A picture is worth a thousand words, and it can be worth a thousand dollars, too.
Recent research has shown that the more pictures a listing has, the more quickly it sells, and the higher the sale price! In this particular study, it went like this: Houses with just one picture sold in X number of days. (The number isn’t important—that would change with the market.) Houses with six pictures sold 43% faster, those with 16-19 sold 48% faster, and those with 20 or more pictures sold 54% faster.
The price received for the property also went from just over 90% of the asking price on the one-picture listings, to over 95% of the asking price for those listings with six or more pictures.
Clearly, Buyers want to see pictures. Serious buyers are looking online all the time and they don’t want to waste their time or gas money going to see places that are not likely to be what they’re looking for. The more pictures we provide, the more likely a Buyer will be to risk a trip to the property to see it in person.
The Realtors who tell their clients that less information is good because it drives more phone calls may have had a point before the advent of the internet, but they do their clients a disservice if they stick to that line of reasoning now.
AHA! moment: have decent pictures. I could go on about how utterly boring most of the pictures Realtors use to sell homes are, but I’ll save it for now. Find someone, anyone, who can take some decent pictures if you’re not happy with the pictures your Realtor is using. Or do it yourself. Just get lots of pictures, good ones, out there in front of your buying public.
Good luck!
Watch my site, www.mankatohomesonline.com for some examples. I’ll try to put up a page of my best pics in the next couple of days. Some of them are pretty good, if I do say so myself.