Listing Pictures: Are they helping or hurting your sales?

My wife and I recently purchased our first home and I was the one who brokered the deal. It was a unique experience because it allowed me to enter the mind of a buyer and see how they feel and what they go through emotionally during the home buying process. It allowed me to further understand their thought process when making decisions to see homes as opposed to just being the Realtor doing the deal. Using this vantage point, there were a number of things I noticed that I felt could help me as an agent especially when listing a home. The biggest factor that stuck out to me was the number of listings I viewed that did not have adequate amount of pictures and or lacked quality.

There were a lot of listings that had only a few photos if that and they were of the outside of the property. There were no photos of the inside at all. This immediately raised a red flag and I thought about what they might be trying not to disclose or show. Almost all of these I immediately ruled out going to see and I bet other buyers would feel the same. The more pictures, the more inclined I was to set up a showing if the property fit our initial criteria.

There were other listings that included pictures of the inside where clearly the agent was in a rush or didn’t care about the quality of pictures to market the property properly. There were pictures of trash in the kitchen, toilet seats up, clutter everywhere in some rooms and some with terrible lighting and or the pictures were sideways. If you’re the listing agent on these, you are doing a huge disservice to your client by not taking the job seriously. Why even take the listing if you’re going to half ass it? If I was selling my house and my agent did this. I’d fire them immediately. I threw these properties out of contention as well and it left a bad enough impression of the property in my mind where I didn’t want to give it a second look. Even if they weren’t professionally done, if it looked like some time and effort was put in, the greater chance there was for us to go see it.

If you’re a buyer, the pictures online will quickly tell you whether you’re interested or not and if it makes the list of properties that you’re going to view with your agent. If you’re the listing agent, it’s your chance to make that first impression great in order to start getting foot traffic. From my wife and I’s experience, if buyers don’t like the pictures, the likelihood of them setting up a showing decreases dramatically. The thing is, you don’t even need a fancy camera. If you have an iPhone or another kind of smart phone, it has all the features you need to take higher quality pictures. Here are my takeaways that contributed to to our decision of what houses to view. This may help you as well with your listings to get more buyers coming through the door. Explain this to your clients so they understand how important it is.

• Take plenty of pictures, the more the better. I would try and post at least 10 pictures altogether of the property inside and out online but take a lot so you have options to choose. There’s a good chance some of the pictures won’t come out as well.
• Use your iPhone or camera if you have one to take higher quality pictures. Make sure the area is clean of clutter and toilet seats are down(I’ve seen this way too many times). When taking the pictures, hold the phone steady and wait for it to come into focus. Use the HDR function. This seems to make a difference from what I can tell so far in my pictures.
• Provide a description for each picture so buyers know which room they’re looking at
• Don’t use older pictures. I’ve gone into homes after viewing the pictures and the property looked nothing like them and it told me the agent was LAZY and didn’t want to take the time to go out to the property to take new ones. By doing this, you're misrepresenting the property and you could get fined by your local MLS as well if you get caught.

Feel free to comment with your thoughts and or any experiences you’ve had with listing pictures.