For Sale By Owner – Photography

A picture is worth a thousand words.  Never has that adage held more true than in the case of real estate marketing. Whether you are advertising your home on the Internet or using flyers and print ads, professional looking photographs are a must.

As experienced real estate agents, we can tell you that the importance of well-composed photos that highlight your home’s major selling points cannot be overstated. Prospective buyers won’t take the time to drive out to see a property if the pictures in the marketing materials or on the Internet don’t impress them.  In fact, great pictures are so crucial, we send a professional real estate photographer to photograph the homes we list.

Going the do it yourself route, here are some handy tips that should help you.

• If you don’t already have a good digital camera, borrow or invest in one right now, preferably with a wider angle lens. You might also want to consider a tripod.
• Before you take any pictures, declutter and depersonalize your home.  Better yet, get professional home staging advice.
• The best time to photograph your home’s interior is just after sunrise, before sundown, or when it’s overcast.  Open your window treatments and turn on as many lights as possible, but make sure none will be in direct view of the camera lens.
• For your home’s exterior, the best time to photograph your home is usually on a bright day with a blue sky and the sun behind you. However, if the front of your house faces north, you may get a better picture on a cloudy day.
• Focus primarily on photographing your home’s main living areas-indoors and outdoors-and kitchen.  When photographing bedrooms, avoid making the bed the focal point, and see if there’s an interesting feature you can capture instead, e.g., French doors leading to an outdoor patio, vaulted ceilings, a fireplace, etc.
• Bathrooms are very difficult to photograph well even when they have interesting features, due to their small size; they also have many reflective surfaces, so you may want to skip them.

Using these techniques, you should be able to produce near professional looking images that will greatly enhance your chances of selling your home for a good price in a reasonable time frame.