the broker's core site." Brokerages can select the amount of traffic to the brokerage site on a monthly basis and convert the leads under the brokerage's own brand, Chang adds.

Roost has a presence in the San Diego, Sacramento, Central Coast, Orange County, and Silicon Valley markets.

Rick Broida is a freelance writer and a contributor to numerous outlets including Wired Magazine, CNET, Family PC, and Popular Science; he also is the author of How to Do Everything with Your Palm Powered Handheld, 6th Edition.