Here’s the truth: most dealerships believe that using a photography vendor is way more expensive than doing the work in-house. We know this because we’ve worked with hundreds of dealerships nationwide in our 15+ years of experience. But the reality is, using a reputable lot services vendor to handle your inventory photography actually saves you money – it just might not seem that way on the surface.

Generally speaking, convenience and control make sense to a dealership. When you have an in-house person responsible for taking your inventory photos, it can seem a better option because you don’t have to worry about a vendor’s schedule, or the particular type of photos they tend to take. But when you factor in the logistics of having just one or two people fully in charge of getting your inventory online, there can be unforeseen challenges.

For example, consider the time it takes to properly train – and retrain, if someone changes roles – one person to be an expert on how to take photographs that market your vehicles well online. With turnover being a constant issue in the industry, this can significantly add to the time and financial cost of handling photos in-house. Also consider the time it takes to post a job listing, interview, hire and train someone to the level of your current photographer.

That’s not considering the management time to keep this person on track and on time, the hours needed to double-check their photo quality periodically, or managing their pacing and speed. What’s more, every employee takes a sick day here and there, or has a pre-planned vacation. Seems simple enough to handle, but here are a number of things to think about when it comes to having one dedicated person handling your photos:

• What happens if your photographer takes 2-3 days off, and no photos of your cars are taken in that time? 
• If your in-house photographer left today, with no notice, who would take your photos tomorrow? 
• What kind of time and resources are involved in hiring a new person to take over for your current photographer? 
• How much do you think your leads would go down if you had no cars photographed for two weeks?
• What would that decrease in leads mean for sales?

All of these considerations are important, because they can have a significant impact on your ability to be seen, and to generate traffic and revenue on the lot and on your site. With all these things in mind, consider the benefits of a photography vendor with over 15 years of experience servicing over 1000 dealerships. In today’s sales environment time to market is everything, and even a one-to-two week “hiccup” could cost your dealership tens of thousands of dollars in profit. Redline takes great pride in working with you to seamlessly and reliably get your cars online fast and looking great.

The right vendor can solve every one of these problems with ease, making your job simpler and more effective. A good photography vendor will have multiple people ready to take over the responsibility of taking photos at your dealership at any time, so things like turnover, vacation time, sick days, and many other factors are non-issues for dealers.

There’s also no need to spend time interviewing, hiring, or training the photographer – at Redline, for example, we have over 100 training steps our photographers go through prior to heading to any dealership, meaning they are experts before they take their first photo of your inventory. There’s no need for continuous QA on your part, because you’ll know if our photos meet our standards, they will certainly meet yours.