7 Reasons Great Photos Matter in Real Estate

Selling your home in today's world is a stressful and complicated ordeal. You want to sell fast, seamlessly, and for as much money as you can. Between listing your home, holding showings, getting inspections, and ratifying contracts, you have your work cut out for you to find the right buyer. So how do we maximize exposure to draw more offers, giving us more options in a buyer? This is where marketing your home is crucial. So here are 7 reasons why great photos matter in the real estate world.

1. Buyers Are Using The Internet To Find Their Next Home: It's no surprise that people are using the internet to buy and sell products more than ever before. 92% of home buyers use the internet in their home search and buyers on average will spend 60% of the time viewing photos while only 20% reading the description (Wall Street Journal). With the rise of social media, marketing these products is also easier than ever before. Posts with images receive 39% more interaction than text-based posts. This makes competition stiff, which is why high-quality photos are a must to make your home stand out.                       

2. Buyers Cite Photos As Important when Buying A House: First impressions really do matter. Researchers watching the eye movements of subjects looking at home listings found that 95% of users viewed the first photo in the listing for a total of 20 seconds before their eyes began to wonder around the screen. Among buyers who used the internet during their search, 87% of buyers found photos useful versus 85% that found the detailed information about properties for sale useful. (NAR)             

3. Professional Photographers Know How To Best Showcase Your Home: Yes, it's true today's smartphones are packing some good HD cameras and can snap a pretty impressive photo but what most people don't realize about photography is that its more about light and composition than how good your sensor is. You're not going to see many people syncing an external flash with an iPhone or attaching a specific wide-angle lens to fit the whole room in the frame. There are subtleties a seasoned photographer sees that your agent won't.

4. Better Photos Get More Clicks: We all like pretty things so it's no stretch to think homes with higher quality photos get more engagement than those of a lesser. In fact, homes with professional photos get 61% more views than listings without. (REDFIN) Facebook posts from brands that included images earned 87% of all engagement (eMarketer) and Tweets with images earned up to 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites, and 150% more retweets. (Buffer)                                                                                                    

5. Homes With Professional Photos Sell For More Money: Believe it or not, this is true. Homes with high-quality photos receive on average a 47% higher asking price per square foot (CBS News) Homes listed between $400,000 to $500,000 sell 18% better in the first six months with high-quality photography. In the $200,000 to $1 million range, homes with listing photos taken with DSLR cameras sell anywhere from $3,400 to $11,200 more relative to their list price. (REDFIN) It's proven that displaying a home with high definition photos brings in high dollar clients.                                      

6. Homes With Professional Photos Sell Faster: High-quality images give your home that edge on the competition. Listings sell 32% faster with professional photos, spending an average of 89 days on the market compared to 123 for other homes. (PR Newswire) In an internal case study, IMOTO compared 350 listings using their professional photography against 350 similar listings in the same ZIP code. Listings using IMOTO's professional photography sold 50% faster and 39% closer to the original list price than similar homes without professional photos.                                 

7. A Professional Photographer Saves Your Agent Time: Delivering great photos can be a time-consuming job, time your agent could be using to ensure the rest of the home selling process is going smoothly. There is more to real estate photography than just showing up and snapping a few pictures. There are many things to consider. Will the home be staged and when will it be? What is the geography of the property and where are the best angles? Which way does the house face and when does it receive the best light? Will any particular equipment be needed? We must also consider the time a photographer puts into editing and the software they use. Post-production can be almost as important as the photoshoot itself, especially considering the HDR (High Dynamic Range) method most real estate photographers use which often requires editing.