In this day and age, even before the pandemic hit and forced most of us to stay in our own bubbles as much as possible, 95% of home buyers use the internet to conduct their home search. Even people who have a trusted REALTOR®, exchange listings with their agents via the internet.
In the old days of real estate, books of listings (that only agents had access to!) catalogued the most basic data of the house: bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, price, and in later years, if you were super lucky, one photo of the outside of the home.
With the proliferation of the internet, real estate listings didn’t just cut-and-paste to cyberspace in their most basic form, but completely expanded! Now, when you click on a real estate listing, it is a one stop shop: measurements of every room, lot size, taxes, school districts, features and amenities, year built, type of foundation…etc., etc., etc. Online listings are a minefield of information.
Yet the most important information, the high value information that most people go straight for…like moths to a flame…are the photographs of the interior and exterior of the home itself.
Photographs are the main event. According to studies, 98% of homebuyers decide if they will tour a property in-person based on first viewing the online listing photos. Photographs are what will make buyers come back to your online listing numerous times before they reach out to their agent to schedule an in-person showing. Even though it is the in-person showings that will ultimately generate offers, good photographs are the vehicle for making those showings happen.
Remember our last blog entry when we outlined the importance of staging? Proper staging goes hand-in-hand with high quality photographs. If you spend all that time and energy staging your home before listing it, only proper photography will capture the essence and scope of your space that levels-up your home on the internet. Even if you pour $10,000 of your own money getting your house market ready, without proper photographs, you are squandering that investment.
At F.C. Tucker Emge REALTORS® all of our agents understand the importance of high quality photographs and believe in it so much, they themselves will bear the expense. These images help their sellers sell and their buyers buy and can be a differentiating factor in making your house stand out against competitors. Think of ALL the other products that are being marketed across various platforms these days. A shirt is not just a shirt: if a $10 shirt is photographed well, it can look like a $30 shirt. If a $30 shirt is photographed poorly, it might look like a $10 shirt. So what is the better strategy? No one will care how your home is priced if the pictures don’t do it justice: you want the pictures to justify the asking price and get people in the door.
If we’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: better staging leads to better photographs; better photographs make for more hits online, which converts to more showings in-person and leads to more offers sooner. This chain of events means you are more likely to sell your house with minimum days on the market and closer to asking price so that you can move on to your next project.
Not only do legitimate photographers have excellent equipment to capture the best possible shots with their fancy lenses and variable shutter speeds, but good real estate photographers know how to capture the best angles of a room as well as how to employ lighting tricks to accentuate the most important assets of your home. They also know what not to take pictures of: like making sure that the toilet bowl brush or nasty sponge gets moved out of the way before they click. Our agents have lots of additional photography tricks up their sleeves to help their listing clients get their home ready for a successful photo shoot. While some of our agents at F.C. Tucker Emge REALTORS® are themselves highly skilled in capturing great photos of your home, many rely on a list of professional photographers they pay themselves to get the job done, at no additional cost to you.
Additionally, good real estate pictures usually call for a little bit of editing, from cropping the shots to changing the shading. A designated professional has the time and knowledge to edit correctly and efficiently to get your listing ready to go as soon as possible.
Exceptional photography is imperative to the initial presentation of your home to the market. After staging is complete, high quality professional photos will give potential buyers an enticing peek into your masterpiece. No matter what price point your home is in, high-quality photos are a must for getting it SOLD.
PS: If you want some funny examples of home photography that fails, may we recommend these sites?
https://terriblerealestateagentphotos.com/
https://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelwmiller/these-photos-show-just-how-much-real-estate-photography-matt
