Real Estate Photos

Selling a home in this day and age requires a few extra steps in the digital world. Customers are looking online for listings more than ever. And they decide based on the photography on the listing to decide if they want to look at the home before ever leaving the computer. This is when the listing’s photography really needs to stand out. This can mean a home sells faster and for more money!

“As The Wall Street Journal reports today, “listings with nicer photos gain anywhere between $934 and $116,076.” The graph clearly shows that you are likely to receive thousands more if you list your home using DSLR photography than if you used a simple point-n-shoot camera to take the photos yourself… Given this obvious upside, it is shocking that only 15.4% of homes in our data set were marketed using professional photography. The majority of listings, 80.9%, were photographed using point-n-shoot photography, and still another 0.7% used just a camera phone. Let’s not mince words: If you are not using professional photography to market your home, you are not really marketing your home.” -source

As a Professional photographer, I will arrive on scene with the necessary equipment to make your home shine. Proper lighting and lenses allow for the best shots possible. Better, more accurate colors, wide angle lenses to make rooms appear at their largest and thus more appealing, and high resolution cameras to allow you possibility of high resolution printing, or large clear images by email or online.

• Price and location are the most important factors in selling a home. If the home is priced too high or in a location no one wants to live in, awesome photos make little difference. Price is a key issue in todays down market. Home sellers having a hard time wrapping there mind around how much their home has dropped in value the last couple of years. Getting home sellers to price their home at market value is a big struggle for some agents. Once a home is priced near market value and there are a bunch of other homes in the same price range and location, the importance of photography kicks in big time.
• Now days 90% or more of home buyers use the Internet start their home search and they are faced with deciding which of all the hundreds of available homes they are going to go look at. Home searchers are faced with choosing which homes to physically go see and photographs play a major part. Any one can appreciate this by simply going to any real estate website and pretend they are looking for a home. As of right now if I go to zillow.com (zillow is not unlike most home search sites) and do a home search there are 163 homes within a couple of miles of where I live between $200k and $300k and I live in a small town (just below 350,000).
• As I browse through these 163 homes the initial selection must be by a handful of facts like year built, number of bedrooms and a small thumbnail photo of the front of the home. The importance of this thumbnail are unmistakable! A compelling thumbnail is like the bright flashy piece of metal on a fishing lure. It attracts home searchers attention to look at the listing details.
• Once you click on the thumbnail to get more detail the importance of the photos increases. The text descriptions in listing details are legendary for their sparseness. One agent or home owner in a thousand will take the time to write good compelling marketing copy so photos pretty much take over the home searcher’s attention, even if the photos are awful. It is easy to see that good photos give the home seller a distinct advantage in the selection criteria. Even though Zillow allows an unlimited number of photos very few homes have over 20. I believe 15 to 20 photos gives a listing a clear advantage over one with less.
• Why are “good” photos more effective than “bad” ones? Because at this time in history even a 65 year old person has grown up with TV and magazine advertising that uses strong compelling images. Even though most people can’t tell you what makes a strong image, they know one when they see it. Strong images work at an intuitive, emotional level. You don’t need to understand how the image works to see and feel it’s strength. Strong compelling image can be created for exteriors and interiors of homes just like other subjects!
• The end result of this online search process is getting on the home searcher’s short list of homes they want to see in person. A home will never sell if no one physically comes to see it and it’s easy to see from the steps above that photos play a key role in getting home searchers to come look at a home and thus selling it. – source

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