Beyond Baseboards & Crown Molding: What Matters in Listing Photos?

We get emails like this on a very regular basis:

Hello, I am interested in the house at “123 Main St”. Do you have any additional photos of the kitchen and master bedrooms that you can send? (Ed note: Street address changed to protect the guilty).

The vast majority of the time these come from someone already working with an agent, and they have Googled a home’s address. Finding our site at or near the top of the Google results, they assume we are the listing agents. We will typically respond along the lines of, “Sorry, this isn’t our listing. But if you aren’t already working with an agent, we’d be happy to try to help… blah blah blah”.

So off I went to the MLS, where I found the home in question.

It’s a lovely home, listed for almost $650,000. If you aren’t from around here or are not familiar with the Phoenix real estate market, a $650K home is definitely a top-end home.

Here are a couple of photos that were in the listing:

To the left would be an example of the crown molding, and an air conditioning vent.

To the right would be a picture of the baseboards, and some berber carpet.

Now in and of itself, photos like this are not necessarily a bad thing. And at least the photos were large, at the right resolution and have good focus and exposure. Sadly, from a technical perspective this puts these photos ahead of a significant portion of the photos in the Multiple Listing Service (MLS).

Why the contractor didn’t trim the vent cover, use a router on the back of the molding, or lower the cover a smidge to render the crown molding flush to the wall isn’t the point.

Recall our emailer wanted additional photos of the master bedrooms and kitchen.

What she really meant to say was, “Can you send ANY photos of the kitchen or master bedrooms”.

You see, despite the fact that our MLS lets an agent upload an unlimited number of photos, the grand total of pictures of the kitchen and master bedrooms was. . .

. . . wait for it . . .

ZERO.

Yup, there were no pictures of either of the two master bedrooms or the kitchen.

None. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

I find this remarkable. You see, when it comes to the interior of a home, there are two places the majority of people looking to buy a home want to see – the kitchen, and the master bedroom. Sure there are some that care only about the garage, and some that want the right yard. But I have yet to show a home to anyone who said, “Nah, we don’t need to see the kitchen or the master bedroom”.

And I have yet to hear anyone say, “These baseboards are amazing. It matters not what the rest of the home looks like!”

If you are going to market a home online, you have GOT to include some photos of the kitchen and the master. Failing to include such fundamental pictures leads a home searcher to say, “Hmmmm, I wonder what is wrong with the kitchen?” Or, “The bedroom must be tiny”, or even worse, “I’m not wasting my time seeing this house, I’ll get my agent to show me one of the other 45,000 homes listed for sale”.

Agents, make the effort to watch people search for homes online. They don’t care about your fluffy sales verbiage. They don’t care about your spinning 360 degree virtual tour. They look at three things – the location, the price and the pictures.

Trust me, they want to see pictures of the kitchen and the bedrooms. They need to see pictures of the kitchen and master. No, you don’t need 200 photos of the home. But you need some good shots of the front elevation, the bedrooms and the main living areas. AND THE KITCHEN for Pete’s sake! No (or poor) photos of these areas and they will move right along.

Sellers – check out what your home looks like on line. Google the address. Look at the photos. Think like a buyer. After all, that’s what you want to attract – a buyer.

Incidentally, I tried to help our emailer by calling, texting and emailing the listing agent to see if they had photos of the kitchen or master bedrooms, or to get permission to take some myself.

Guess what?

I’m still waiting on a response…

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