Prince George Real Estate

Welcome to part six of our twenty two part miniseries on real estate photography and the role that it plays in marketing a home.  Today we are going to look at a master bedroom from a local listing, taken with a point and shoot camera, and then critique it and compare it to a shot from my site, PG Listings.ca

I’m feeling rather saucy tonight, so I think I’ll turn things up to eleven and choose a higher end master bedroom, something that you might walk around in wearing a silk kimono, puffing away on your ivory tusk hand carved pipe while doing morning pilates….So with the goal of evoking that kind of imagery, lets have a look.

I don’t know about my faithful readers, but this home, which is slightly under $400,000, is underwhelming to me.  That price point will get you a pretty nice place in this town, so it is alarming to see this kind of image.  In fact, I would almost go so far as to say that this image makes me want to visit the house even less than if there were no images at all – and I don’t think I’m alone in holding this opinion.  The objective of marketing a home is to influence people, to convince them that the asking price seems very reasonable based on the what they see, to make them want to be there.  We as consumers mentally conjure up expectations based on the asking price of anything.  If I asked you to visualize a car with an asking price of $250, you would likely picture an old rusted out car in your head. If I changed the price to $400,000 your mental expectation will likely be a Ferrari.  The same thing happens with houses; when we learn what an asking price is, we begin to establish an expectation of what the home will look like. If the images do not meet or exceed our expectations, we run the risk of consumers bypassing a listing, or mentally justifying a low ball offer without even having stepped into the home, neither of which are productive outcomes for the home owner or listing agent, but I digress.  Back to the image evaluation!

What we have here is a classic case of the camera trying to expose both the bright windows and the dark interior at the same time, but it’s little wee sensor can’t handle the range in brightness, so it tries to split the difference, resulting in blown out windows anyway (which can be nice in certain situations), and a dark room, which is never nice. This is the exact same problem that existed in the last post regarding the bathroom, and it’s going to happen with every camera in the world if you take the shot on auto with the flash off.

Fun Fact: Turning on the lamp will do wonders for both the overall light levels, and it will add warmth and character to a shot.  Visualize the shot above with the bedside lamp on for a moment – It seems much nicer doesn’t it?

Anyway, here’s a shot from a similar price bracket from PG Listings.ca

Booyah!  If you don’t want to don slippers and do pirouettes in this baby then you are probably missing some of your genetic code! Total difference in asking price is about $15,000 (my shot is from the more expensive home) and the difference in perceived value – priceless.  Actually, it’s not priceless, I’m sure there is a quantifiable figure that can be applied, but that can’t realistically be calculated.  To make a shot like this requires some off camera flash units as well as knowledge of photoshop – because you’ll need to do some touch up after the image is taken.  This takes time, which is one thing that an active real estate agent does not have a lot of. Actually, the more I work with agents in the city, the more I realize that these people really don’t have a lot of time and that they work very hard under very tight deadlines, making time saving solutions such as hiring a photographer/social network specialist valuable in more ways than one.

In case you were wondering if I was trying to hoodwink you by presenting the first image in a smaller format, I’m highlighting one of the weaknesses of our national MLS system – a size limit of 640×480.  PG Lisitngs has the images available full screen in high resolution, and I think this day in age consumers are justified in expecting this kind of presentation.  I’m sure that they are working to increase this but the massive amount of bandwidth required for the national system will likely keep the current standard in place for a while longer.

Well that’s it for today, I hope you are enjoying our two part series on home real estate photography, and I look forward to your comments!  Now it’s time to don that robe and slippers!

Daniel Abraham
PG Listings.ca