How to Take Awesome Pictures of Your Properties

Images are integral to the success of your property advertisements. Whether you’re listing online or forwarding an informational packet to an interested investor, there’s no doubt you’ll include photographs as part of the overview. Photos can compel someone to trust your listing, request more info or even move to purchase. If you’re not focusing on the type and quality of your property photos, you’re missing out on a key selling factor.
Photos tell a big part of the story about your property. My company has had many of our turnkey properties earn higher-than-market rents and we attribute much of that to our professional quality photos. Here’s what you need to pay attention to when you take property photos.

Make Sure Everything is Well-Lit

Poor lighting can make all your photos come out with an ugly yellowish hue. Dim lighting can also result in blurry images. Strive to take all your photos during a sunny day. If the property is naturally kind of dark inside, you might have to bring your own portable lighting. You can get an inexpensive tripod of high intensity lights at Home Depot. You only need one. Just bring it around to each room as you take the photos.

Don’t Close Blinds or Curtains

Closed blinds are worse than showing a view outside a window that’s less than ideal. Even if the view is the red brick façade of a building that’s six inches away, that’s better than closed blinds. There could be anything behind closed blinds, and it will make your prospect’s imagination wild imagination take over thinking about what might be behind them. If the view is truly awful, what you can do is some light editing. Just blur out the window view so it’s unclear what exactly is out there.

Capture Interesting Details

If the property has some unique or cool details like an arched doorway or a built-in pantry, capture those details in their own photograph. Don’t just try to include them in a general photograph of the room. In other words, don’t expect your prospects to spot the gorgeous antique fireplace in the corner of the living room; take a special picture of the fireplace all by itself and a second image of the entire general living room.

Don’t Take Pictures of Corners

So many listings contain corner pictures. For some reason, owners feel like they want to photograph as much of a room as possible, and they end up with picture after picture of corners, usually facing downward to get the flooring. Images like these are just bad pictures and should always be avoided.

Don’t Use Fish Eye or Other Weird Filters

Even professional real estate agents get this one wrong. Again, trying to get the entire room into one shot, they’ll use the fish eye filter. This distorts the dimensions of the room and makes it very hard for prospects to get a sense of the actual size of the rooms. It’s not a good selling strategy to use. Keep your listing images as realistic-looking as possible and save the filters for your artistic endeavors.

Skip the Gratuitous Beauty Pictures

Too many owners try to fill up their listing’s image allotment with pretty pictures of surrounding areas. Skip taking pictures of the blossoming Hydrangea bushes, the nearby golf club or the close-up of the gecko you were able to capture on the side of the house. These images won’t help to sell or rent your property. What they will do is force your prospects to start clicking faster through your images so they can get to the “real” ones, in which case you risk them missing out on actual photos that matter.

Don’t List Too Many Photos

Speaking of image allotment, you really don’t want to list too many photos. If you give it all away with the photos—which never give a property justice—your prospects may feel they’ve seen everything there is to see. They may be less inclined to schedule an actual in-person viewing. Instead, take as many photos as you need to give a general sense of the property, along with some juicy details, but leave some things out. Don’t show every single possible angle of the kitchen or living room, for example. Just give enough to entice the prospect to want to see the property for themselves.

Take Great Before and After Shots

This last tip is the best one. Investors are always worried that the property hasn’t been rehabbed. In a recent Facebook poll, that was the number one fear that investors had. You can allay these fears and show off your best rehab work by taking great before and after shots. Here’s how:

Come up with a set of standard shots. Before the rehab, get all the “before” shots, but make sure that you or the photographer (your real estate agent or other boots on the ground team member) is standing in a certain spot. For the “after” shots, make sure they are standing in the exact same spot, taking photos at the same angle. This makes the before and after images very easy for your prospects to follow, like an “apples to apples” comparison. If you do a lot of rehabs and you want to make it super easy to take before and after shots, you can do a very rough floor plan sketch for the property, mark Xes where you want the photographer to stand and arrows where you want them to point the camera. Then when it’s time to do the after images, they just follow the same blueprint.

Finally, you don’t need a DSLR camera to take listing photos, although it’s always good to have nice equipment when you know how to use it. But you can still get great shots with your cell phone these days. Just be sure you know how to get clear shots with whatever camera you’re using. Use these tips to maximize the selling potential of your listing photos.