Want to sell your House? Hire a Professional Photographer

By John Kim | October 13th, 2010

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Professional Photo	Amateur Photo

Think about transactions that involve hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the best way these numbskulls promote their product is by using a cheap point and shoot. In every other industry, companies hire professional photographers to display clothing, cars, and gadgets in the best light possible. Well apparently when it comes to real estate, the norm is to capture your $300,000+ product on a $100 camera.

Recently a study was done by Redfin, and they compiled the data from both Boston and Long Island. Their findings showed that listings with better photos not only received more attention, but they commanded a higher asking price. Surprisingly, only 15% of the million plus listing incorporated professional photography, which is surprisingly low considering the amount of competition there is. Unfortunately, this only applies for listings that are in decent condition. If you were to sell a property that was in dire need of repair, high resolution images would only reveal more of the suckiness.

So get real people, you are trying to sell a home, and asking someone to put down their whole life savings, and 30 years of indentured servitude to live in your home? How are you going to convince them that your home is worth the asking price? Do you realize that you could hire a professional for as little as $500, which could potentially give you another $5000 on your asking price? This is why the world is collapsing, because we have a bunch of nickel and dimers that don’t know how to invest. A population full of the penny wise but pound foolish.

Anyways, look at the graph below. The red bar represents houses that had crappy images versus the green bar that shows homes that has professional images. As you can see, the likely hood of selling a home dramatically increases after you get past the $300k mark. This is because homes past the $300k mark is more likely to be in decent condition, and the professional photos only make it look that much better.