if selling the only non-furnished advertised house in the city..

Girthhitch

is it better to use non realistic photos, ie brightened up to hide blemishes, or realistic ones. its a much bigger house than most, the rooms are grand, so i figure being as fake as possible is best, to get more people to enter and appreciate the size of house.

thanks.

eddddy

Are you advertising the property yourself?

If an estate agent is advertising the property, the law says they mustn't have anything misleading in their adverts, including misleading photos - so they might refuse to use 'doctored' photos.


More generally, it's not a good idea for people's first reaction to a property to be disappointment when they see it - because it's not as good as the photos suggested.

It's probably better if they are pleasantly surprised when they walk through the door, rather than disappointed.

Girthhitch

They use filters all the time in many adverts though I read??? Is this not the UK?? Thanks.

Sure, but the size is the pleasantly surprised bit. Unfurnished is my argument that it is in fact unnaturally reduced in perception with photos compared to every other house.

housebuyer143

Just play with the exposure in any of the dark photos to brighten it up but I wouldn't go mad with filters - people can tell and personally it puts me off. 

GDB2222

I think houses look great when unfurnished.  Blemishes on the paintwork show up more, so you might want to consider touching up or repainting some rooms.

 The main snag is that some buyers can’t envisage whether furniture will fit into a particular room, and they don’t take much notice of the measurements in the floor plan. But they need actual furniture for that reason, not a CGI. 

FlorayG

If the house is empty then for some reason it's likely to only appeal to people who want to 'do it up' anyway. Most people have no imagination and empty houses are more difficult to sell because of that; people want to see it as a 'home' and can't do that in their heads

gwynlas

When you say that the decoration is a bit off do you mean dark colours dodgy wallpaper or something else?

Many people cannot envisage furniture placement so get some in if you can, free off gumtee or wherever.

I personally hate ads without floorplans showing size of rooms.

EssexHebridean

When we were looking we viewed a few places where the photos were taken using a fairly extreme wide angle - in each case we walked in and were instantly disappointed by how small the rooms felt - in one case I didn't even really want to bother going upstairs as we already knew it wasn't going to be right for us. Frankly we just ended up a bit hacked off that we'd wasted our time.  Just make your photos honest - it's not like people aren't going to see the true state of the place when they view! 

We had no issue viewing places that were unfurnished either - made it far easier to see where our own bits and bobs would fit, and also to know that there weren't bookcases hiding holes in the walls or anything like that! 

FreeBear

EssexHebridean said:

When we were looking we viewed a few places where the photos were taken using a fairly extreme wide angle - in each case we walked in and were instantly disappointed by how small the rooms felt

There is wide angle, and then there is wiiiiide angle - The latter will have massive barrel distortion that can be corrected to some extent by post processing. But perspectives will still be off.

@G@Girthhitch - Just go with plain honest images. Don't do fancy (crap) HDR or photoshop in blue skies. And bin the fisheye lenses.

EssexHebridean

FreeBear said:

EssexHebridean said:

When we were looking we viewed a few places where the photos were taken using a fairly extreme wide angle - in each case we walked in and were instantly disappointed by how small the rooms felt

There is wide angle, and then there is wiiiiide angle - The latter will have massive barrel distortion that can be corrected to some extent by post processing. But perspectives will still be off.

@G@Girthhitch - Just go with plain honest images. Don't do fancy (crap) HDR or photoshop in blue skies. And bin the fisheye lenses.

Yes - quite. It's not always possible to tell from low res images which have had the "skew" pulled out of them whether what you are seeing is an altered "super wide" or just a straight "wide" angle though. When our photos were taken when we sold, I played around first and then gave the agent the exact detail of what focal length we were happy for them to use to avoid the risk of rooms looking larger than they in fact were. 

Part of the issue is the tendancy for a lot of agents who don't have the first clue about photography to equip themselves with a DSLR camera and a wide angle lens...then the pitfalls of distorted room sizes and badly done HDR come along. In fact they would often do better to use a phone camera as those tend to provide "autoHDR" results which are far better! 

Albermarle

EssexHebridean said:

When we were looking we viewed a few places where the photos were taken using a fairly extreme wide angle - in each case we walked in and were instantly disappointed by how small the rooms felt - in one case I didn't even really want to bother going upstairs as we already knew it wasn't going to be right for us. Frankly we just ended up a bit hacked off that we'd wasted our time.  Just make your photos honest - it's not like people aren't going to see the true state of the place when they view! 

We had no issue viewing places that were unfurnished either - made it far easier to see where our own bits and bobs would fit, and also to know that there weren't bookcases hiding holes in the walls or anything like that! 

A family member is currently househunting, and one common theme seems to be that often the photo of the driveway/front garden/space,  has been taken from the side with a very wide angled lens ( not so much the rooms) .