“You’re really doing the sellers a disservice if you don’t have first-class, top notch photographs.”

Josh Rogers is a real estate agent in Jacksonville, Florida, and he really gets it. He hires a photographer for every listing, not just the high-end homes, which is a mistake some agents make.

So according to Josh, how does professional real estate photography help the agent?

Well, he says it “makes you look like a rock star“, and I think that’s a really big point that a lot of real estate agents miss. They make the mistake of thinking that the photos are only for the sale of the home, but really, they sell the agent!

“And keep in mind as other people are considering selling their homes they’re on Zillow looking at other homes listed in their neighborhood, and if you have poor quality pictures on your listing, what’s the likelihood of them reaching out to you and asking you to list their home?

I’ve had people specifically reach out to me and say, ‘We’ve seen your photographs – you do an amazing job, and your properties look great. Can you come talk to us about selling our house?”

I mean, is that not the perfect conversation that every real estate agent wants to hear? Surely that’s what you want, and that’s what agents who use top quality photography experience.

“Hiring a professional photographer for listings is a must”

In the video below trainer Mike Krein is chatting with real estate broker Jennifer Clark from Orange City in Florida:

One of the things that Jennifer mentions in this interview is this:

“We brought on a professional photographer to go out and photograph all of our houses … and it’s made a huge difference.”

When a real estate business gets it right with their photography they do see a difference in their sales figures. Professional real estate photography is not just an optional add-on that really can’t be quantified, but something that dramatically impacts upon a real estate business in a positive way:

“So the question is, ‘Should you hire a professional photographer to do your houses?’, and the answer is ‘Yes, yes and yes!'”

The presenter Mike Krein goes on to talk about a study that was done that tested people in lab conditions on what got them most engaged with a property listing online, and they found:

“They look at the picture first … then the data, then the remarks. The better the picture was the more likely they were to read it, and to click.”

I don’t think we really needed a study to tell us this, but it is interesting to see the influence that the first image a potential buyer sees, the ‘hero shot’, has such an influence on whether or not that buyer even looks at that listing.

Mike goes on to say that “The more pictures the better,” but that is absolutely not true. It’s not the number of pictures that helps at all, but the quality of the images used, which is why it’s so important to hire a high quality photographer, and not just hire the cheapest real estate photographer in town.

What an agent or home seller might want to do instead of including 50 photos is to consider incorporating a floorplan into their marketing mix, and Mike goes on to talk about the benefit of having a floorplan:

“The one thing nobody ever puts up is a floorplan. Buyers love it to death when they can see the floorplan. Because with the pictures they can’t tell how it’s laid out. But if you can get floorplans on the house, and they add that up there, that is a huge thing and nobody does it. You will double or quadruple your traffic and leads.”

Floorplans may not be a popular marketing tool where he is, but in some areas floorplans are very common, and the reason why is that buyers in those areas have come to expect a floorplan when previewing a property listing online. But for those areas where floorplans are not used they can be something unique that gives any listing an edge.

Get the best photos + a floorplan:

If I was selling my home I would have 10 to 20 photos, no more than that, and I would include a floorplan because the images will provide the emotional connection, and the floorplan will sell the logical connection. With both working together you are reaching to the emotional side and the logical side of your potential buyers, which means you’ve got all of your bases covered.