A Picture Ain't Worth Bupkis

I have a confession to make: I almost never look at the pictures of the houses I’m showing.

I know my clients obsess over the photos in the portal I set them up with, and their hearts are won and lost over these houses based only on the pictures. When I pick them up with my list of houses in hand, they always have one they are absolutely confident is The One, because the pictures were so perfect and nice and they even liked the furniture.

I do not believe that any of my clients have ever actually purchased the house they thought was The One from the photos. We usually get to that house and it backs to a major road, or the layout is terrible or the rooms are tiny. The really important stuff in a house is so difficult to photograph.

I’ve also had it go the other way, especially on the high-end houses. I often think houses look guady or over done in the pictures, and then when I get into them they are fabulous and have amazing features that weren’t at all visible in the photos.

I’ve seen enough houses and enough pictures of houses that I’m just so over the photos. I almost never even glance through them and I definitely don’t eliminate houses I’m showing based on photos. A house is so dependent on the quality of the photographer portraying it. Some agents are too cheap to hire a professional and some are even too lazy to do anything but photograph the front stoop. None of this is a reflection on the actual quality of the house.

Now a video tour… that I can get behind. Here’s one I did for a client last week: