Capturing the beauty of your home through photographs takes skill. If you’ve tried to do it before, you know it’s not as simple as walking around your house snapping photos, at least not if you want great ones that will capture the attention of a potential buyer.
Great real estate photos when selling your home require a process. You need to prep and stage your house, take photos, edit them, and showcase them online in a way that has buyers clamoring to step through your door.
Why Photos Are Essential to Any Home Advertisement
If you don’t understand why capturing high-quality photos is a crucial step on the selling your home checklist, consider this: According to an NAR report, 43% of homebuyers looked online for properties for sale, and 83% found photos valuable (the most valuable feature available online).
It just takes one internet search of "how to sell my house" to learn the impact photos have on your home sale. The results may warrant hiring a professional photographer. However, if you feel ambitious and have the confidence to do it yourself, we’ve compiled a list of home-selling tips to help you photograph your home successfully, whether you’re using a professional camera or your phone.
1. Capture Your Home at Its Best
Your online advertisement often makes the first impression. The goal is to make it great as well as unforgettable. The first step is home staging, which is a powerful tool to use when selling your home.
Five ways staging benefits home sellers from Home Staging 101:
- Staged homes sell faster and for more money.
- Staged homes look better in photos.
- Staged homes look move-in ready.
- Home staging protects the property’s value.
- Home staging connects generations of buyers and sellers.
Photo by Liza Summer from Pexels via Canva.com
What Not to Do When Staging Your Home
Don't have people in your photos.
The buyer doesn’t need a person to model the space. Instead, let the home speak for itself and ensure that people aren’t visible, including yourself.
Don't leave the toilet lid up.
It doesn’t matter if it’s clean. Seeing the inside of a toilet bowl is distracting and off-putting.
Don't photograph an empty house.
It’s much more difficult to portray the size of a room when it’s empty. Not to mention, it’s impossible for buyers to determine if their furniture will fit.
Don't photograph the home cluttered.
Photos with visible clutter are offputting for a few reasons:
- It’s distracting. The potential buyer isn’t going to see your home; they're going to focus on all the stuff you have sitting around.
- The buyer wants to know that the house is in good condition. Piles of clutter will make them wonder what the upkeep of the actual house is like.
- Clutter creates the illusion that your home lacks storage.
Don't neglect the home's exterior.
Even if you’re working with a tight budget, don’t spend it all on the interior. A grungy front door or unkempt landscaping communicates to buyers that you haven’t looked after the property and makes them wonder what else is neglected.
Focus on This When Staging Your Home
Let in natural light.
Light makes your home look more open, spacious, and airy. If you don’t get much natural light, remove curtains and blinds that obstruct what little light you have.
Depersonalize and declutter.
Remove anything that’s personal and not essential to your routine. But don’t hide it in the cupboards or a closet, because when buyers come by for a showing they’ll open every cabinet and closet door. Remember, less is more!
Rent a storage unit if you need to.
Store extra appliances, furniture, and personal items that crowd your space until after your house sells.
Photo by annastills via Canva.com
Hide cleaning supplies and other items in the kitchen and bathroom.
Put away sponges, dish towels, paper towels, and dish soap in the kitchen. Remove magnets from the fridge and clear clutter off the counters.
Pay attention to the details in the bathroom. Put the toilet lid down, remove the plunger, hide the toilet brush, tuck your toiletries away, and replace used towels with new, pretty ones.
Clean everything.
Spotless is the goal. Repeat to yourself, "Buyers want a move-in-ready house," as you re-caulk the bathroom sink and scroll down the selling your home checklist.
Pay attention to details like:
- Baseboards
- Walls
- Floors
- Appliances
- Carpets
- Ceiling
- Repair holes in the wall (even little ones from hanging photos)
- Get rid of any pet odors
Go neutral.
Replacing vibrant, powerful colors in your home will help potential buyers see your home as a blank slate for their own belongings. You don’t have to paint your walls white, but a soft, neutral color will go a long way to help your house appeal to more buyers.
Up the curb appeal.
While your advertisement makes the first impression online, the home's front really makes the first impression in person.
A few things to keep in mind: keep the yard manicured, replace dead or dying plants, repair or replace anything broken, and freshen up with a fresh coat of paint or a pretty pot of flowers on the front step.
2. Take High Quality Photos
Once you’ve staged your home and it looks radiant, it’s time to talk about photography.
Take photos that appeal to buyers when they see your home online. Here are a handful of tips to help take impeccable images of your property with the camera you have available.
What Not to Do When Taking Photos for Your Home Listing
Don't use vertical photos.
Even if you’re trying to capture the world’s smallest bathroom, it’s difficult to show depth and give viewers a good sense of the space with a vertical angle.
Don't take photos at night.
Homes may feel coziest in the evening after the sun goes down, but don’t try to capture this for your advertisement. Your pictures won’t showcase the room to its fullest. Instead, dark areas take over, and artificial light distorts the natural hues.
Remember this when you’re learning how to sell your house: natural light is best for real estate photography.
Don't leave the front door open.
Although you might think it looks more inviting, an open front door looks unfinished.
Don't overlook features that sell.
If your home has a garden tub, fireplace, pool, hardwood flooring, or any other attractive feature, take a photo to include it in the listing.
Don't use extreme angles.
Don't take photos from above your head or below your chest. Don't angle the camera like you're taking senior pics in 2009. While a bird's-eye view can help capture everything in the room, it doesn’t provide online viewers with an honest perspective of the space. You also risk having more dead space (floors and ceilings) in your photo than areas of interest.
An example of too-dark lighting for a home ad photo:
Photo by pixelshot via Canva.com
What to Focus on When Taking Photos for Your Home Listing
Use landscape orientation.
Landscape mode is the go-to for real estate photography. This best captures the size of your space and more accurately represents your property.
Foster natural light.
We've already discussed how light makes space look larger, open, and airy, so capture your home when the natural light is at its highest. The best time of day varies depending on your windows' location.
Try using the flash to minimize window flares (the blurry light around a window that distracts from other details in your home). This step can eliminate the blur and help viewers see details outside the house, creating a more fluid feel. In addition to a flash, photo-editing programs can reduce flare as well.
Create a good flow in your photographs.
You don’t want the house hunter’s eyes to stop at the first thing they see. Avoid large items in the foreground to ensure the photo leads the viewer around the room. However, small items, like a coffee table, create interest and lead the eye to the background.
Find the best angles.
If you have a unique feature in the room, find the angle that accentuates it. For example, a nook, built-in bookcase, or fireplace are all great features potential buyers need to see when they look at your listing. Choose an angle that showcases that feature.
Avoid converging vertical lines.
When taking photos of rooms, avoid converging vertical lines. Unless you plan to use a tripod, there’s a good chance the space will look distorted when lines in the photo don’t line up with the actual edges of the photograph. Avoid this by adjusting your camera height, using a wide-angle lens, and shooting toward the corners.
Use a wide-angle lens.
Using a wide angle helps portray a more accurate feel of the space. It creates depth and detail for house hunters shopping virtually. Here’s an example of the same photo taken without and with a wide-angle lens on an iPhone. You’ll notice that without a wide-angle lens, the image only captures a small portion of the space.
Shoot the corners.
To add depth and movement, aim toward the room's corner in your picture; this will guide the viewer's gaze inward. This strategy can also help you avoid those pesky converging verticals.
The goal is to shoot two walls to create a three-dimensional photo. One wall falls flat, and three walls (depending on the room) can create a narrow, almost suffocating feel.
Here’s an example of capturing one, two, and three walls.
One wall:
Photo by vanitjan via Canva.com
Two walls:
Photo by Roy_20051_ from pixabay via Canva.com
Three walls:
Photo by Lisa Anna from Pexels via Canva.com
You’ll notice that the room looks more spacious when the camera aims toward the corner of the room and captures two walls. The third picture, with three walls, feels smaller and closed.
Take photos at chest height.
Photos taken at chest height present a more accurate feel of the space. It showcases what the buyer will see when they step into your home. It leaves little room for dead space, like the floor and ceiling.
Follow the sun for exterior photos.
Take your exterior shots at different times of the day when the lighting is best. This might mean capturing the front in the morning and the back in the afternoon. Be patient and wait for the right time.
3. Lighten, Brighten, and Edit Your Photos
You don’t need access to Photoshop to tweak your photos before you post them. There are easy-to-use editing tools available. Gimp, Picmonkey, Fotor, Photoshop Express, and Pixlr are all great options.
You can also use simple editing tools on your phone, which can be better than nothing. And you don’t have to be an expert to use them. They’re just there for you to make simple adjustments to the already amazing photos you took.
What Not to Do When Editing Photos for Your Home Listing
Don't use low-resolution photos.
Low-quality photos appear grainy. They’ll make it difficult for potential buyers to see the details of your space. Buyers want clear, bright images.
Don't upload small pictures.
Small photos make it nearly impossible for buyers to perceive the size of the space. The whole point of your online listing is to create a stunning impression for home buyers and cause them to say, I need to see this house right now. Small, hard-to-see photos make this goal unattainable.
Don't add filters or a fun frame.
Your online advertisement doesn’t need a filter that you’d find on a social media account. Your pictures should draw buyers because your home looks incredible, not because you have a flashy filter. Leave the frames, vignettes, and filters for social media.
What to Focus on When Editing Photos for Your Home Listing
Adjust the brightness.
Without professional photography equipment, you may find dark spots in your photos. Don’t worry. With a simple edit, you can adjust the brightness and lighten shadows.
If your editing tool doesn’t have an adjustment brush for more finite adjustments, you’ll want to be sure that you look at the whole photograph. While some areas could use a considerable light adjustment, you don’t want to over-expose the spots that are already well lit. Look at the photo in its entirety and determine a good balance between light and dark.
Crop your photo.
Use the crop tool to edit out little nuisances in your photos, for example, telephone wires or part of the neighbor’s car. Keep in mind, though, the more you cut, the more sharpness you lose, so use the crop tool sparingly.
Resize if needed.
Small photos don’t sell, so you may need to resize them before you upload. Just be sure they still have high resolution to avoid a grainy, pixelated image.
Pay attention to resolution.
High resolution is crucial for the success of your photos. Dark, grainy images don’t showcase your home well. And chances are, online house hunters will scroll past until they find photos that appeal to them.
Pay attention to your hero photo.
The first photo/thumbnail should usually be the front exterior. That said, using a photo of a unique selling point (like the in-ground pool that has that wow-factor) can be just as good if your home lacks a strong exterior.
Learning how to sell your house may seem time-consuming. Getting the home staged for photos, waiting for proper lighting, taking photos, editing, and then uploading your home photos for the world to see takes some effort. But with so much weight relying on those images to bring potential buyers to your home, it’s well worth your time to get this part right.
For step-by-step home selling tips, download our free resource below: A Guide to Selling Your Home.
