Recently I’ve written about why most Realtors don’t take enough photos, and the importance of an attractive front photo of your house when you go to sell it.

Inside Photos Matter Too

If the front image is the most important, the interior photos are the suporting cast. They need to be appealing, to keep a viewer’s attention and get them to place your house on their list of homes to go and see in person. This can be hard to do in houses that are occupied and full of life’s debris and in homes that are vacant and have white walls.

It’s  always a good idea to consider professionally staging the house you are selling. Since that is sometimes not an option, due to expense or other reasons, I’ve begun to suggest everyone stage homes just for the photos.  Move furniture out of rooms, add art, borrow furniture for empty spaces, buy flowers. However you do it, make your house look good in the photos. It’s often the only chance you have to make people want to see your house. And if they don’t see it you can’t sell it. 

It can take significant effort, but compare the following photos:

They are of bedrooms of about the same size, in homes on the same block, both listed for sale at the same time at similar prices. They even have the same carpet and baseboard and are nearly the same color. There are however, quite a few differences in the photos. How we did it is below, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is the effect. Which house would you be more likely to go and see?

It Takes Work and Skill to Get Great Photos

In the room photos above, one is staged using an air mattress on top of some cardboard boxes then dressed to appear a proper bed. One was likely taken with a point and shoot 35mm camera while the other used a DSLR camera with a wider angle lens. One is taken from eye level looking down and the other from near the floor, looking up and capturing more of the new carpet in the frame. Additionally, one is an HD image – which is a compilation of seven separate photos taken at different exposures to better balance the brightness of the windows with the darker room, the other doesn’t seem to have been refined with imaging software at all. Have I lost you? Put it this way, there is a lot more time and effort in one of the photos, and it comes through.

We spend time and money to capture great images to sell houses. Here is some of the equipment we used for a recent photo shoot:

We don’t always take two cars of props to a house for photographs, but we do always work to get photos that show off the best features of the home for sale. We always return to a home more than once for photos. The front yard may photograph best in the morning, but the back yard may need to be shot in the afternoon to have the sunlight at its best effect. We may not have a blue sky on our first day of shooting. We may get back to our office with hundreds of photos only to realize the best shot of the kitchen is from a slightly different angle than we captured initially. We think it through and make sure we get the best possible photos because we want your house to sell almost as much as you do.

Want this Kind of Realtor Working for You?

If you don’t need assistance to get great photos, get them in front of buyers and get your house sold, great. But if you don’t have the time, the skill set, or the cameras and software to do it yourself, make sure the people you hire to assist you do the job well. 

If you are in the South Bend – Mishawaka – Granger Area and want this kind of effort put into marketing your home, pick up the phone ( 574-217-4770) or send an e-mail (nick@realst8.com). We’d be pleased to meet with you and see if we can help you. Here’s more on how we help you sell your house.

 

 

Recently, I wrote about how most Realtors around South Bend don’t max out their chances of making a positive impression on home buyers based simply on the number of images they use to market the home (original article here). That’s bad enough, but the situation is even more dire when you look at the quality of the images.

Here are a few photos of homes for sale now in our mls:

Do They Make You Want to See More? Me Neither.

The front outside shot, looking at the home from the street, is the single most important image for selling a home. If you had to have just one good picture, this should be it. That’s because it is the only picture most people will see, at thumbnail size, and they will base their decision to spend more time on your house or to move to the next property on that photo. And in most cases they will do so in a fraction of a second. 

It can be difficult to get an enticing image of the face of some homes, but it is worth the effort. If this isn’t a good picture, the rest of your pictures probably won’t even be seen. Think how you search for a house for sale:

1. You punch in criteria like price and number of bedrooms and get a list of results. 
2. You click through them, pausing on the most interesting and attractive to see it on a map or see the rest of the photos. 
3. Those that still look good upon this second look get flagged for a visit and further scrutiny.

If you’re front photo isn’t good, you lose the buyers before you even have a shot at them.  So you need a good lead photo.

You can’t take a picture better than the house, but you can take one that is worse. Look at these four photos of the same house, at roughly the size most people would see them online:

 

Can you guess which one sold the house? 

Photographs matter. Especially the front, outside photo. If you are selling a house by yourself, hire a photographer if you can’t take a high-qaulity photo. If you’re working with another Realtor, look at the images they are using and make sure they’d make you want to buy the house. If you want help selling your house from Realtors who thoughtfully and actively market your home, start here.

Quick, choose the house you want to see

How about these

Photos Sell Houses

The photos above are displayed at about the size most people will see them on their computers as they scan through dozens of homes for sale looking for the ones they want to get into a car and see. They will get a quick glance and if they aren’t appealing, they’ll be forgotten.

It’s a simple truth that photos sell houses. They don’t do all the work, but they run the first lap in the relay from listing to closing. If your photos don’t draw people in, your house won’t sell unless you price it aggressively enough that investors, who buy on logic, like the numbers. The numbers that serious investors like are usually low enough to make sellers gasp. So it makes sense to take time to create attractive images of your home and place them in the places where home buyers look – on real estate web-sites and on flyers available in front of the house.

Most Homes For Sale Don’t Have Enough Photos Online

Simple, right? Apparently not. The “MLS” is the primary database of homes for sale in our area. Here it is officially called The Greater South Bend-Mishawaka MLS. It is the source from which most real estate web-sites draw their home information and photos. When you search on RE/MAX, Realtor.com or even Realst8.com, you are seeing MLS information.  Our MLS currently allows 8 photos of any property for sale. That’s a pretty low number of chances to get homebuyers interested in the house you want to sell and you might expect everyone selling a house would carefully choose the eight best pictures to sell their house. But you’d be wrong.

This morning there are 2,389 residential properties for sale in our MLS. 670 of them don’t have the maximum eight images. 209 of these houses people want to sell have no photos or just a single image. That’s right, almost 9% of the houses for sale don’t have any interior photo in the MLS. Not even one of poor quality. 

Virtual Tours and Web-sites for Just One House

Even the maximum eight photos allowed often aren’t enough to show buyers enough of a house for them to decide if it’s worth their time to see. And it’s almost never enough to highlight the best features of a home. The workaround for this photo limit is to link to a web-site with more pictures. The Realtor-speak for these web- sites is “virtual tour” or “single property web-site.” Virtual tours are quick slideshows of a property ( sample ). Single property web-sites are web-sites just for the house for sale – for example http://5309Larkspur.com is a web-site about, you guessed it, the house at 5309 Larkspur in South Bend.

These links to more photos are included with the listing as it is e-mailed and reposted on real estate web-sites like Realtor.com. They don’t have restrictions, so you can display dozens or hundreds of photos, floorplans and other information to homebuyers just when they want to see them.

That makes it both surprising and tragic that only 624 of the homes for sale in our MLS this morning have such a link to a web-site or virtual tour with more photos. That’s just over one in four. 

And to the best of my knowledge, realst8.com is the only real estate team in the area using single property web-sites. These sites are more expensive to create and host than virtual tours, but they are more focused and more flexable. We can include seller’s disclosures, printable flyers, area information and other things that don’t fit into virtual tours. They also stick in the mind. The address is the web-site, so home buyers can remember it, and know that when they go to the site, their will be information about the house, not about the Realtor trying to sell it.

We want to show buyers pictures of the house they want to see fast, before we lose them to the next house. If they wanted to read about us, they’d be on this site.

Want to Work With Realtors That Do More? 

Phone 574-217-4770 ,
e-mail nick@realst8.com ,
or read more about us and by us .