Today I was searching through listings for a buyer and found myself in shock…. I clicked on a listing that matched my extensive list of criteria and got a listing with zero photos. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I figured that it was a new listing and they haven’t had the chance to upload the photos yet. Understandable, when the listing gets first listed, there could be a short delay. We’ve all been guilty of this.
Here is where the story gets hilarious. This particular listing has been on the MLS since August and it is now December. Four whole months of “representing” their client without photos on the MLS. Sign me up with that agent. It takes 15 minutes or so to get the actual photos.
Once you have the photographs taken, it takes another ten minutes to upload the photos to the listing. This agent is charging their client 7% to market their home. Tis a true story. This is common practice for many real estate agents.
I continued flipping through listings to show my client, and there were dozens more listings without photos. Doing this causes you to miss out on motivated buyers. Every single time I reached a listing with zero photos, I just skip to the next one.
Here are few other things I noticed when looking at listings online..
1. A handful of listings only had one photo of the exterior. I wanted to see more photographs to better qualify the home and how it fits my clients needs. The exterior doesn’t show us your home, and generate interest for us to setup a showing.
2. Some listings had the photos straight off of the local assessor site. This is just laziness, and not doing your job for your clients. Not to mention that most of these photos are like a decade old. Clients may wonder why the house is blue when it was white in the photo.
3. 98% of the listings had horrible photographs. They were out of focus, too dark, or overall terrible. Not a good first impression for a serious buyer. Some photos even had people in them.. Hilarious! Agents are selling real estate by taking photos with their toys they got from Christmas.
4. Photoshop can create wider angles. I saw a listing where an agent used a photoshop technique of stitching together a few photos to create a much wider angle photo than what the camera could originally produce. Nice, I’ll be utilizing this technique.
If you find this story hilarious then definitely click here. They have posted some real life photographs that get publicized.
I’ll be looking into the legal issues with taking photos off of our local MLS to share with you to better illustrate the hilarity behind all of this. If you know the legalities of using photos drop me a comment.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I agree with you on this subject. When my wife and I were looking for a home (which we actually purchased with Erics help) we skipped past the homes with no photos and even wrote some off that had 3 photos that just didnt do the home justice. We looked to the internet first and then contacted eric to show us the houses we were most interested in. Photos are an essential to a buyer, I know first hand.