Consider Alternative Camera Angles For Your Listing Photos

Most listing photos feature the front exterior of the home as the primary photo, and 95% of the time this photo is composed in exactly the same, predictable way. The photographer stands across the street (or in the middle of the street) and takes a straight-on, shoulder-high view of the home.

If the photographer happens to be the listing agent, they might be missing an opportunity to get more attention for their listing by not considering alternative camera angles for the all-important front exterior shot. The traditional front-on viewpoint tends to makes the subject property more like all the others. This effect is evident when browsing through online real estate listings. The small images presented on real estate web sites leave little opportunity for standing out, but there is some room.

Remember, real estate agents are not just contract negotiators. If they are taking listing photos, they are doing an important part of their own marketing, and they should be expected to think creatively about how to present their product in its best light.

Here are a several examples illustrating how non-traditional camera angles help the primary listing photo stand out and look more appealing than the standard shot.

First, here's a house that's sideways, and the listing photo takes that at face value and presents the side of the house as if it were the front of the house:

The image above shows the actual street view of the property. Maybe the agent felt that there is some rule that the street view must be the primary (and in this case, the only) listing photo. That's a pity. Even though it's a rather unimpressive house, it looks better from another angle. See the photo we shot of this same house, below.

A wide angle lens and an alternative camera angle were the keys to making this look like a potentially appealing house. Instead of taking a straight-on shot, we stood on the sidewalk at the right corner of the lot. We got down low to reduce the amount of pavement in the picture. You'll see two doors in our shot. The one toward the rear is actually a masonry-framed front entrance to the home. So the right elevation in our photo turns out to be the front of the house, and the left elevation, which was presented as the primary photo by the agent, is visible in our image but is no longer the whole story.

Next, I'm going to pick on a listing photo that I've previously held up as an example of poor real estate photography, this time focusing on the camera angle. Never mind the fact that the agent's photo has a deep blue cast.

Here's the agent's listing photo. Keep in mind that this home is being offered for nearly $1 million, by an agent working for one of the major real estate firms.

The agent's photo was taken from across the street. Although cropping would have helped the composition, the narrow-angle lens that the listing agent used required standing fairly far back to get the whole house in the picture.

We re-shot the house with a wide angle lens, enabling us to get in closer. But there's more. Take a look at the result below and see if you can figure out what else we did differently.

In our photo, we stood at the front gate that is visible in the agent's photo. The low fence in the front of the house was blocking the view of the front yard's landscaping.

Our solution was to not only stand where the landscaping could be seen by the camera, but also to elevate the camera to a height of about ten feet above the ground. The effect is to give even more prominence to the lawn, helping to offset the monolithic front elevation of the home, and warming up the photo. The overall composition contains less sky, more house, no pavement and attractive greenery.

By the way, we did not need to use an expensive elevated camera rig to get this shot. We just held the camera tripod up at arm's length and took a few shots using the automatic timer to trigger the shutter. Very low-tech, but it worked.

So, getting in closer and raising the camera up is another way to change the camera perspective and obtain a more pleasing picture.

In this third and final example, we'll see how the listing agent's photo missed out an a terrific opportunity to use a corner lot to great advantage.

Here's the agent's listing photo:

This is the typical, blah, straight-on shot. If you add up all the space given to the features of least interest to potential buyers, (street, sidewalk, driveway, garage) they add up to nearly half the picture area.
The quirky topiary landscaping might be considered a dated feature by younger home buyers looking for homes in this price range. The untended mow-strip in the right foreground is a definite turn-off. You'd never know from this photo that the home is situated on a corner lot with lush, park-like landscaping on the right.

We usually try to avoid straight-on camera angles because, as seen above, they are cliche and do not distinguish the subject from its competition.

With great delight we chose a camera position located on the sidewalk at the lot's corner. We lowered the camera to about two feet above ground, framing the house in the more colorful landscaping that is out of view in the listing agent's photo:

In our photo, the house now says "Look at me, surrounded by my lush landscaping!" The front door is still visible, but the garage is no longer prominent, and there is virtually no pavement. Same property, but now it looks like it's in a park.

Is this lying? No, it's just packaging. The agent could still include the standard frontal view in the set of listing photos that end up on the MLS, but this photo will generate many more clicks than the agent's sterile, unimaginative photo.

To summarize, the quality, distinctiveness and effectiveness of listing photos can be greatly improved just by thinking carefully about where to stand and how high to hold the camera before you click the shutter release.

Do-It-Yourself vs. Professional Real Estate Photography

"Increasingly, agents and sellers are turning to professional photographers
to do what they themselves cannot: Take those jaw-dropping glamour shots
even when the home isn’t a mansion or an architectural gem."
[SOURCE: LA Times]

Which of these two Big Macs would you rather eat?


I admit it. I’m biased toward professional real estate photography, since I take photos of homes for a living. But if you’ve spent any time looking at online home listings I think you’ll have to agree, amateurish photos of homes can be quite a turn-off. Amazingly, even high-priced homes often are presented as if they are the result of a “drive-by shooting.”

For example, here’s a home located in my local market. It’s listed at nearly $1 million.


No pro photo, this one. Do you like the lovely blue tint? How about the time stamp that shows it was taken in May (it’s now September and the property still hasn’t sold, but the same photo is still being used to market the property).

I drove by the home with my partner and we decided to re-shoot it just for kicks. It took us about five minutes:



Our improved photo is not presented as a boast, just an illustration of how much better a million-dollar home can be presented with knowledgeable use of a camera. No blue cast, we’re in closer instead of across the street, we’re up higher so we can see over the fence and can appreciate the landscaping, the details of the entryway, etc.

Good Listing Photos Sell

My point is simply this: presentation matters. People connect emotionally to pictures, so whether one is selling Big Macs or homes, pictures can either help or hinder that connection.

Based on what I’ve seen and what many real estate agents have told me in recent months, most real estate listing photos are taken by the listing agents themselves, or sometimes by a staff person who provides marketing support to a team of agents. Listing photos are even taken by the companies that put out the “for sale” signs on the lawns. That tells me something about the perceived importance of the photos, at least when the homes are not mansions. Professional photography seems to be reserved for luxury homes.

As a professional real estate photographer, I’m always interested to know the reasoning behind this phenomenon. The majority of opinions among real estate agents seem to break down as follows:

Professional photography is not considered to be worth the expense unless the home price is over $1 million.

1. My sellers generally don’t want to pay for pro photography and I don’t either, unless I have to.
2. (This seems to say “I don’t see the value.”)
3. My photos are good enough – I don’t need to hire a pro.
   

Lets examine these ideas.

Is pro photography worth the expense?

First of all, let’s quantify the expense. Most professional real estate photographers charge somewhere between $200 and $350 for a set of photos that can be used for the MLS, flyers, virtual tours, and so on. At our firm, we currently charge $200 for a ten room house, and a little more for larger homes with more rooms. It takes us about three to four hours to do an assignment, including photography, photo editing and travel time. That works out to somewhere between $50 and $67 per hour in compensation.

Is this expense worth it? It all depends on one’s options. From the point of view of the listing agent, if they are a good photographer, with good equipment, and can take good photos, then they can simply compare the cost of their time against that of a professional. Successful agents who highly value their time may conclude that it’s cheaper to hire a pro. Low-producing agents will conclude the opposite, but then most low-producers are not good real estate photographers, it seems.

Problem is, many (if not most) real estate agents are not good photographers, so just comparing the time they would spend vs. the money is not necessarily valid.Are any real estate agents good photographers? I believe some are, but it’s hard to tell because good photos are not signed by the photographer. However, any time spent browsing through real estate listing web sites will quickly convince you that most real estate agents are not good photographers. About one-third of the photos are good, one third are fair, and one third are either poor or entirely absent.

Of the good photos, most depict upper-end homes, so many of those are probably shot by pros or talented in-house staffers.

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the leading real estate firms is Pacific Union. They tend to specialize in the luxury home market. They require each of the sellers they represent to agree to professional real estate photography services as a condition of the listing.
At the other end of the spectrum, many real estate companies seem to care little or not at all if their agents depict client properties poorly in their online marketing. (See BadListingPhotos.com). What we see in the “fair” to “poor” categories of listing photos runs the gamut from little to no preparation of the home itself for photography to amateurish handling of the camera. Not to mention inattention to editing of photos to fix simple problems such as color casts, lens distortion, contrast and composition.

I wonder why so many agents (and the sellers that hire them) set such low standards in this critical area of marketing their product? Is it laziness? Perhaps, but I know many hard-working agents who use poor listing photos. I tend to think that it is simple ignorance. Real estate agents are not trained to perceive the difference between good and bad listing photos, so they are indifferent about improving their own photography or hiring professionals.

I ran across a response to a blog posting recently from an agent in Virginia that questioned the do-it-yourself approach:

"I think that agents should stick to what they know, and hire out for
pictures…there is no excuse not to; it’s and inexpensive ROI, considering that
photos get people in the door, and that’s how homes are sold. Every photo and
marketing opportunity needs to be optimized for web viewing and browsing. Good
photographers bring lighting to a shoot and we all know what lack of good
lighting looks like. Most of us don’t cut our own hair…we shouldn’t take our own
pictures, either."

Deborah A. Rutter
Virginia Realtor

Listing Photos for REOs are Among the Worst

There’s another prevailing view about pro photography that often surfaces in today’s market: REO property, which usually means vacant property, is not considered worthy of professional photography or staging. The feeling seems to be that since the bank won’t spend a nickel on anything to help sell the house, and since the bank can be expected to simply lower the price if the property isn’t selling, why waste money on fancy photos?

I have had agents who sell REO explain this to me and I’m still baffled. Wouldn’t it help them earn more REO listings if they could show the bank asset managers they are actively and intelligently marketing the bank’s foreclosures, trying to minimize the bank’s loss (instead of simply settle for the most convenient offer)? Good photos can be strong selling tools, even for vacant homes. Today we are using virtual staging to warm up the otherwise soulless look of a vacant home. The cost for this added service is low, and the potential for faster sales and higher closing prices is high. So it would seem to be a mistake to dismiss the value of good listing photos for REOs as well as normal listings.

Bad Listing Photos Cost Sellers Time and Money

Both agents and sellers pay for this error in judgment. I believe it is a serious error because we now know from various surveys (NAR’s included) that over 90% of home buyers start their search for a home on the Internet, and the listing photos are the single biggest influence in determining which homes are selected for further investigation. Bad listing photos cause buyers to skip over properties that don’t “zing” them, visually speaking.

If a real estate agent insists on taking their own listing photos, then it would be in their best interest (and their sellers’) to make sure they know how to produce good ones. This starts with having the right equipment (Digital SLR camera, wide angle lenses, tripod, image editing software, etc.). They also need to know how to compose a pleasing picture, how to expose it correctly, and how to edit each photo. A professional normally spends anywhere from two to four hours performing these tasks. Given the many tasks real estate agents must perform, I doubt that many of them put this amount of time into taking their listing photos.

If you are a home seller, you should be asking your listing agent during the listing presentation to show examples of their past listings, including pictures. Ask them who will be taking the pictures of their home to ensure that they will present the home at its best. Buyers want to see pictures – lots of them – and the better the home looks in pictures, the more buyers will ask to see the property.

Conclusion

Professionally shot pictures will have up-front costs, but the returns to the seller and listing agent usually more than compensate. Whether the market is hot, or not, the better the photos, the higher the response rate to your professionally photographed listing.

In the end, you and your seller should be asking yourselves "Which costs less: professional real estate photography, or your first price reduction?"