6 Real Estate Photography Tips to Increase Your Showings

When it comes to selling your home, photos are essential. According to the National Association of Realtors, 95% of buyers searched for their dream home on the internet, and 89% found photos very useful in their search. The bottom line? Photos sell your home, period. Good photos will lead to more buyers scheduling listings and attending open houses. Bad photos with dark lighting, cluttered backgrounds, or sloppy editing turns off buyers, meaning your home may sit on the market longer.

At Jessica Sullivan Real Estate, we’re experts in shooting homes to sell. I earned my BA in commercial photography, so I know what I’m talking about when it comes to lighting, shooting, staging, and editing real estate photos.

Here are my top six real estate photography tips that’ll help increase your showings.

Shoot In Natural Light

Shoot during the daytime in natural light, with the blinds and curtains open. Often people will turn on all the overhead lights and lamps at once to get “better lighting” when shooting their home, but this is a major mistake. Turning on all the lights will make your home look bright while you’re standing in it, but it won’t read well on camera. Start with opening the blinds and curtains, then see how that looks when you shoot it. Turn on one light at a time - an overhead or accent light might help make it look even better, but start slowly.

You don’t need a full studio light setup to make your home look bright and inviting - you just need the windows that are already there! It’s best to know which way your home faces. If you have a western exposure, it’ll be brightest and sunniest in the late afternoon; an eastern exposure will be best shot in the morning. Just make sure to avoid very direct sunlight, like the sun glaring right into your camera lens.

See the natural light flooding this kitchen? It makes it look so inviting!

Use The Right Equipment

Don’t rely on a few quick cellphone shots to sell your beautiful home - to really showcase it, you need the right tools. As a professional photographer, I have a whole kit of lenses and equipment I take with me to shoot my clients’ listings.

Often in real estate listings, an inexperienced photographer will use a super wide lens to capture a large room, but that lens will make the ceiling look oddly low. Or they won’t use the right flash, so the room will look washed out and overlit. A cellphone photo might look okay on your phone screen, but on the MLS listing or Zillow it can appear blurry or low-res, making your home look less appealing.

In rooms like this that are narrow and don’t have windows, a professional photographer will help use the right lens and flash to light it and capture it well.

Clear Up The Clutter

This is major when it comes to staging your home. Of course, when you’re living in your home (especially with pets and kids), you have a lot of stuff hanging around. But when you want to aggressively stage your home to sell, it needs to look clean, fresh, and appealing to buyers, so the less clutter, the better.

A professional photographer can help you stage your home and organize the clutter for photos - they’ll see things that stick out in photos that you might not notice (like that pile of dog toys in the corner or the vacuum cleaner in the dining room).

For a kitchen, don’t just tidy up the mail pile on the counter - remove it entirely. Store small appliances like the toaster or blender away while your home is being photographed.

Use a Tripod

You’ll want to use a professional tripod when shooting real estate photos. Every photo should be from the same relative height and viewpoint, and a tripod eliminates shaky hands and tilted images, leading to less editing down the road.

Know Your Editing Software

Every professional real estate photographer should know their way around programs like Photoshop and Lightroom. Even the best stager can’t catch everything, and post-production editing in Photoshop can touch up things they missed, like a scuff mark on the wall. A program like Lightroom will give your photos a consistent, professional look, even if one is of the attic and one is of the bright, white kitchen.

On the other hand, it’s important to not go too crazy with the editing programs. We’ve all seen listings where someone Photoshopped a super fake, Hawaiian blue sky into the window of a suburban home. These obviously fake edits turn buyers off just as much as a cluttered living room does.

A good photo editing software can touch up any issues and give your photos a professional look (like consistent lighting even when the weather on shoot day was touch-and-go).

Work With A Pro

At Jessica Sullivan Real Estate, we’re uniquely able to professionally shoot our listings as part of our marketing efforts. You’ll be getting your home shot by a trained commercial photographer who’s also a professional real estate agent.

Another perk? With the advent of COVID-19, having me shoot your home AND list it means one less person in your house during the pandemic. If you’re ready to list your home on Long Island, get in touch with Jessica Sullivan Real Estate today.