6 Common Real Estate Photo Mistakes

A beautiful real estate photo can be an immensely valuable resource in marketing a home, and can bring more potential buyers and tenants to your listing. It’s not easy to create a beautiful real estate photo, but it’s also not easy creating a photo so bad it leaves people scratching their heads. Here we will list the six most common real estate marketing photo mistakes.

1. The Rushed Phone Photo

_{Not sure what the agent is trying to convey here...}

There is nothing wrong with taking real estate photos with a cell phone. But it is expected that regardless of what type of camera you have on hand, you think about what the potential buyers and tenants see when they shop around. A rushed, low quality photo can often be worse than no photo at all.

2. Tilted, Slanted World

_{This isn't even the worst example of a crooked photo}

Very few structures should be crooked in a photograph a la the Leaning Tower of Pisa. A well done real estate photo should be straight on both the vertical and horizontal axis. It can easily make or break the picture. A minor adjustment to the rotation of a photo can help immensely, while the lack of this adjustment can make the viewer tilt their head with the look of disapproval.

3. HDR-ed to the Max

_{Is this a painting or a photo? Hard to tell with bad HDR.}

HDR (High Dynamic Range) is a technique used in digital photography where multiple exposures are stacked and merged together using software so that underexposed(too dark) and overexposed(too bright) portions of a scene look more appropriately exposed. Well done HDR can be unnoticeable to the average person. Yet, some people insist on creating as dramatic of an effect as possible through this technique, causing an “oil paint” effect that looks akin to something you would see in a museum of bad art.

4. The One and Done

_{I may or may not see a house in this one supplied photo... It's hard to tell.}

Taking one photo of the property for a listing is just plain lazy. It is a disservice to your client and does nothing to generate interest from potential buyers and tenants. A responsible real estate agent will take an adequate amount of photos to represent the current state of the property.

5. Wiiiiiide Angle

_{This place looks* huge!}

A real estate photo should be an accurate representation of a home so that a potential buyer or renter is not disappointed when they come in to look at the property. Oftentimes, photographers opt to shoot photos in the widest setting possible, stretching the view of a room to unrealistic dimensions. This practice is deceiving and often very unattractive.

6. Drenched in Saturation

_{Oversaturation and bad HDR often go hand in hand.}

Nothing burns people’s eyes more than a photo with its saturation cracked up to unbearable levels. Trees and flowers in the front yard turn into psychedelic art that would make a hippie blush.

_{Written by Yo Wakita, Leasing Manager & Company Photographer}