Attracting buyers to your property

by John O'Leary

It is absolutely amazing to find some of the photographs I've seen on the Internet of homes for sale in Scottsdale.  Knowing that Realtors often don't have either photographic experience or high quality cameras and photo-editing software, I can understand why some of the photos come out so poorly.  But I've seen photos of $2 million homes that look so bad that I can't imagine anyone wanting to actually see the real home in person.

Above is an example and it is definitely not one of the worst that I've seen.  This is the main photo on the MLS for a Scottsdale home with an asking price of $1,270,000.  I copied this photo off the Arizona Multiple Listing Service (MLS) and you are looking at the actual size the Realtor used at 260 pixels wide.  This is a really poor photo of this house because of the angle taken, the fact that you can't even see the entire house, the time of day it was taken, etc.  The MLS allows Realtors to upload 640 pixel wide images, rather than this small size used by this Realtor.  But if I click this small photo on the MLS no larger image opens.  What you see is what you get.&npsp; If I was the seller of this home I'd probably be a bit upset that both prospective buyers and Realtors are going to see this as the representation of their home!

As a comparison, click the image above to see what a 640 pixel image size looks like.  This is an image I did for our current featured listing.  This home is priced less than the one above.  If you were a buyer looking on the Internet for homes, which house would you want to see?  When Realtors search for homes to show their buyers they also weed out the listings that don't look good on the MLS.  So the sellers of the house in that top photo aren't going to be having many showings of their property.

Now to put this all into context, there are currently 357 homes for sale in Scottsdale priced from $1,250,000 to $1,500,000.  With that number of homes for sale, you have to have your property stand out from the crowd, not look like it is crowded onto a tiny lot as in the top photo.  The sellers we are representing are thrilled with the way we are marketing their property on the web.  I doubt the sellers of the home in the smaller photo are equally as pleased.

If you have a home to sell and you want a Realtor who will really market your property well, please consider a quick call to discuss it.  Call John at 480-313-5955.

If you are a Realtor reading this, consider at least hiring a professional photographer to take photos of your listings.  Otherwise, do what I've done and invest in a quality digital camera and get very proficient with photo-enhancement software.  Your clients deserve no less.