Selling your home can be a frustrating and confusing process, with so many different things going on, you’ll often feel like the proverbial juggler spinning plates in the air, hoping you don’t break one, except the consequences for missing something when selling your home could lead to thousands of dollars lost, significant harm to your credit, or even being left without a home or all of the above! What might seem like one of the smaller plates you have to balance is getting pictures taken of your home for sale, but this step can be crucial to getting you promising sales leads. In a still competitive real estate market, having clear quality photos of your home will go a long way towards setting your listing apart, especially since many prospective homeowners will concentrate on online listings to make initial decisions about what homes they are interested in. With that in mind, we thought we’d share a few simple tips to help ensure your photography session goes well. We’re going to split this over two entries to make sure we give as much advice as we can on these points, so make sure to stay tuned for part two!
Not having a clear plan- These shoots can move very fast, with a number of photos that will need to be taken. There are so many things about your home that make it special, and you want to include all of those. Work with your real estate agent to identify what opportunities you want to highlight, be it the elegant staircase leading to the second floor living area, or the wide open basement filled with possibilities, you want to make sure you know which items you’ll want to include with your listing. Also, different online listing services, called an MLS, have different rules about how many photos can be included with a listing. Make sure you know how many photos can be used with the MLS your real estate agent will be working with so you can have the appropriate amount of photos taken. One of the great advantages of our virtual tours is that we can produce photos from any of the spots designated as part of the tour, giving you more flexibility after the fact.
Not setting aside enough time- These shoots can move very fast, and most professional photographers will have a clear plan that allows them to move efficiently through your home getting the photos needed in as short of a time as possible. Unfortunately, even the most efficient photographer will still need to take the time to properly set up each shot and this time will add up. Especially if you haven’t had much experience with professionally photography, you may underestimate how much time it takes to properly shoot a home. The best possible angles will need to be chosen and lighting will need to be set up. While you may want the time taken for your photography to be as short as possible, trust us the last thing you want to do is pay the money for a professional photographer only to get low quality photos that were done in a hurry. As a professional team with wide experience, we can plan our projects to be as efficient as possible while still giving you high quality photos along with your virtual tour. Extra time might be needed if you elect for additional services like drone photography of the area, but will work to have a plan in place to complete the shoot as quickly as possible.
If you’re planning on selling your home, we would be excited to partner with you to complete a virtual tour and photography to give you the best listing possible. We have the experience and tools to plan and efficiently complete a high quality package to help make your listing stand out. Come back next time when we go over some more real estate photography mistakes to avoid!