Bad MLS Photo of the Day #419

July 7th, 2008 Bad MLS Photo of the Day, Photography atholkay 2 Comments »

Instant twilight shooting…. just add purple!

 From Betta Peterson.

Your bad photos are good here, please send me the horrible shots you find.

See more Bad MLS Photo of the Day, Rules of Good Photos. Problem photo? Try Pimp My Listing Photo or if in Connecticut you can even check on My Services.

Thanks for visiting.

When Your Wife Stabs You With a Fork You Learn to Pay Attention.

May 29th, 2008 Humor, Photography, Rules of Good Photos atholkay 1 Comment »

In any other situation it’s called a partial seizure. During a showing it’s called The Thanksgiving Turkey Test. That’s the one where the buyers are pretty interested in the home and everything is going pretty well, then suddenly the female half of the buying couple makes a beeline back into the kitchen and just stands there. 

The “standing there” could take a little while. There may be odd movements and vocalizations. It’s really important not to disturb her. What she’s doing is trying to imagine if she’s comfortable pulling the Thanksgiving Turkey out of the oven in this particular kitchen. Open your mouth and you break the spell. Just let her come out of it on her own. 

Oh sure the kitchen is just fine… at least it is to you foul mouthed oafs that make a ham and potato chip sandwich and just spin the loaf of bread afterwards and tuck the end under. Yeah… me too, guilty as charged. True story - back in the in the early days of wedded bliss I once came home from Wal-Mart with a box of matching plates, cups and bowls. When asked how many were in the box, I did the math and said “four days worth”… 

… apparently that was the wrong answer. 

It turns out that when there are just two of you, and you have a four day supply of plates, you have eight settings. Then I had to wash brand new plates! I had to take them right from the box and wash them. She’s not due for PMS until Tuesday either, so she’s like Basic Instinct calm as she said we had to wash them too. I’m freaking out man. 

Sorry, wandered off for a bit there. Anyway, um… wife, kitchen, the standing there, imagining if it’s possible to pull off T-Day. I’m right back with you now. Focused. 

So, here’s the snap of the wet towel – you have to pass the Thanksgiving Turkey Test in the photo of the kitchen. Buyers will study the kitchen photo like no other. 

The good news is that the kitchen photo is the easy one to get right. The biggest key is simply making sure the kitchen is clean as possible, and decluttered as possible. I go really, really, and I mean really decluttered. Move the toaster, the spice rack, the candle, the cat’s food bowl, the dish towels out of the shot. If it’s an ornamental towel hanging on the handle of the oven that the First Lady gave your grandmother, they can either bring an offer, or you take it out of the shot. Take everything that isn’t nailed down out of the shot, with the exception of just two magical items that can sit on the counter. 

1. A coffee maker – because coffee symbolizes relaxation, enjoyment and can cap the end of a successful dinner event. 

2. A roll of paper towels – symbolizes ease of use and cleanliness. 

Now there are a bunch of other important things that do matter in kitchen shots, especially making sure the verticals are vertical, but I’ll hit that up another time. The lion’s share of the emotional impact in the kitchen is just going to be the open space and the cleanliness. 

P.S. Fridge magnets are of the devil. 

P.S.S. Yes I know that this entire post is completely sexist in assuming that the woman/wife will be in control of all the cooking etc for Thanksgiving. In my defense, all I can say is that I’ve seen multiple instances of very even tempered, domestically egalitarian, women turn into possessed maniacs attempting to channel “Betty Crocker on a good day” around Thanksgiving.  Suddenly the way cloth napkins are folded becomes as important as correctly following the checklist for the deployment of Space Shuttle. In situations like this the best advice is to repeat the phrase “everything was fabulous” until the situation has resolved. My point remains salient though – home buying is rarely rational. 

P.S.S.S   You’re probably wondering about about the “stabbing with the fork” bit in the title. Here’s the story… I got up in the middle of the night for a drink of water… the turkey was left in a chicken stock/brine thing in a cooler in the kitchen…anyway, long story short, we had to clean the kitchen floor, I sustained “superficial fork wounds”, and everything was fabulous.

Is Real Estate Photoshopping EVIL?

May 5th, 2008 Deeper Thoughts, Photography atholkay 3 Comments »

Bill Rubin tosses me a softball in the comments…

“Athol;
Just a question since you are the photoguy

There has been some discussion in the Professional Standards Forum at NAR about artificial enhancement and modification to property photos which might present a false picture to the consumer.Do you think that framing the shot so that the power lines don’t show might be a violation of the Code of Ethic’s true picture requirement(Article 12)?

I’m sort of “on the bubble” about it - If the power lines were photoshopped out, I would think that the agent was doing a bad thing, but framing it without artificial modification would seem to be acceptable because this is really what the property looks like when viewed from a specific angle (though the viewer would need ot have your car parked in the driveway) - So what do you think?”

Firstly, I think you’re misreading the phrase “true picture” as “true photo”. Once you’re into the breakdowns of Article 12 there is absolutely nothing about standards of photography. Nothing, nada, zip.

As far as I know, NAR has zero standards directly applying to photography, which a huge problem, and one of the reasons we are awash in such disgustingly poor photographic efforts from the vast bulk of realtors. It’s my semi-private cause to see that righted.

That being said, you basically have the right understanding of photo modification ethics. Once you start screwing with material facts, and editing out things to make the structure look more physically sound than it is, then we’re misrepresenting the property. We’re lying. That way ends in lawsuits, drama, tears and Ramen.

As I recall from pre-licensing class, what I do, and I argue I do pretty well, is the photographic equivalent of “puffing”. Careful cropping, flattering angles, well lit and attention to detail. It’s what I’m paid to do. Quality photography is used in every other single sales profession and there is no excuse for not using it in real estate sales. Buyers should be aware that the listing agent et al are out to actively pitch the house. If they aren’t actively pitching…  the door is thataway.

puffing n. the exaggeration of the good points of a product, a business, real property, and the prospects for future rise in value, profits and growth. Since a certain amount of “puffing” can be expected of any salesman, it cannot be the basis of a lawsuit for fraud or breach of contract unless the exaggeration exceeds the reality. However, if the puffery includes outright lies or has no basis in fact (”Sears Roebuck is building next door to your store site”) a legal action for rescission of the contract or for fraud against the seller is possible.

If buyers need to see a fugly photo of the house before they go on a showing appointment, then they can Google Earth it. Heck, maybe their buyers agent that my seller pays for could do it for them. I dunno what more to do for them really. Maybe I should sue my wife for wearing a push-up bra and lipstick when we were dating, but what would be the point?

<— Fugly photo of house with tree and power lines. I’m hiding this how?

To not mince words, the biggest “artificial modification” is the humble flash bulb. Photography is all about light. Numerous I’ve times walked into depressingly dark rooms, and simply used the on camera flash and voila… the photo looks well lit and warm.

Also to be honest, the good photographers, and I mean the really good ones, can simply do things in editing and in setting up that defy detection to the untrained eye. I’m not talking about “the power lines got removed”, or “the divots in the lawn got repaired”, that sort of thing is for chumps. No need to try and ram home the power of photoshop like a Freshman with the rock.

Pros just get you with deftness. Like the gentle arc of the ball off a long fadeaway jumper. Butter smooth shots that bypass the buyers defense shields and can simply make them fall in love with a property before they even set foot in the house…

…swish… nothing but net.

Photo Death By Tree and Powerlines

May 3rd, 2008 Photography, Rules of Good Photos atholkay 2 Comments »

It’s not a bad photo, but zomg tree and power lines dominate. It’s a reasonably busy street, so you gotta choose a side of the road to stand on to shoot the photo too.

Solution…

Park the car at the end of the driveway, stand on the rear quarter panel*, use a wide angle lens…

It’s a much better angle, but if you’re a regular reader you’ll be spotting some sky tweaking and a lack of shadows. Yup… the sun ain’t shining, so I’ll be back to shoot again anyway.

* The Regent Photo Guy does not recommend nor advise standing on the rear quarter panel of your own car. This likely voids your cars warranty and you could fall your clumsy ass right off the car.

Pimping My Mom

March 21st, 2008 Pimp My Listing Photo No Comments »

Heres the photo my Mom (or for my six New Zealand readers Mum) sent me.

Attached is a pretty good picture of the townhouses, could you please blue the sky for me - not too bright though. Its a late afternoon shot so the sky was bright and pale. Im starting to take pictures for the advertising for the next door townhouse - the ex-owner is planning to move out around the 20th of next month, then we can get to and start filling it with furniture and taking some pictures too. We live in the right hand one and have bought the middle one

Color filled the sky, graduated blue filter on the sky, brightened and then turned the warmth up a lot to get a more twilighty feel.

Now I have to wait and see if Im ever allowed home.

Interested in having your listing photo Pimped? Email me a maximum file size image and Ill see what I can do. I do email back the edited photo as a max image too. Enjoy!

Like A Background For A Paxil Ad?

March 15th, 2008 Photography, Rules of Good Photos No Comments »

One of my biggest pet peeves about real estate photos, are exterior shots taken in bad weather. I’ve seen foreboding clouds, rain, snow, hail and in one case what appeared to be an actual tornado carefully hidden behind the house. I kid you not.

This is great stuff if you’re a clothing company selling sub-zero weather proof gear to deep sea fishermen, if that’s the goal I say pour it on baby! Wait for the worst day possible. I’m talking a wall of wind and water pelting everything, get Clint Eastwood dressed up in your special raincoat and shoot him gritting his teeth as you “accidentally” try and drown him. Awesome stuff, we’ll sell a million of them.

However bad weather is like death to real estate shooting. Crappy day photos just send a message of “well at least it’s better than being in a tent”. They’re like a background photo for something like a Paxil advert, or say an avoiding foreclosure debt counseling service.

I’m going to touch on this theme again and again over the coming months… real estate photography is about creating a positive emotion in the buyer. The photos do not need to be technically perfect, but we do want a basic response of “oooh nice house” in the buyer. Real estate purchases for anyone except the most hardened investor are highly emotional, and positive emotion helps sell homes.

The simplest shortcut to getting that “oooh nice house” response for exterior shots is sunshine. Pure natural feel good sunshine simply can’t be faked. In other words, you have to wait until you get a nice day to shoot the exterior photos. Now you may have to go with what you can get in the first couple days of your listing, but nothing is stopping you from going back to the house and re-shooting the front on a nice day. It’s well worth doing this. Yucky weather equals yucky photo, equals yucky house, equals no commission check for you.

The frontal shot is as important as all the other photos put together. That’s because on Realtor.com or where ever the listing is online, that’s what the photo buyers will click on to get to see more about the house. So the front shot better be as good as you can get it.

Not every home squares off to face the sun all that wonderfully. Do ask when the sun hits the front of the house the best. Just do the best you can. Regardless of the perfection of the shot, sunshine just works. We’re shooting for emotion and sunshine always improves everyone’s mood.

It ain’t rocket science.

Happy 1 Year Blog Day

March 12th, 2008 Bad MLS Photo of the Day, Deeper Thoughts, Good Vibes, Photography No Comments »

Well… actually that was March 9, but if I actually celebrated that date on time the rest of the family would wonder why I could remember that date, but not their birthdays. So celebrating two days late… as is my idiom.

So one full year plugging away at Reagent. Notable high points that can be measured….

Winning the Carnival of Real Estate. CMA vs Zestimate - Just The Facts Ma’am. Pretty much after that post the venomous assault on the accuracy of zestimates all but disappeared from the real estate blogs. I’m still waiting for the gift basket from Zillow for that. Bastards.

Winning the Consumer Orientated Carnival of Real Estate. A Dumpster is Cheaper Than Selling Your House. Just a fun piece.

Getting in the L.A. Times. I Get Mentioned In The L.A. Times. Did I mention I was mentioned in the L.A. Times? Just mentioning it.

Cracking 50,000 visits in the first year. It’s in the footer on the bottom left. It’s not monstrous numbers, but respectable.

Actually getting a monthly writing gig with the Arkansas Realtor Association. The Arkansas Realtors® Association Leaves Me Voice mail. I’m now doing a monthly photography article for them that actually gets printed in real magazine format. Like a grown up.

Page Rank of 5. Click on the link to www.iwebtool.com to see where Google thinks I am. Though I just checked and half the data centers are down and strangely two of them think I’m PR7. Which I tend to disbelieve.

That being said, a lot of the good stuff – the really good stuff - isn’t measurable.

No doubt I’ve become known for a single post topic. The Bad MLS Photo of the Day. Sparking many copies…

MLS Trash Can, Horrible MLS Photo of the Day, Worst MLS Photo of the Day, Terrible MLS Photo of the Day to name a few.

Am I offended by this? Not at all, it’s flattering and I’m always happy to see a new bad photo post theme. I don’t own the post format of “bad photo + mockery”. I’ll claim I do it best, but it’s not mine alone.

Every time someone new does a bad photo post, it means that the message is getting through and spreading nationwide that bad real estate photos need fixing, and can be fixed. If you want to run bad photo posts… do it! I just ask people to not copy the name exactly.

It’s a quiet revolution based on laughter and awareness rather than threats, fines, lawsuits and drama.

I’ve influenced thousands of agents improve their photography or decide to use professional photographers. Not a day goes by now where I don’t get email of new bad photos, or something that says “we’re all laughing at your blog in the office”. I’ve even had emails asking if they can use the blog in their training classes and conference presentations. (Of course you can!).

My favorite ones are comments and emails where someone says thanks for helping them do better with their photos. There’s not a stat counter for that, but it makes me happy knowing I helped someone do better.

And of course a huge round of thanks to everyone that has commented, linked, linked back, emailed, phoned and emailed me photos over the last year. I’d love to pretend that this blog was some sort of juggernaut “bigger than me” now, but… well it isn’t. It is my blog for better or worse.

But at the same time I deeply know that the majority of my success has simply been emailed to me from others. I’m stunned, saddened and laughing my ass off each day by what people email me as realtor photographs.

There are simply too many people to link to…

…if you know me, and I know you… thank you.

HUGE Pro-Consumer Connecticut MLS News!

March 6th, 2008 Connecticut, Deeper Thoughts, Geekage and Blogging, Photography No Comments »

I’m doing back flips here! Direct from my email…

“Dear CTMLS Participants & Subscribers,

 I am pleased to report that CTMLS has doubled the total number of photos allowed on MLXchange to twenty! 

Many of you have asked for more than ten photos over the past year, so CTMLS purchased the extra space to allow twenty - which should meet just about everyone’s photo needs!  With the launch of CTReal.com, the official search engine of both CTMLS and the Connecticut Association of REALTORS®, Inc. later this month, all twenty photos will be available to the public.  Make the most of it - it’s FREE!

 It’s one more benefit of the Statewide MLS… keep your eyes peeled for more news coming soon!”
 

BOOM! Twenty photos per listing. That is a massive change from just ten photos. This will completely alter the way photography will have to be done for listings. In one sense my workload just doubled, but on the other hand my work just got twice as important.

Agents simply cannot hope to squeak by on 5–6 photos any longer. Buyers will simply think you are hiding something from them. For smaller homes 20 photos is going to mean multiple photos from different angles on some rooms. You’re going to have to show everything.

And I mean everything.

The public website CTReal.com – unfortunately nothing to show but the “in development” placeholder as yet – could become the ultimate Connecticut real estate public search platform.

This is a serious kick in the face to Realtor.com et al. Why pay for enhanced listings etc if the public can go straight to the firehose and get it all direct from the MLS public site. If the public MLS site can gain traction with the public, it will ultimately deep six all the third party vendors depending on listing feeds etc.

Of course I’ve said all this before… check out Just Make The MLS Open To The Public And Be Done With It Please. written back in June 2007.

…The solution is painfully simple. The MLS systems simply need to be made fully public on a public “read only” level and an agent “read/write” basis.

Charge the public $20 for a years public membership and the MLS’s will make a ton of cash. It will kill off all the third party listing companies. It will destroy claims of hiding information. It will destroy all the lead selling pirates. Even the Department of Justice thinks that the MLS serves the public as a cost saving measure. It’s a rare benign monopoly, that’s why the DOJ sues NAR etc to get discount brokers fully enfranchised as MLS members…

It may not be exactly as I wrote (LOL I said charge $20 for it!), but the general thrust is the same. Let agents have read/write privileges and let the public have read only access. How much the public gets to see I don’t know as yet, but 99% of what they want to see is the price and the photos anyway.

Unquestionably this is good both for consumers and Connecticut Realtors. This goes a long way to creating an efficient 21st Century marketplace to buy and sell real estate.

Sunshine On My Shoulders

February 29th, 2008 Good Vibes, Photography, Rules of Good Photos No Comments »

I’m just gonna hammer this point home

Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy
Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry
Sunshine on the water looks so lovely
Sunshine almost always makes me high

Words by john denver, music by john denver, dick kniss and mike taylor

Sunshine just makes you feel good.

Make Hey! While The Sun Shines

February 28th, 2008 Photography, Portfolio, Rules of Good Photos No Comments »

If you’ve been following the plot, I’ve been going crazy over sunshine in the last week.

Anyway… yesterday after hours of tweaking I salvaged this from an overcast day.

It’s okay, but as I said yesterday it was fixing up dog food as meatloaf.

Today the weather forecast is off, and BOOM! We got sunshine baby! Fortunately the house is two blocks from my own house so after my frou-frou date breakfast with wifey I swung around and the first shot out of the camera is this one.

NOM NOM NOM NOM!!!

Filet Mignon!

Just compare the two photos. Which one makes you feel good inside?

Think the front was dramatic? Try the overcast vs sunshine shot of the backyard. I couldn’t even do anything with the backyard editing yesterday.

Pure natural feel good sunshine simply can’t be faked. I keep saying this over and over, the photos do not need to be technically perfect photos, we’re trying to create an emotion for the buyer. Real estate purchases for anyone except the most hardened investor, are highly emotional and positive emotion helps sell homes.

Raise the emotional tone, positive energy, feel good, use The Force…

…Flow.