Is Your Front Exterior Listing Photo a "Money Shot?"

When you put it altogether even a modest home can look inviting without misrepresenting the appearance of the home. Above is an example, with a listing agent's photo on the left, and our re-shoot on the right.Unless the only good photos a house can offer you are on the inside, it’s essential to get an outstanding front exterior photo. That's the picture that must stop the online home-shopper in their tracks. It should make them want to see what the inside photos look like. If the outside shot fails to "zing" them, they will pass your listing by in two seconds or less.

Therefore, it is worth extra time, extra effort, and (if you choose to use a professional photographer) extra marketing investment to make this a true “money shot.” It’s the one picture that can save – or lose – weeks of marketing time and possibly many thousands of dollars at closing.

Here are a few tips to help you understand the range of possibilities for making your “money shot” stand out from the competition.

• Prepare the property properly for photography. I will post a list of do’s and don’ts in my next blog entry.
• Use the right equipment. Cheap point-and-shoot digital cameras are fine, but not if you want to produce good listing photos. I’ll be discussing the minimum gear, so stay tuned.
• Eliminate or downplay distractions. Many listing photos are “almost good,” but the photographer allows a significant blemish to remain in the image, to the great detriment of the result. In future posts I’ll provide examples and pointers on how to work around these problems.
• Try different camera positions to find the most pleasing composition. It’s amazing how much better a listing photo can be made just by standing somewhere other than in the most obvious camera position, and possibly lowering or raising the camera a couple of feet. 
• Consider alternatives to the basic head-on primary shot. Sometimes the side or rear view of the home is better than the front. I’ve shot homes where the side was the front, if you consider the “front” to be the side of the house where the front door is located. In that instance the “side” faced the street, and offered a very drab photo opportunity.
• Make sure the light is adequate for photography. Unless you are a master of high dynamic range photography and have the equipment and software to employ it, you will need to have either good available light or you will need to use flash photography to expose the photos properly. At our firm we tend to use flash very little, preferring HDR for its superior quality.
• Shoot the house in optimal light. If you show up to the property at the wrong time of day then you may find the front of the house in dark shadow, which can be a problem to shoot. Worse, you might get there when the late afternoon sun is shining straight into your viewfinder, making proper exposures impossible. Similar problems can arise with interior shots: bright outside light typically causes windows to appear like glowing white blank screens, and the rooms themselves end up too dark. These situations call for either better timing, when light is balanced, or lighting manipulation. 

It’s alright to fool Mother Nature, up to a point. Listing photos should always present an honest view of the subject property’s features, size, condition and other physical attributes. But it’s OK to take small liberties to make photos look better, when such liberties do not misrepresent the real estate itself. For example, it is fairly common to replace boring gray or flat blue skies with more photogenic ones. Lawns with a tinge of brown might be greened-up a bit, reflecting the effect of a few days of actual watering.

When you put it altogether even a modest home can look inviting without misrepresenting the appearance of the home.