This may be a bit of a departure from the typical post here at at Geek Estate. Sure, most of the time we’re talking about things like marketing, web hosting, IDX, syndication, how the internet affects real estate agents, CRM, mobile apps, etc.  So what am I doing here posting about printing? Isn’t print dead?

Well, perhaps in some ways, yes, but in others it’s alive and well. Take property flyers. We can adorn our yard signs with single-property website URLs and QR codes to our heart’s content, but many buyers out there still want that take-away. Yep, the paper property flyer. And our sellers expect them, too. So as much as we’d like the whole process to be as paperless as possible, those flyers aren’t going away any time soon.

So, what’s the best way to handle the production of those flyers? Some agents are fortunate enough to have a lender who offers to print flyers for them. But for various reasons, that may not be practical for everyone. In that case, do you print them in your home office with your own printer, or do you pay to have them printed? And how do you know which is more cost-effective?

The answer to that is not quite as simple as it might sound. Sure, there are a number of websites which will provide cost-per-print estimates of various printers available on the market. But are those estimates based on realistic assumptions? If have found that they are not.

Any time you see cost estimates for printers, or yield estimates for ink or toner cartridges, those estimates are typically based on 5% in coverage. This means 5% of the page is covered with ink or toner. You may be surprised to find out what 5% coverage looks like. I don’t know about your flyers, but ours certainly have greater coverage than that! Of course, our flyers are full of large photos, and oh, they’re in color. The color complicates the issue even more. Cost estimates for 4-color printers are typically based on 20% coverage, but that’s not practical, either. Even if one filled the entire page with only text, that constitutes 30% coverage. Large blocks of color photos surely escalate the coverage exponentially.

And here’s what the printer salesman may not tell you.  On a color printer, full coverage is not 100%, it’s 400%. You’re dealing with 4 color cartridges, CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key/Black), so you have the potential to fill the entire page with each of them. So how does one know how much ink coverage is represented in one of their real estate property flyers?

Ink CoverageFortunately there are online tools and other software which can calculate that for you. The one I like is printcalc. Upload a PDF of your flyer and they’ll calculate your ink coverage. You may be surprised at the results … I know I was. On the left is the results of a flyer that I uploaded. Wowsers! Over 175% ink coverage? Yep.

So if your printer specs say your cost per color print at 20% coverage is, say 13 cents per page, your actual cost would be more like $1.14 per page!  (175% is 8.75 times higher coverage than 20%, so 13 cents times 8.75 is $1.14.) That’s not perfectly accurate, because some of the cost is the paper and some may be life-limited parts like drums, but it gives you a good idea.

So, if your local UPS Store or FedEx/Kinkos charges 25 cents per page to print your flyers, jump on it! The next question is, if it costs so much to print color flyers, why are they charging so little? Good question. I have two theories on the subject: (1) they want simplified pricing and they assume most print jobs will have significantly less ink coverage than our color photo flyers, and/or (2) the printing is a loss-leader to get us into the store where they hope to sell us other services.

I think the bottom line is, it’s still great to have a color printer in the home office for when you need those flyers ASAP. But it certainly pays to have them printed elsewhere, if you have the time.