Since I started Hawk & Chadwick I’ve always had a bee in my bonnet about Estate Agents and their god awful pictures. Just go look on any major portal right now and I’m willing to bet my left kidney that within the top 10-15 listings you’ll find photographs that appear to have be taken by somebody who forgot their orthopaedic shoes when they left for work that morning.
It’s infuriating because when you think of the service you expect when marketing your property with a local professional, you’d be well within your rights to be outraged if they can’t even operate a camera and show up without a tripod. Equally you should be outraged by third party image manipulation with clearly false blue skies being pasted into the background of dreary images.
I know I might sound like a grumpy old man, but the fact of the matter is we are now working in an environment where the first thing a potential buyer or tenant is going to see is a photograph of the front of your house, or possibly one of the internal rooms. They will make a split second decision on whether to view your property based on that image, and so it has to be bloody good to catch their attention.
Let me explain why that is the case. When our eyes our open, our vision accounts for two-thirds of the electrical activity of the brain. Approximately 40% all nerve fibres connected to the brain are linked to the retina, and more of our neurons are dedicated to vision than the other four senses combined. And as if that’s not nearly enough, your brain processes visuals and images 60,000 times faster than it does text. Now you know why an image is worth 1000 words.
When you extend this biological predisposition for visual stimuli into the screen-ruled social media world we live in with far more people walking into lamp posts than ever before, it starts to really add up. Recent studies found that nearly half of all Internet users have re-posted a photo or video they have found online, and Tweets with embedded images receive 150 percent more retweets – same for Facebook posts that are image rich. Agents who post social media content with relevant images get 94 percent more views than content without images.
The bottom line is that strong imagery elicits an emotional response in the viewer. So to be all dandy about it, what I do as a photographer of your home is to convey that homeliness and that sense of warmth, comfort, attraction, safety and the welcoming nature of home to the observer (who hopefully will later become an enquirer, a viewer and then a tenant or buyer) – of course, there is a large amount of that which depends on who that person is and their purposes and mindset when viewing the photograph, but looking at the scientific data mentioned earlier it absolutely stands to reason that putting in the effort required to present your home smartly and professionally and with the absolute best quality images available is what I like to call a No Brainer.
And listen, I’m not about to fly into some uber-technical tirade about the Rule of thirds, The Golden ratio, the Fibonacci sequence or something else that sounds like a Dan Brown novel. Yes, those techniques exist and yes they’re relevant but the main thing to take away from this is that just having images is good, but it’s not enough. High quality and attention to detail within your images, and how they are presented to the general public (i.e. the people who ultimately will be the key to your financial advancement) is VITAL to succeeding in a marketplace where you’re trying to attract the buyer that’s thinking of buying your neighbour’s house across the street. You need Every. Single. Competitive. Advantage.
Start with excellent pictures. Then pick an agent who has a verified track record of success in using them.
It’s infuriating because when you think of the service you expect when marketing your property with a local professional, you’d be well within your rights to be outraged if they can’t even operate a camera and show up without a tripod. Equally you should be outraged by third party image manipulation with clearly false blue skies being pasted into the background of dreary images.
I know I might sound like a grumpy old man, but the fact of the matter is we are now working in an environment where the first thing a potential buyer or tenant is going to see is a photograph of the front of your house, or possibly one of the internal rooms. They will make a split second decision on whether to view your property based on that image, and so it has to be bloody good to catch their attention.
Let me explain why that is the case. When our eyes our open, our vision accounts for two-thirds of the electrical activity of the brain. Approximately 40% all nerve fibres connected to the brain are linked to the retina, and more of our neurons are dedicated to vision than the other four senses combined. And as if that’s not nearly enough, your brain processes visuals and images 60,000 times faster than it does text. Now you know why an image is worth 1000 words.
When you extend this biological predisposition for visual stimuli into the screen-ruled social media world we live in with far more people walking into lamp posts than ever before, it starts to really add up. Recent studies found that nearly half of all Internet users have re-posted a photo or video they have found online, and Tweets with embedded images receive 150 percent more retweets – same for Facebook posts that are image rich. Agents who post social media content with relevant images get 94 percent more views than content without images.
The bottom line is that strong imagery elicits an emotional response in the viewer. So to be all dandy about it, what I do as a photographer of your home is to convey that homeliness and that sense of warmth, comfort, attraction, safety and the welcoming nature of home to the observer (who hopefully will later become an enquirer, a viewer and then a tenant or buyer) – of course, there is a large amount of that which depends on who that person is and their purposes and mindset when viewing the photograph, but looking at the scientific data mentioned earlier it absolutely stands to reason that putting in the effort required to present your home smartly and professionally and with the absolute best quality images available is what I like to call a No Brainer.
And listen, I’m not about to fly into some uber-technical tirade about the Rule of thirds, The Golden ratio, the Fibonacci sequence or something else that sounds like a Dan Brown novel. Yes, those techniques exist and yes they’re relevant but the main thing to take away from this is that just having images is good, but it’s not enough. High quality and attention to detail within your images, and how they are presented to the general public (i.e. the people who ultimately will be the key to your financial advancement) is VITAL to succeeding in a marketplace where you’re trying to attract the buyer that’s thinking of buying your neighbour’s house across the street. You need Every. Single. Competitive. Advantage.
Start with excellent pictures. Then pick an agent who has a verified track record of success in using them.
