If a Picture is Worth a 1,000 Words Today’s Real Estate Listings Have a Couple Million Words to Tell You ! By, Jim Clifford

The “Good” Ole Days in Real Estate

When I started in real estate we used either Polaroid photos or took our 35 millimeter film to Walmart or local one day photo development store and paid about a $1 per photo to get developed. You took one or two photos of each room because it was too expensive to take more. Professional photography was super expensive, slow and hard to find. Without photos to look at, it took buyers a lot longer to find the “right” home. Buyers had to drive around and look at homes “in person” rather than how homes are sold today. Now you have the ability to see hundreds of homes usually with 10 to 30 photos plus video and aerial photos and videos.

Today, Photos are Readily Available

Today it is not if you are getting photography of home completed it is how many photos and videos to have done. According to article in Inman News https://www.inman.com/next/8-tips-for-taking-real-estate-listing-photos-that-wow/ it is important to take pictures of what really counts. In other words what are the important selling features of a home and making sure they are prominent in the photos. A Newamerican funding blog explains the importance of photos in listings https://www.newamericanfunding.com/blog/how-important-are-photos-when-selling-your-home/ by stating the statistics of how buyers use websites and photos to determine what homes they want to look at. Over 88% of buyers start by looking at photos online and 90% plus of buyers say they looked at photos of the home they purchased online.

So if photos are so important there are two questions to ask. First, why do many listing have really poor quality photos? Second why are photos of homes taken when the home is not ready for photography? HGTV has article about getting a home ready to be photographed correctly. https://www.hgtv.com/design/real-estate/take-better-real-estate-photos It says to start with decent camera, not your cell phone, stage your home, light it with as much natural lighting as possible but get good lighting, and choose best angles and composition.

Making your home look its best!

Since the year 2000 I have taken over 25,000 photos of homes using digital cameras. While my first few years of taking photos was more of a hit or miss, now it is much easier to visualize what the photo will look like before it is snapped. Understanding back lighting, seeing angles and views, understanding shadows and over exposure of light all makes sense now. Still, I will defer to a professional photographer that knows how to get the best out of each set of photos for a home. As one client said after we had photos online for her to view, she never realized how beautiful her home really was.